Britten had been homesick, yet wartime England did not at first seem very appealing after they arrived back in Liverpool on 17 April 1942. A letter to Elizabeth Mayer notes the drab shabiness112 everywhere, and the poverty of musical life in London. In May, he had to appear at a tribunal and explain his conscientious objection to war service. Under interrogation, he said that he did not believe in the divinity of Christ, but I think his teaching is sound and his example should be followed.113 The tribunal’s decision was that he should be called up for non-combatant duties; he objected, and his objection was accepted. Pears was also excused, and the two were able to continue their work as musicians. Pears obtained the lead part in a production of Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffman, and went off on tour. Their letters to each other at this time adopt the intimate and caring tone they would always maintain. Some of their friends had been surprised to find them as a couple; in the climate of the time the relative openness of their relationship showed a defiant courage.
During the past three years there had been some hostility in the British press about Britten’s absence in America, but this seems to have evaporated now that he had returned home. When Britten and Pears performed the Michelangelo Sonnets at the Wigmore Hall in September 1942, both audience and critics were deeply impressed by Britten’s music and by the new glamour and strength of Pears’s voice. The two repeated their performance in October at one of the National Gallery concerts – an important and much valued wartime institution – and recorded the work soon afterwards, their first recording together. They were soon to become one of the most famous duo partnerships of all time, whose performances of the great song-cycles such as Schubert’s Winterreise and Die Schöne Müllerin and Schumann’s Dichterliebe would receive unanimous critical acclaim. Britten would also write seven works for Pears and himself to perform, in addition to his many folk song arrangements. He was hardly ever again to appear as a soloist: he now suffered too much from nerves to be able to go through the ordeal, and even in his recitals with Pears he was unable to eat before the concert, and had to drink brandy just before the performance to give himself courage.
In the audience at the National Gallery that October was Michael Tippett, who had admired Britten’s music for some years. Not long afterwards, Britten was describing Tippett to Mrs Mayer as a great new friend Peter & I have made, an excellent composer, & most delightful & intelligent man.114 He came to admire Tippett more than any other of his English contemporaries, though he had reservations about the clarity of his musical thought. Imogen Holst recorded in her diary that Britten said ‘he always knew what Michael was feeling in his music, and it moved him, but he didn’t think Michael always managed to convey what he was thinking’.115 Tippett in turn, as he wrote in his autobiography, regarded Britten as ‘quite simply, the most musical person I have ever met’.116 He showed Britten and Pears the manuscript of his oratorio A Child of Our Time and they promised to help him get it performed (it had its first performance in March 1944, with Pears singing the solo tenor part). Meanwhile Tippett wrote them a cantata, Boyhood’s End, which they premiered in June 1943, after Tippett, also a conscientious objector, had gone to prison for refusing to accept his assigned non-combatant duties. After several years of self-analysis on Jungian lines, Tippett was now untroubled by his own homosexuality, and very likely tried to make Britten more confident of his. Tippett had something of Auden’s intellectual authority and Britten became very close to him. As Tippett recalled, they shared a bed one night – chastely, though Pears was somewhat disturbed when he heard about it.117
Britten and Pears had begun to give frequent concerts for CEMA, the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (the predecessor of the Arts Council), performing the Classical and Romantic repertoire and Britten’s folk song arrangements – in 1941 he had compiled the first of the four volumes he was eventually to produce. He wrote to Bobby Rothman: We go to small villages, & play on pianos all out of tune, when some of the notes won’t go down and those that do won’t come up, and altogether have a pretty hectic time.118 Britten was also writing incidental music again for the BBC, a task that kept him busy throughout that summer. Shortly after the Wigmore Hall concert – which he told Mrs Mayer had been a great strain on his nerves, rather like parading naked in public119 – he became ill with ’flu and was still not completely recovered when in March 1943 he was admitted to a fever hospital following a severe attack of measles. By this time he and Pears had bought a flat in St John’s Wood, which they were to share with Erwin Stein, his wife Sophie and their daughter Marion after the Steins’ flat was destroyed in 1944 by a domestic fire. Britten had also kept the Old Mill at Snape while he had been away; during his convalescence there he wrote his first real piece since A Ceremony of Carols, having meanwhile abandoned ideas for a Harp Concerto and a Sonata for orchestra. One of his incidental music projects in 1942 had involved the RAF Orchestra, whose principal horn was the 21-year-old Dennis Brain. Brain’s seemingly effortless and utterly secure playing straight away made Britten want to write a piece for him. This was the Serenade for tenor, horn and strings.
The Serenade is a cycle of six dramatically contrasted songs by six different poets, on the unifying theme of evening and night. There are few obvious precedents for such a scheme: song-cycles in the past had almost always been based on a single poet, or at most two, as in Das Lied von der Erde. The horn’s ‘Prologue’ uses the notes of the harmonic series, the only notes straightforwardly available on the old natural horn, and is like a Mahlerian Naturlaut, a ‘sound of nature’. The first two songs, Cotton’s ‘The day’s grown old’ and Tennyson’s ‘The splendour falls on castle walls’, are suffused with evening light, soft and subdued in the first song, radiant in the second. The diatonicism of these songs gives way to a tortuously chromatic melodic line in Blake’s ‘Elegy’, whose climactic words about ‘dark, secret love’ cannot help but sound chillingly personal.
The falling semitones, out of which first the horn’s melody is made and then the tenor’s, are repeated at the end by the horn, the second, lower note ‘stopped’ (muted with the hand), an eerie effect Britten would have noticed in Mahler’s Ninth Symphony. These two semitones (A flat and G) become the refrain of the medieval ‘Lyke-wake dirge’, a grim warning of punishment for sin – ‘The fire will burn thee to the bare bane’ – and one of the most frightening songs ever written. Ben Jonson’s ‘Hymn to Diana’, chaste goddess of the moon, in characteristic ‘hunting’ rhythms that recall Brahms’s Horn Trio, Op 40, is a kind of purgation, before the final song, Keats’s sonnet in praise of sleep, with its central prayer: ‘Save me from curious conscience, that still lords / Its strength for darkness, burrowing like a mole’, the last five words once again set to the insistent falling semitone. The strings then envelop the voice like a warm blanket, and there is a fragile final peace, before the horn’s farewell – a distant repeat of the ‘Prologue’. Britten rather dismissively described the songs to Mrs Mayer as not important stuff, but quite pleasant, I think,120 as if wanting on some level to play down one of his most personal statements.
In all these very personal works we encounter material that threatens stability to an extreme degree. As becomes still clearer in many of the operas, Britten actively dramatised his inner life in his music as few composers could. Mahler also had this capacity, which may be partly why Britten felt so close to him. When music communicates such intense feeling, one might argue that its relation to Britten’s actual life becomes superfluous. But it is perhaps just this sense of intimate connection with inner experience that allows us to feel the unease that so unnervingly invades the music, and is worked through with ruthless care towards the tentative consolation of the ending. If Britten had not himself felt this level of unease, it is hard to imagine that the piece would have its precarious ‘edge’, the sense of things about to fall apart yet somehow holding together. And it is the finely balanced regaining of control over threatened stability that particularly contributes to the Serenade’s artistic success.
During the rest of 1943 Britten wrote another string piece for Boyd Neel, a Prelude and 18-part Fugue, even more ambitious than the one in the Frank Bridge Variations. He also composed the cantata Rejoice in the Lamb, commissioned by the Revd Walter Hussey for the Jubilee of his church, St Matthew’s, Northampton. Britten set words by Christopher Smart, a little-known 18th-century poet to whom Auden had introduced him. Smart, like John Clare, was cruelly confined for many years in a madhouse, but his poem Jubilate Agno is a celebration of Creation that almost entirely transcends his personal misfortunes. Smart’s childlike innocence ensured his appeal to Britten, and Rejoice in the Lamb, while acknowledging in its setting of the lines beginning ‘For I am under the same accusation with my Saviour’ the unjust persecution of an outsider, is overall one of his most joyous works. In the autumn he wrote an extensive score for a radio production of Edward Sackville West’s play, The Rescue; and The Ballad of Little Musgrave and Lady Barnard, a choral piece for a friend, Richard Wood, who was imprisoned in Germany: the piece was sung by the prison-camp choir.
By the New Year of 1944 he was at last ready to begin the composition of Peter Grimes. Shortly after his return to England, Britten had asked Montagu Slater to be his librettist and Slater willingly agreed. M. has taken to Grimes like a duck to water & the opera is leaping ahead,121 Britten wrote to Mrs Mayer on 4 May 1942. Britten had originally asked Christopher Isherwood, who rejected the idea. He did not ask Auden, but then he knew that Auden was working on the Christmas oratorio. Britten and Pears had already worked on a dramatic scheme for the opera which was not too dissimilar from the final shape of the work. As a writer of the political ‘left’, Slater’s inclination was to emphasise the conflict between Grimes and the oppressive Borough society, therefore portraying Grimes as a victim of society’s prejudices. At the start of the opera, Grimes is cleared of any foul play by the inquest into his apprentice’s death, but he knows that people still suspect him. His ideals are unachievable: he feels himself unworthy to marry the widowed schoolteacher Ellen Orford, who is in a class above him, until he becomes more prosperous – which is unlikely to happen – and thus loses his one chance of happiness, since Ellen would have accepted him as he is. He quarrels with Ellen over her concern that he is bullying his new apprentice; he strikes her, and that is effectively the end of their relationship and the beginning of the end for him. There is a landslip on the cliff outside his hut, and the boy falls to his death; it is not really Grimes’s fault, but the townsfolk, who are now solidly against him, would never believe his innocence. Alone and almost mad, he is advised by Balstrode, the most decent man in the Borough, to take out his boat and commit suicide by sinking it, which he does. At the beginning of a new day, the Borough’s everyday life continues.
Britten and Pears’s original plan of giving Grimes a much more explicitly sadistic relationship with the new apprentice was modified, much to the opera’s advantage. The boy does not speak, and is presented as little more than an extension of Grimes’s will: we feel that his harsh treatment of the boy stems from his anger with himself. Although Britten and Pears saw Grimes to some extent as a representative of their own outsider status, as pacifists (which they openly admitted) and as homosexuals (which for obvious reasons they couldn’t mention), in making him more generally ‘the man who couldn’t fit in’,122 as Hans Keller called him, they divested the opera of its merely personal relevance. Grimes stands apart from the others in his self-centred inability to communicate, even with the woman he loves. It is easy, nonetheless, to identify with the Grimes of Act I: at the inquest he conducts himself with dignity, and we are inclined to believe his story; we are touched by his frail intimacy with Ellen; his monologue ‘Now the Great Bear and Pleiades’ reveals him to us as a visionary, even if the uncomprehending listeners in the pub think he is mad; and as he sings his great line ‘What harbour shelters peace?’ we devoutly wish that he will find it. In Act II, with his surly behaviour towards the new apprentice and his brutality towards Ellen, our hearts may harden, though the pathetic state of near-lunacy into which he collapses in Act III cannot but move us. It is Grimes’s opera and we stay with him; none of the other characters except Ellen and Balstrode can much excite our sympathy. The townspeople are shown as ordinary human beings with ordinary faults and ordinary virtues: the men are easily aroused to become a hostile, malicious crowd; the women, with the exception of the sour widow Mrs Sedley, may be capable of compassion, as their ensemble at the centre of Act II shows, but it is not sufficient to save Grimes from destruction. It is getting more and more an opera about the community,123 Britten wrote in the same letter to Mrs Mayer. In a national opera, which is what in many respects Peter Grimes is, the chorus will have a prominent role, as in Boris Godunov; here the chorus is seen as a kind of natural force, with potential destructive power (so in Boris too) – like the sea, which is a character in itself, and helps give the opera its epic quality. In writing Peter Grimes, I wanted to express my awareness of the perpetual struggle of men and women whose livelihood depends on the sea,124 Britten said.
What is especially remarkable about Peter Grimes is that at every point Britten finds the right musical language to activate the drama. His sense of timing is impeccable, and his word-setting a model of clarity. Why is it that so few opera composers – and especially British opera composers – possess these essential abilities? Even if the first is perhaps inborn, the second at least can be learnt. Britten wrote: One of my chief aims is to try and restore to the musical setting of the English language a brilliance, freedom and vitality that have been curiously rare since the death of Purcell.125 In this again he succeeded. Purcell, for whom Tippett shared an equal passion, was a fairly recent influence; Britten was to make a number of Purcell realisations, which he performed with Pears. For his choral writing and the big, complex ensembles, he turned to Verdi, the best example he could have chosen. He also learnt much from Berg’s Wozzeck (the 20th century’s other great outsider-figure opera) for Act III in particular, with its on-stage dance music (some of it in ‘alla Ländler’ tempo) and its Expressionist language for Peter’s mad scene; there are even small parallels, in that both operas begin with the calling of their protagonist’s name, and both protagonists die by drowning.
Peter Grimes is through-composed but clearly divided into sections, like a late Verdi opera. This was a structure that, with some variation, Britten adopted for all his subsequent operas (Paul Bunyan had been divided into separate ‘numbers’). While rejecting an all-embracing Wagnerian leitmotif system, Britten develops motifs meaningfully over long sections of the score. For example, at the climax of his duet with Ellen in Act II, Grimes’s decisive ‘And God have mercy upon me’, where he breaks with Ellen to stand defiantly alone, is first taken up by the Borough eavesdroppers and then becomes the theme of the Passacaglia interlude. It is inexorably repeated in the bass while first the solo viola – Britten’s own instrument – muses on the suffering of the apprentice, and then the variations, increasing in momentum and ferocity, express more and more the frustration of Peter’s will. The duet with Ellen also demonstrates Britten’s dramatic use of tonality. The whole of the duet and the parallel church service that is heard in the background is sung over a long-sustained dominant pedal on F, building up tremendous tension which finally resolves at ‘upon me’ into B flat, the key in which the opera began and the one most remote from the E major of ‘Now the Great Bear’, Peter’s most idealistic moment. Grimes’s submission to the Borough here seems graphically to seal his fate.
The opera is punctuated by the series of orchestral interludes which portray the sea in its many moods, from the muted colours of the grey dawn that opens Act I, with cries of herring gulls on high violins, to the brilliant glitter of ‘Sunday Morning’ – an extraordinary marriage of the Coronation scene from Boris Godunov with the Balinese gamelan music Britten had learnt from Colin McPhee, producing a wholly original orchestral sound. There is much else that is arresting: the deep E flat chords of the ‘Moonlight’ prelude to Act III, with the gleam on the waves picked out by flute, harp and xylophone; the foghorn, a mournful off-stage tuba; and the majestic unleashing of orchestral fury in the ‘Storm’ interlude and the Passacaglia. But perhaps if one had to single out one episode in Peter Grimes as an example of great operatic music, it would be the quartet for the women in Act II (or strictly trio, since the two ‘nieces’ sing in unison). This is the moment where Ellen, Auntie (the land-lady of the pub) and the ‘nieces’ (the pub prostitutes) combine in expressing their pity for Peter’s fate and for the plight of all men, in a lulling barcarolle. The three verses each climax – significantly on the word ‘sleep’ – in a torrent of high, sensuous sound that evokes unlikely comparisons with Der Rosenkavalier. Britten had been sent a score of Strauss’s opera by Ralph Hawkes while he was in hospital in March 1943 and wrote in thanks: I am impatient to see how the old magician makes his effects! There’s a hell of a lot I can learn from him!126 The sweetness here is not straightforwardly sexual; it is more like the tender feeling a mother has for her child, which is evoked with such poignancy that we experience a moment of complete safety before we are returned, with the Passacaglia, to the cruel world of reality. This duality is at the very heart of Britten’s artistic vision.
The premiere of Peter Grimes had originally been scheduled for Koussevitzky’s Berkshire Music Festival at Tanglewood, Massachusetts, in the summer of 1944, but the festival was suspended because of the war. Pears had joined the Sadler’s Wells Opera Company in January 1943, and the directors soon heard about Peter Grimes; after Britten played some of the score to them they were keen to stage it, and Koussevitzky graciously agreed. Britten had originally intended Grimes to be a baritone, but Pears’s new status as an opera singer enabled Britten to write the part specifically for him. The producer was Eric Crozier, a young man on the Sadler’s Wells production staff who was to become very important in Britten’s life. The designer, whom Britten suggested to Crozier, was Kenneth Green, a Suffolk artist who also at this time painted the most lively of Britten’s portraits. His sets were a realistic depiction of Aldeburgh.
Britten was ultimately not altogether satisfied with Slater’s libretto, and Slater was reluctant to make changes: just before the score was finished Britten asked Ronald Duncan to improve the mad scene, which Duncan did, very effectively. Rehearsals began soon after the completion of the score in February 1945; the conductor was Reginald Goodall, much later to become the most eminent British conductor of Wagner after many years when his talents were neglected. The first performance took place at the newly reopened Sadler’s Wells Theatre on 7 June, a few weeks after the end of the war in Europe. It was a triumph. All the critics recognised that here was something very new and striking. Britten wrote to Imogen Holst, Gustav Holst’s daughter and a newly acquired friend: I think the occasion is actually a greater one than either Sadler’s Wells or me, I feel. Perhaps it is an omen for English opera in the future.127 Britten’s life was changed: from now and for the rest of his life he was to be, first and foremost, an opera composer.