Despite the success of Peter Grimes, there had been problems with the Sadler’s Wells Company. Many company members were prejudiced against ‘modern’ music, and Britten saw no possibility of writing another opera for them, or for Covent Garden. Shortly before the premiere of Grimes, Britten, Pears, Crozier and Joan Cross – who sang Ellen in the performances and who had now resigned as director of Sadler’s Wells – decided that the way forward was with chamber opera, and a company of their own to perform it. As a first venture, Eric Crozier suggested the subject of the rape of Lucretia; as a schoolboy he had been much impressed by seeing André Obey’s play Le viol de Lucrèce performed by a company of young French actors. Britten asked Ronald Duncan, for whose verse play This Way to the Tomb he was composing incidental music, to make an operatic version of the Obey play. Britten was not to collaborate again with Slater, who became one of the first of his ‘corpses’ – his friends’ name for people close to him who found they were suddenly dropped, usually because they somehow fell short of the high standards Britten demanded of them. Sophie Wyss became another: Britten decided her recent performances of Les Illuminations were hopelessly inefficient128 in comparison with Pears’s – but this strange criticism of a singer whom he had previously held in high regard was almost certainly influenced by his partner.
In July 1945 he visited Germany with the violinist Yehudi Menuhin to give recitals to concentration camp survivors. They went to Belsen: Britten was so shocked that he never talked about the experience, except that at the end of his life he told Pears that it ‘had coloured everything he had written subsequently’.129 It certainly affected the mood of the song-cycle The Holy Sonnets of John Donne, which he began on his return. Donne’s dark, questioning poems are set by Britten with restless intensity. At times the musical language is almost atonal, as in ‘What if this present’. But the last of the nine songs, and the finest, ‘Death be not proud’, offers some release, proceeding with solemn dignity over its ground bass and, on the final ‘death, thou shalt die’, reaching out to a proudly assertive B major chord. The songs’ feverish mood may also stem from the fact that Britten had been ill while writing them. His fever had subsided by the time he began his Second String Quartet shortly afterwards. This is a larger and more contemplative work than the First Quartet, to which it stands in a relation similar to that between Beethoven’s ‘Razumovsky’ Quartets and his Opus 18 set. All three movements are in C: the outer ones in the major and the scherzo in C minor. The first movement uses sonata form in a typically inventive way, introducing three themes, each of which begins with the interval of a rising tenth, developing them within an eerie nocturnal atmosphere reminiscent of the ‘Tenebroso’ of Berg’s Lyric Suite, and recapitulating all three simultaneously. The headlong scherzo, with muted strings, is dark and anxious. The finale is a passacaglia, appropriately enough for a quartet composed to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the death of Purcell, for whom the passacaglia or chaconne was a favourite form. Britten gave the movement the Purcellian title ‘Chacony’. It was the largest passacaglia he was to write and its intense lyrical counterpoint makes an interesting comparison with Tippett’s fugal Third Quartet written much at the same time. The last of the 21 variations ends with 23 affirmations of the tonic chord of C major, paralleling the 23-bar C major coda of the first movement (Berg was obsessed with the number 23 and often encoded it in his scores: could this have been a deliberate reference by Britten?) The premiere, by the Zorian Quartet (who had also premiered the Tippett Third Quartet), took place at the Wigmore Hall on Purcell’s birthday, 21 November and the day before Britten’s own – he was 32. Britten was pleased with the Quartet, writing to Mary Behrend, its commissioner and dedicatee: to my mind it is the greatest advance I have yet made, & altho’ it is far from perfect, it has given me encouragement to continue on new lines.130
There was still another piece to come in this momentous year, music for a film made for schoolchildren about the instruments of the orchestra, which he wrote in less than two weeks in the second half of December. The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra, as Britten called his piece, is a set of variations and a fugue on a theme by Purcell, a brilliant educational exercise – for Britten knew exactly how to demonstrate the individual character of each instrument – and display of musical skill, with the most extravagantly jubilant of all his endings. It has become his most widely played and popular piece.
At the start of 1946 Britten was ready to begin the composition of The Rape of Lucretia. On 24 January he wrote to Pears: Well – I’ve taken the plunge and old Lucretia is now on the way … I think it’ll be alright but I always have cold feet at this point. It is loathesome starting pieces – I always regret that I’m not a coal heaver or bus-driver and not have to depend on things you can’t control.131 Here again he was writing an opera in which the protagonist commits suicide. The story can be simply told: the Etruscan prince Tarquinius, encamped outside Rome, is drinking with his fellow generals Junius and Collatinus. Spurred on by talk about the faithlessness of all the officers’ wives except Collatinus’s wife Lucretia, Tarquinius rides to Rome, boasting that he will test her fidelity. He asks for hospitality at her house, and during the night he rapes her. The next morning, Collatinus arrives and Lucretia confesses to him; he forgives her but she, full of shame and guilt, stabs herself.
A feature of Obey’s play had been the inclusion of narrators who comment on the story. Britten and Duncan expanded the idea: a Male and Female Chorus (sung in the original production by Peter Pears and Joan Cross) are present on stage throughout. They set the scene, interpose their (unheeded) advice and, above all, they place the pagan tragedy within a Christian context of forgiveness. The Christian aspect Britten and Duncan gave to Lucretia has come in for justifiable criticism, since it can easily seem like pious moralising after the event. In any case Christianity’s profound silence about sex means that it cannot solve the real moral dilemma of the opera, which is whether or not Lucretia acquiesces in her rape. There is no obvious sign of this in her terrified protests against Tarquinius’s intrusion into her bed, yet both libretto and music disclose more ambivalent feelings. Lucretia confesses that ‘In the forest of my dreams / You have always been the Tiger’, and Tarquinius claims ‘Yet the linnet in your eyes / Lifts with desire / And the cherries of your lips / Are wet with wanting’; the music at this point does not give the lie to his observation. The whole of this scene is superbly handled by Britten and is full of the wildness, fervour and confusion of sexual desire. When Lucretia makes her confession to Collatinus, fragments of Tarquinius’s music appear lightly in the orchestra as if to suggest that her memories are not as terrifying as she presents them. Collatinus’s offer of forgiveness is so complete that we feel Lucretia cannot but accept it, yet she stabs herself. She cannot bear the thought that she might have unwillingly aroused in herself some deeper, darker level of sexuality. The passacaglia ensemble that follows her death (‘Is it all? … It is all!’) and its concluding quiet attempt at reassurance (‘It is not all …’) do not solve our uneasiness about Lucretia. Britten and Duncan were brave in asking disturbing questions about sexuality, but these are so challenging that what may easily seem like Christian platitudes are inadequate to answer them.
Britten exploits to the full the sonorities he can obtain from his 12 players – five winds, five strings, percussion, harp, plus a piano played by the conductor for the recitatives. The prominent harp part could be used as a textbook on how to write for the instrument, likewise the double bass. There is more use of leitmotifs than in Peter Grimes: Lucretia in particular has her own much repeated motif. But this is also much more an opera of set piece and recitative than Grimes, and Britten had learnt much – and would learn more – from Mozart’s recitatives with their unsurpassed skill in rapid word-setting. The tone of the music can seem a little detached at first, as if Britten is not fully involved with the story – and indeed the laddish sexual bragging of Tarquinius and Junius seems rather distant from his own sensibility. He is more at ease in Scene 2 with the women’s placid life of spinning and folding linen. The music here is ravishingly beautiful: like the women’s ensemble in Peter Grimes, it evokes the protective maternal world of childhood in the sensuous yet innocently pure sound of intertwining female voices. But this is also a cloying world, from which Lucretia would need to escape were she ever to find her true self. She can do this only in death, willingly letting her dark secret love destroy her life.
The original plan had been to perform Lucretia at Dartington Hall in Devon, the home of the Elmhirsts, a philanthropic couple who had given accommodation to many refugee artists during the war. But Crozier happened to meet Rudolf Bing, one of the managers of Glyndebourne Opera, which was about to reopen following its wartime closure. Bing introduced him to John Christie, the eccentrically idealistic proprietor of the opera house, and Christie agreed to set up a Glyndebourne English Opera Company which would perform Britten’s new operas during the summer season and then take them on tour. The Company moved down to Sussex and rehearsals of Lucretia began in June, while Britten finished the scoring at his usual superhuman pace (somehow he also found time to go to Switzerland for performances of Peter Grimes).
At first all went well, though growing tensions developed between Britten and Crozier on the one hand and Christie and Bing on the other, and Christie appeared not to care much for the music. Crozier had brought in John Piper to design the sets and costumes. Ernest Ansermet was the conductor, and Lucretia was sung by the 34-year-old Kathleen Ferrier, who had no experience as an opera singer, but possessed the most moving mezzo-soprano voice of her generation.
The premiere took place on 12 July 1946. Reviews were more mixed than for Grimes, and the libretto in particular came in for criticism, especially the Christian epilogue. This had been Britten’s idea and he was prepared to defend it: in a letter to Imogen Holst soon after the premiere he wrote: I’ve discovered that being simple & considering things spiritual of importance, produces reactions nearly as violent as the Sacre did! I have never felt so strongly that what we’ve done is in the right direction and that the faded ‘intellectuals’ are dangerously wrong.133 Tippett, however, who had gone to see the opera with Walton, in his forthright manner told Britten, whom he knew was next intending to write a comic opera, ‘For Christ’s sake don’t use this librettist.’134 He also wrote Britten a long and complex letter setting out some of his reservations about the high poetic style of the libretto, which concluded: ‘the most striking thing lacking in English librettos is the knowledge of how to present emotions & characters in terms of dramatic situation & gesture whereby the words they actually sing withdraw a bit into the background’135 – sound advice that Tippett can hardly be said to have followed himself in his later operas, at least.
Britten did not use Duncan again for any of his future operas. He was not to become a ‘corpse’; their friendship continued, if rather shakily, and Britten later became extremely close to his son Roger, who was Britten’s godson; but Duncan never understood why he had been rejected as a collaborator. It had seemed to him, as it had to Montagu Slater, that theirs was a good working relationship; indeed Britten was to write: The composer and poet should at all stages be working in the closest contact, from the most preliminary stages right up to the first night. It was thus in the case of ‘The Rape of Lucretia’.136 After Lucretia, Duncan and Britten had been working on an adaptation of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park; but without telling Duncan, Britten turned to Crozier for another idea. ‘I suggested a comic opera based on Maupassant’s short story, Le Rosier de Madame Husson [‘Madame Husson’s May-King’].’ Crozier wrote. ‘Britten liked the idea, especially when he saw how easily the action could be translated from Maupassant’s France to his own native coast of East Suffolk.’137 Lowestoft’s chief export supplied a name for the hero, and the opera: Albert Herring. In the meantime the tour of Lucretia around provincial cities played to half-empty houses and lost a great deal of money, with the result that John Christie withdrew his financial support from the company, though he was already committed to staging a new opera in 1947. The company re-formed to become the English Opera Group (EOG), with Britten, Crozier and John Piper as artistic directors. During the Lucretia tour, Britten had gone to Tanglewood for the delayed American premiere of Peter Grimes, performed by students and conducted by the 28-year-old Leonard Bernstein. Auden, who had come from New York to see it, said: ‘The performance was terrible but the work made an impression all the same.’138 This was one of the last occasions when Britten and Auden were to spend any time together.
While Crozier got down to the libretto of Albert Herring, Britten wrote a Festival Overture for the opening of the BBC Third Programme, which he withdrew after its first performance (it has since been revived as Occasional Overture). He also made orchestral versions of five French folk songs which come close at times to the sound world of Mahler’s Wunderhorn songs. In December he began the composition of the new opera, continuing it on a New Year skiing holiday in Switzerland with Pears and Crozier; he finished the score in April 1947. Together with his version of The Beggar’s Opera, Albert Herring is the most light-hearted and optimistic of Britten’s operas. Set in the imaginary East Suffolk town of Loxford, it is full of references to local places. Albert Herring is the naïve and awkward greengrocer’s boy, thoroughly under his mother’s thumb. The Loxford establishment, headed by the preposterous Lady Billows, choose him to be May King, since none of the local girls is virtuous enough to be May Queen. At the ceremony, Albert is given lemonade laced with rum by the young lovers, Sid and Nancy, which is the key to his liberation: he decides to head off to town and enjoy himself. His disappearance causes the townsfolk to believe he is dead, especially after his coronation wreath is found abandoned in the road; they sing a threnody for him, at the climax of which Albert reappears to tell them his tale of getting drunk and, by implication, losing his virginity. The shocked townsfolk withdraw, leaving Albert with Sid, Nancy and the village children to enjoy his new-found freedom from bourgeois convention.
Crozier, as the librettist, was the instigator of this scenario, where instead of succumbing to fate, a Britten hero vigorously asserts his independence and embraces life. The sheer exuberance of Britten’s music shows how much he was in sympathy with the story, and that this was another liberation for him too. In particular, Albert’s freeing himself from his mother’s apron strings would have had strong personal resonances for Britten: the newly confident Albert’s dismissive ‘That’ll do, Mum!’ is, as Donald Mitchell has written, ‘the final act of a long-running, domestic drama’.139 Britten had a strong sense of humour, schoolboyish maybe, but genuine all the same, and the score of Albert Herring is full of fun. There are hilarious parodies of different musical styles for the various establishment characters, who in their fixed attitudes to life are all caricatures: Lady Billows’s mock-Handelian pomposity, the teacher Miss Wordsworth’s pseudo-Victorian roulades, the Gilbert and Sullivanesque orotundity of the Police Superintendent’s laborious pronouncements. There are imitative sounds that rival Richard Strauss’s sheep: fluttertonguing flute and muted horn and a glockenspiel for the whirring and chiming clock, Sid’s wolf-whistle reproduced by violin harmonics, a tenor drum crack with harp and string harmonic glissandi for the swoosh of flame as Albert lights the gas. When Sid and Nancy lace the lemonade, viola (significantly Britten’s own instrument) and piano play the opening of Tristan; and when Albert drinks we hear the full Tristan sound, with tremolo strings and plangent oboe. There is another sly quotation: just before the Superintendent mentions the word ‘rape’ in the scene before the general threnody the orchestra plays the Lucretia motif. Britten uses exactly the same chamber orchestra as for Lucretia, with still greater ease and virtuosity. There is more freedom too in the recitatives, which are sometimes very complex, with several cadenza recitatives for almost the whole cast. Most of the score moves at lightning pace, but there are two extended passages of slow music: the second scene of Act II, a nocturne, which contains an exquisitely tender love scene for Sid and Nancy; and the magnificent threnody in Act III, another passacaglia, a complement to the one in Lucretia, in which general mourning alternates with each character’s individual reflections on the situation in their personal musical style. The note of seriousness here especially raises this most deft of comic operas to a higher level.
The premiere of Albert Herring on 20 June 1947 was a great success with the Glyndebourne audience, though as usual some of the critics could not resist carping. Britten himself conducted. He never enjoyed conducting, but reluctantly came to accept that he was in fact the best interpreter of his own music. After Glyndebourne, the English Opera Group took Albert Herring to the Holland Festival and then performed it in Lucerne, together with Lucretia. It was while they were on this cumbersome and expensive tour that Pears suggested that it might be easier to start their own modest festival in Aldeburgh to perform operas and concerts with their friends. During the summer Britten had decided to move from Snape to Aldeburgh, and had bought Crag House, a pink house with a walled garden, its frontage appropriately on Crabbe Street, and with a fine view eastwards out over the sea from his first-floor study.
Aldeburgh has its own unique character. It extends for half a mile, from marshes to the north down to the Alde estuary, which at the town’s southern end winds in from Snape to follow the shoreline for several miles before finally reaching the sea below Orford. At each end of the town are substantial Victorian hotels; however, Aldeburgh is not a resort, but a fishing town – there are fishermen’s huts and boats drawn up on the shingle beach – and a place to retire to. Along the sea front is a narrow road for pedestrians, Crag Path, with mostly small Victorian houses and the Medieval Moot Hall right by the beach, looking in danger of being swept out to sea. Behind are two more parallel streets, the second a busy High Street, at whose top end a road leads up a hill to the large Parish Church. Britten made his main home in this small town for the remainder of his life.
The first piece Britten wrote at No 4 Crabbe Street, as he wanted the house to be known, was his Canticle I, ‘My beloved is mine’, a setting of the 17th-century English poet Francis Quarles’s ‘A Divine Rapture’ for tenor and piano which he wrote for a memorial concert for the Revd Dick Sheppard, one of the founders of the Peace Pledge Union. It is one of his most serene works, a rededication of his love for Peter Pears, and it ends in a mood of untroubled happiness that would soon become rare in Britten’s music. But not yet: for a year at least his music would continue in the blithe spirit that Albert Herring had engendered. His next piece was the cantata Saint Nicolas, written for the centenary of Lancing College, Pears’s old school in Sussex. Crozier devised a libretto on the life and miracles of the 4th-century bishop who was the patron saint of the school, as well as of children, seamen and prostitutes. It is superbly conceived for the occasion, and Britten makes dramatic use of the available space, with voices sounding from the gallery. There are testing but rewarding parts for the amateur singers and instrumentalists; congregational hymns, and one of the catchiest of his tunes for ‘The Birth of Nicolas’. The potential problem of an explicitly Christian and moralising work written without full conviction (for although Britten retained much sympathy for the Church, he did not have the kind of fervent religious faith that Messiaen, for example, possessed) is not the same here as in Lucretia, because there is no conflict with the subject matter. All that can be said in mild criticism of Saint Nicolas is that there are a few places where the music seems to lack complete conviction – where it has more to do with piety than with true religious spirit.
In any case Britten was at his happiest with secular subjects. In the early months of 1948, in the midst of recitals with Pears in Italy, Switzerland and Holland, he somehow found time to write a new, almost two-hour work for the EOG: The Beggar’s Opera. With Tyrone Guthrie, who had been the administrator of Sadler’s Wells at the time of Peter Grimes, to edit the text and direct the production, this was by no means a simple adaptation of John Gay’s early 18th-century ballad opera, but a total recomposition, based on the original tunes but giving each a sophisticated and often highly contrapuntal treatment. I must stop myself too much ‘canonizing’ of the music,140 Britten wrote to Pears – but we may be glad that he didn’t. The story is a not untypical one for Britten, with an outsider hero, the highwayman Macheath, who has a complicated love life – he has married Polly Peachum after getting Lucy Lockit pregnant. Peachum and Lockit, the two fathers, rogues both, contrive to have Macheath imprisoned; he is about to be executed when the conventions of opera come to his rescue and all ends happily for him, if not for his two women. The music has the same quality of unforced inventiveness as Britten’s folk song settings, and the scoring – the same as Lucretia and Herring – is consistently delightful. Stravinsky may have got to know The Beggar’s Opera while he was writing The Rake’s Progress, which seems like a deliberate attempt to outclass it, like Stravinsky’s other attempts to set Britten texts and make his own versions of existing Britten pieces: the ‘Lyke-wake dirge’ in the Cantata; The Flood; Abraham and Isaac. Stravinsky also borrowed the 12-note row from The Turn of the Screw for The Flood,141 and it could even be claimed that, not content with stealing Britten’s subjects, Stravinsky also stole Auden for his librettist. This side of the old master is not his most attractive.
The Aldeburgh Festival had been officially constituted the previous autumn. Fidelity, the young Countess of Cranbrook, who lived nearby at Great Glemham and was a known supporter of local music, was invited to become Chair. Elizabeth Sweeting, who had lately been working for the EOG, was appointed general manager. Enough money was guaranteed for the Festival to go forward. It would centre on the Jubilee Hall, a short distance down Crabbe Street from Britten’s house; the hall held just over 300 people and had adequate facilities for staging opera. The first Festival ran for a week, from 5 to 12 June 1948. There were three sold-out performances of Albert Herring and the unofficial premiere of Saint Nicolas; the Zorian Quartet played Bridge’s Quartet in F sharp minor and Tippett’s Second Quartet; the 21-year-old Arthur Oldham, Britten’s composition pupil and amanuensis – he had copied out Britten’s full scores since Peter Grimes – conducted his own Variations on the Coventry Carol for chamber ensemble. There were lectures: E M Forster spoke on Peter Grimes and stayed with Britten and Pears at 4 Crabbe Street; William Plomer talked about Edward Fitzgerald, the Suffolk poet-translator of Omar Khayyam; Sir Kenneth Clark lectured on ‘Constable and Gainsborough as East Anglian Painters’, and there was an exhibition of small Constable paintings (Pears had just bought one himself, the beginning of their art collection). The Festival was a success.
Britten was busy with conducting the EOG on tour after the Festival ended, but he kept August free for a complete break. Holidays were nonetheless quite strenuous: Crozier records that Britten actually swam ‘four or five times a day … and quite often last thing at night.’142 Forster came to stay again, and acquiesced in Britten’s request that he should collaborate with Crozier on a future opera project. Meanwhile Britten was thinking about his next large-scale piece, the Spring Symphony, a second commission from the Koussevitsky Foundation. This had been in his mind since 1946, and he had already assembled a collection of texts to set for three soloists and chorus – both boys and adults. It was not to be a symphony in any traditional sense, though Mahler’s Eighth and Das Lied von der Erde and Holst’s First Choral Symphony can be seen as precedents. The four parts do loosely correspond to the four movements of a Classical symphony, with the slow movement second and the scherzo third. Each part except the finale is made up of a group of shorter settings, often for a solo voice, of predominantly 16th- and 17th-century poems. The choral introduction, depicting the icy grip of winter, caused Britten much trouble. He wrote to Pears on 22 October: The work started abysmally slowly and badly & I got in a real state … I’m half way thro’ the sketch of the 1st movement, deliberately not hurrying it, fighting every inch of the way. It is terribly hard to do, but I think shows signs of being a piece at last. It is such cold music that it is depressing to write, & I yearn for the Spring to begin, & to get on to the 3 Trumpets & Tenor solo! Spring is heralded by the trumpets’ cuckoo calls and, in the following choral setting of Nashe’s ‘Spring, the Sweet Spring’, by the three soloists imitating cuckoo, owl and nightingale. In the slow movement and scherzo Britten gives each setting its own reduced orchestra: Vaughan’s ‘Waters Above’ is just for tenor and violins, whose sul ponticello (near the bridge) patterings mimic the spring rain. Britten wrote that the slow movement was about the darker side of Spring – the fading violets, rain and night.143 The finale is a setting for all the forces of a passage from Beaumont and Fletcher’s play The Knight of the Burning Pestle. A ‘cow horn’ is introduced into the orchestra, insistently sounding middle C with a glissando up to the note. At the climax the boys’ choir burst in with the medieval carol ‘Sumer is i-cumen in’.
The Spring Symphony was in some ways a turning point in Britten’s music. It contains his last and perhaps his finest setting of a text by Auden, the 1930s poem ‘Out on the lawn I lie in bed’, for which Britten creates a rapt nocturnal atmosphere, underlining the poem’s central prophecy of war with muted trumpet fanfares. And the uninhibited exuberance of the ending, expressing sheer delight in life, was a tone of voice that Britten would later find hard to sustain.