The start of 1949 found Britten deeply depressed. He suffered from depressive symptoms all his life, but they were especially prevalent over the next few years. The causes were various: exhaustion following the completion of a work – and he probably worked harder at this time than at any period of his life – as well as a recurring sense of failure, unwarranted but real nonetheless; very likely, too, the continuing painful feelings that resulted from his obsessional attractions to ‘thin-as-a-board juveniles’, for there had been several others since Bobby Rothman and there were to be many more. His sexuality was strong, but because of its nature and his own strong moral sense, he had to take great and sometimes damaging pains to control it.
Pears took him for his first visit to Venice, from where he sent Nancy Evans (who was newly married to Eric Crozier) a postcard of a gondolier by night which might be a scene from Death in Venice. On this occasion La Serenissima worked its magic and Britten returned revitalised, putting aside the scoring of the Spring Symphony to plunge straight into another piece about childhood innocence. Crozier and Britten devised an entertainment for the second Aldeburgh Festival called Let’s Make an Opera! whose first half shows how the practical problems of getting an opera on the stage are solved, and the second half presents the opera itself, The Little Sweep, performed mainly by children. The idea for The Little Sweep came from Blake’s poem ‘The Chimney-Sweeper’, later set by Britten in Songs and Proverbs of William Blake. Crozier introduced the opera in the Festival programme book: ‘It’s a very simple story about a sweep-boy called Sam. Some young children kidnap him from his ruffianly master, bath him, feed him, clothe him and keep him in hiding till he can be smuggled away to a better kind of life.’144 The opera was very much an East Suffolk piece: it was located at Iken Hall, near Snape, and the cast were given the names of Fidelity Cranbrook’s own children. There are a few places where the music verges on the twee, but they are swept aside by the vitality and charm of the conception.
Let’s Make an Opera! was premiered in the Jubilee Hall, conducted by Norman Del Mar, Dennis Brain’s horn-playing colleague who had taken up conducting and found it his true vocation. For the next few years, Del Mar was to be Britten’s favoured conductor, until personality clashes occurred and he lost his place. Much has been written recently about the breakdown of a number of Britten’s friendships and artistic associations,145 though not so much about the enduring close friendships – for instance with John and Myfanwy Piper, Mary Potter, Imogen Holst, Marion Harewood (later Thorpe), and Kathleen and Donald Mitchell. His care for his close friends was exceptional: he invited love, which they were prepared to give him. No one questions that, like almost all artists and especially great artists, Britten was exceptionally thin-skinned and ultra-sensitive to criticism. He was also very aware that people talked about him and Pears behind his back, and when he discovered this, he felt it as a betrayal. He was capable of outbursts of furious anger. As for his working relationships, the mezzo-soprano Janet Baker, who sang in many of his works from the 1960s onwards, summed them up matter-of-factly: ‘If you worked too closely with a man like him, you could face the prospect of being taken over completely. I think he was quite entitled to take what he needed from others. It might seem like ruthlessness, but success in life sometimes requires ruthlessness … From those who worked with him he demanded absolute loyalty. The commitment had to be complete. If anybody fell below his high standards, they were asking for trouble. To blame him for that is probably unfair.’146
The second Festival also included revivals of Albert Herring and The Rape of Lucretia, more Bridge (the String Sextet) and an exhibition of Gainsborough drawings. Del Mar conducted a concert which included the original single-strings version of Wagner’s Siegfried Idyll, Britten’s childhood after-Sunday-lunch piece. The following month, the Spring Symphony had its first performance at the Holland Festival. Britten was now anxious to begin his next opera. William Plomer, who had become a friend since his Aldeburgh lecture, had suggested Melville’s late novella Billy Budd, Sailor, as a possible work for adaptation, and Britten was immediately excited by this story of the closed world of a ship at sea, and innocence destroyed within it.
Forster had not been confident enough to write a libretto alone, as he lacked theatrical experience, which Crozier possessed in abundance. They made a harmonious team, even though Forster was sometimes prickly, and criticised Britten in a way that the composer would not have tolerated from anyone else. Crozier was now living in nearby Southwold, and Forster frequently came to Aldeburgh to stay. Britten had made friends with a local fisherman, the fortuitously-named Billy Burrell, who would sometimes take them out in his boat, and who also supplied fresh herrings for breakfast. In September 1951, while Britten was scoring Billy Budd, Burrell took Britten and Pears, together with Basil Coleman – who was to produce Budd and a number of subsequent operas – and Arthur Oldham on a fishing boat up the Rhine. Robin Long, known to Burrell as ‘Nipper’ and a current favourite of Britten’s, acted as cabin boy.
Melville’s novella tells the tragic story of the handsome sailor Billy Budd, who during the Napoleonic Wars is impressed on a British warship commanded by the thoughtful, introverted Captain Vere. Billy has natural goodness and is popular with his mates, but Claggart, the Master at Arms, who is evil incarnate, determines to destroy Billy and falsely accuses him of inciting mutiny. Invited by Vere to defend himself, Billy cannot speak because of a congenital stammer – his one flaw – and instead strikes out at Claggart and kills him with a single blow to the head. A hastily summoned court sentences Billy to hang. Vere, though he admits that Claggart has been ‘struck down by an angel of God’, does nothing to save Billy, who goes meekly to his death. In their libretto, Forster and Crozier developed the characters of both Claggart and Vere in ways that were suggested but not fully realised by Melville. Claggart’s repressed sexual desire towards Billy is spelled out more clearly than in Melville’s original. Forster would perhaps have liked to make it still more overt, but this was impossible at the time. What Forster could say, he expressed in Claggart’s great monologue ‘O beauty, o handsomeness, goodness!’ which Forster told Britten ‘is my most important piece of writing’147 (he was initially upset by the way Britten had set it). Forster makes it plain that it is Claggart’s frustrated desire to possess Billy that confirms his resolve to destroy him: ‘If love still lives and grows strong where I cannot enter, what hope is there in my own dark world for me?’
In the novella, Vere is a less sympathetic figure than in the opera. In Melville’s account of Billy’s trial, Vere persuades the reluctant officers of the drum-head court to condemn Billy – a court which, as Melville makes clear, was illegal in the first place. In the opera, Vere is loved rather than merely respected by the officers and the crew. His condemnation of Billy is seen as a necessary duty, but privately he is horrified by what he has done, ironically assuming some of Claggart’s language: ‘Beauty, handsomeness, goodness, it is for me to destroy you’. And before he goes to tell Billy his fate he confesses: ‘I am the messenger of death … How can he pardon? How receive me?’ In the epilogue, Vere as an old man reflects on what he did, and finds consolation: ‘But he saved me, and blessed me, and the love that passeth understanding has come to me. I was lost on the infinite sea’ – and he goes on, quoting from Billy’s final aria – ‘but I’ve sighted a sail in the storm, the far-shining sail, and I’m content.’ For Britten, as for Forster and Crozier, Vere is the central character of the opera, and his redemption is the culmination of the drama. The Christian parallel is obvious, though not openly stated; Billy’s act of loving self-sacrifice is in fact a purely human one, and may remind us of Wagner’s self-sacrificing heroines. Does Vere deserve his final sense of contentment? Should Billy have so passively accepted his fate? The music seems to answer yes to both questions. The opera ends in B flat major, resolving the initial conflict with G major which dominates the Prologue, where Vere introduces the drama. Billy finds his own peace in the key of F major: following the F minor of the death sentence (the key, also, of Claggart’s ‘I … will destroy you’) and Vere’s subsequent aria of anguish and self-laceration, the elemental 34 triadic chords of the wordless ‘interview music’ gradually and very firmly establish F major, in preparation for Billy’s tranquil aria of farewell in that key. We do not know what Vere said to Billy during the interview, but we know its results, since at the end of Billy’s last aria, over a partial repeat of the ‘interview’ chords, he proclaims: ‘I’m strong … and I’ll stay strong … and that’s enough.’
Billy Budd is, of course, an opera without women’s voices, which Crozier at first thought might be problematic, but it isn’t; it is simply one of the factors – another is the spectacular orchestral use of brass and woodwind – that contribute to the opera’s unique sound. And Britten’s use of his male chorus in Billy Budd is as extensive, more elaborate and still more assured than the choral writing in Peter Grimes. There are four major choral scenes in the opera: the opening, with its great cries of ‘O heave away, heave’; the sighting of the French frigate at the start of Act II, a tumultuously energetic ensemble that generates huge excitement; the execution scene and the ensuing near-mutiny when the crew crescendo in a terrifying wordless fugato which sounds like a vocal version of the Peter Grimes storm; and most memorable of all, perhaps even the supreme moment of the opera, the ‘Blow to Hilo’ episode at the centre of Act I. We first hear the sailors quietly singing their shanty below decks; the curtain falls and Britten takes up the melody in the orchestra, beginning gently on the strings, then in vigorous and forceful two-part counterpoint. The music dies down, swelling up again in conflicting keys as the curtain rises on the assembled sailors on deck. Their unison B flats, bursting in dissonantly on to the striving orchestral sounds, sweep into a huge, ecstatic outburst of E flat major. Everything that Britten had ever felt about the sea is expressed here. A tremendous, overwhelming feeling of nostalgia is embodied in the words ‘say farewell’, repeated over and over again in rich canon. But unlike Delius’s lingering farewells, it is not filled with regret. It is a farewell to youth, life, love; but all in a spirit of acceptance, and an almost religious feeling for the sea as the great mother. Britten rarely revealed himself with so little inhibition and so much emotion; he was never to do so quite as powerfully again.
Billy Budd is Britten’s grandest opera and in some respects his greatest. His portrayal of the evil Claggart, whose music is mostly the superbly sinister sound of trombones in parallel triads, rivals its obvious model, Iago in Verdi’s Otello. Vere – Pears’s role – is the most intriguing of his outsider heroes. The structure of the work was improved by Britten’s 1960 revision which turned the original four acts into two. The original ending of Act I was excised and a new linking scene contrived; Acts III and IV could simply be joined together. The premiere of the four-act version at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden on 1 December 1951, conducted by Britten and broadcast on the BBC Third Programme, with the young American baritone Theodor Uppman in the part of Billy, was enthusiastically received, though as usual the critics were divided. The faction fighting for him was headed by Hans Keller and Donald Mitchell, who regarded him as the foremost living composer and were shortly to publish a symposium expressing and substantiating that view.148 Though increasingly irritated by his hostile critics, Britten was quietly confident about Billy Budd, telling Imogen Holst a year later that though it would never be a popular success he was very glad he’d written it, and to a few of his intimate friends it would always mean a great deal.149 He had told Marion Harewood while he was writing the opera that I’ve never been so obsessed by a piece.150 After the first performance he wrote to thank his librettists. To Crozier he said: I’ve written to E.M.F. & told him that I think you & he have produced the finest libretto I’ve ever heard or read. And I think many people realise it too.151 Crozier, in reply, wrote ‘I liked particularly the remark made by K Clark to Morgan [Forster] – that “it is one of the great masterpieces that change human conduct”. Perhaps I have misquoted, but that was the gist of it.’152
Britten took almost two years to write the music of Billy Budd, interrupting it to write three pieces: the viola and piano piece Lachrymae, ‘Reflections on a song by John Dowland’ for William Primrose and himself to play at the 1950 Aldeburgh Festival; Six Metamorphoses after Ovid for oboe for the 1951 Festival, first performed by Joy Boughton from a boat on nearby Thorpeness Meare and now the most widely-played piece for oboe solo in the repertoire; and a realisation (made jointly with Imogen Holst) of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, presently ignored because of the current fashion for ‘authenticity’. The pendant to Billy Budd was Canticle II, ‘Abraham and Isaac’, which Britten composed for Pears and Kathleen Ferrier in January 1952. Its opening – E flat major arpeggios ascending on the piano and the voice of God sung by the two voices in harmony together – is a stroke of pure genius, worth a million dollars,153 as Tippett remembered Britten telling him. This time the sacrifice of an innocent victim is avoided, and there is rejoicing over the salvation of a child – a theme to which Britten could bring all his deepest feelings. Yet it is, in truth, a terrible story of a tyrant deity demanding unheeding obedience from his subjects, which Britten does not question here; later, in the War Requiem he would.
In March 1952 he and Pears went on a skiing holiday in Austria with George and Marion Harewood. One day the après-ski conversation turned to national operas – The Bartered Bride, Die Meistersinger, Boris Godunov – and the lack of a British example (since Peter Grimes had not yet achieved its present emblematic status). ‘Well, you’d better write one’,154 Harewood said. When they turned to a subject, Elizabeth I seemed an obvious choice and, with the Coronation of a new Queen Elizabeth imminent, Harewood agreed to do his best to organise the production of a new opera at Covent Garden in 1953 as part of the festivities. This would be based on Lytton Strachey’s Elizabeth and Essex (which Harewood happened to have just read) and called Gloriana. Britten did not appear to be concerned about the tight schedule, though Pears was put out that their planned recital programme for the following year would be disrupted. Britten’s first choice of a librettist was William Plomer, with whom he had already been discussing two ideas for a children’s opera. If Plomer was unwilling, Britten agreed to Harewood’s suggestion of Ronald Duncan. Crozier was not considered: his close friendship with Britten had ended ‘as a result of strains and tensions that were mostly on my side’,155 as Crozier later wrote. The crucial rift seems to have come about a few years later, when Crozier suddenly demanded that Britten should bring the Aldeburgh Festival to an end, an extraordinary and immediately alienating suggestion.
Plomer did agree to write Gloriana, and Britten soon brought in his regular set designer John Piper. The libretto was written over the summer of 1952 so that Britten could start composing in September. There is an extensive correspondence between Britten and Plomer about Gloriana: Britten’s letters suggesting improvements to Plomer’s drafts are reminiscent, in their practical approach, of Richard Strauss’s letters to Hugo von Hofmannsthal. After Plomer had sent him the opening scene, Britten replied: Terribly good. I am delighted with it & the ideas come fast & furious. I’d like to start the tournament earlier, so, in fact, that practically the whole of it could be described by Cuffe. Could Essex have more asides – such as ‘Heavens’ – ‘I can’t bear it’ kind of thing? Which leads to one general worry … I think that metre & rhyme (especially the latter) may make the recitatives very square, & unconversational. Can we take out a word here & there to break them up?156 Overall, he found Plomer a most congenial collaborator. William is a treasure,157 he wrote to Basil Coleman, who was to be the opera’s producer.
He decided to ask Imogen Holst to act as his assistant, to make the vocal score and prepare the full score by ruling barlines and writing in the names of the instruments. In September 1952 she began a detailed diary which she kept for the next 18 months: its tone is somewhat similar to Natalie Bauer-Lechner’s Reminiscences of Gustav Mahler, and her relationship with Britten has much in common with Bauer-Lechner’s with Mahler. In her diary, Imogen Holst gives a detailed account of the compositional process of Gloriana – Britten scoring so fast in the later stages that she could scarcely keep up with him. She also records many things he said, and occasionally reveals her own feelings – for she was clearly in love with him at this time. Despite some disruption when Britten’s house was flooded after the severe East Coast gales at the end of January 1953, the composition draft was finished in just over five months, and the full score, over 400 pages long, only four weeks later.
Plomer’s libretto sets the private story of Elizabeth and Essex within a series of public events: a tournament, a masque, a court ball. The impetuous young Earl of Essex is the ageing Queen’s favourite. Lytton Strachey describes his divided, unstable personality: ‘he might have been a scholar, had he not been so spirited a nobleman … he ran and tilted with the sprightliest; and then suddenly health would ebb away from him, and the pale boy would lie for hours in his chamber, obscurely melancholy, with a Virgil in his hand.’158 It might almost be a description of Britten, as he must have realised when he marked this passage in his copy of Elizabeth and Essex; it was fundamental to his treatment of Essex in the opera. Essex wants the Queen to make him Lord Deputy in Ireland, in order to quell a rebellion there; she is reluctant, knowing in her heart that he is not fit for the task. She finally agrees, but Essex fails; he hurries back to England and bursts into her dressing chamber to tell her. Elizabeth will support him no longer; Essex, in a panic, starts a rebellion himself, and is arraigned for treason. Against her deepest wishes, Elizabeth signs his death warrant. Duty is in conflict with private feeling: it is a parallel situation to Vere’s condemnation of Billy.
Gloriana has its own splendours. If it is not quite the equal of the operas that stand either side of it, this is probably because Britten was not as involved in its subject matter as he had been with Billy Budd, or would be with The Turn of the Screw. Yet the private story within the opera certainly much interested him, and the ‘private’ music – for instance the beautiful quartet ‘Good Frances, do not weep’ and Essex’s second duet with the Queen – is always compelling, and becomes more so as the opera develops. As for the ‘public’ music, Britten was clear from the start that he was making no concessions. He told Harewood: It’s got to be serious. I don’t want to do just folk dances and village green stuff.159 The set of Choral Dances he wrote for the masque and the Courtly Dances (Pavane, Galliard, La Volta, Coranto) for the ball scene are not a pastiche, but loving recreations of the Elizabethan style which are also always recognisably Britten’s. There are other examples of this neo-Renaissance manner in the opening set of variations which accompany the tournament, and Essex’s two lute songs. There is a directness in this music that is new; it was certainly intended. Donald Mitchell recalls Britten saying at an orchestral rehearsal: You know, the more simple I try to make my music, the more difficult it becomes to perform.160 Much of the music that Britten wrote in the second half of his composing life (Gloriana comes at the mid-point) reflects this aim towards a greater simplicity, which will reach its apogee in the last works, with no loss of weight in the musical argument.
The premiere of Gloriana at the Royal Opera House on 8 June 1953 in front of the newly-crowned Queen and various assembled dignitaries was a flop, far beyond the simple fact that the applause was somewhat muted because many of the audience were wearing gloves. The opera’s failure might in any case have been expected with an audience who were probably hoping to hear something like Edward German’s Merrie England; it highlighted the ingrained philistinism of the English establishment, for most of whom contemporary music would have meant nothing at all. The popular press characteristically used the occasion to make stupid remarks; though Britten had his defenders in the serious papers, and Gloriana did well at the box office, leading him to suppose that it would soon be revived. In fact after a provincial tour the following year it would not be staged again in Britain until 1966. The fiasco of the premiere did not seem overly to upset him: he must surely have been half expecting it because of the inappropriate subject he had chosen. Probably a part of him still secretly wanted to shock, as with Our Hunting Fathers and the Sinfonia da Requiem. He wrote to William Plomer: I expect that you, like me, have felt abit kicked around over it – perhaps more than me, because I’m abit more used to the jungle! But the savageness of the wild beasts is always a shock.161 He did take one criticism on board: there was a general feeling that the Epilogue, a spoken melodrama in which Elizabeth as an old woman was confronted by a number of spectral figures, was too obscure. Britten simplified it, so that it became almost entirely a monologue for Elizabeth reflecting on her achievements. Gloriana still ends, however, with the off-stage chorus singing the madrigal ‘Green leaves’, fading away into silence rather like the end of Holst’s Planets, an ending as remote from pomp and circumstance as it is possible to imagine.
When Britten agreed to write Gloriana, he had to postpone a commission he had already accepted for a chamber opera for the EOG to be performed in Venice. Before he turned to this, he wrote a new song-cycle for Pears and himself called Winter Words, settings of Thomas Hardy, a poet whose sceptical but intensely humane philosophy was in many respects close to Britten’s own. The overall tone of Winter Words is thoughtful and often disquieting: in the longest song, ‘Midnight on the Great Western’, the ‘journeying boy’ of the subtitle is observed on a train travelling towards an unknown, lonely destination: the verses are punctuated by the mournful sound of the train’s whistle, imitated by the piano. But there are also more kindly moments of vision, like the angel choir in ‘The Choirmaster’s Burial’, and the joyous bird songs in ‘Proud Songsters’. As in the John Donne cycle, everything converges on the final song, ‘Before Life and After’, whose first stanza encapsulates the essence of Britten’s world view:
A time there was – as one may guess
And as, indeed, earth’s testimonies tell –
Before the birth of consciousness,
When all went well.
Britten writes this song as a quietly passionate plea for the return of innocence to the world: the music moves steadily over pulsating triads in the bass towards its heartfelt final cry: ‘Ere nescience shall be reaffirmed / How long, how long?’ It is one of the key moments in his music.
The new opera was to be based on Henry James’s novella The Turn of the Screw, which Britten first encountered in 1932, when he heard a radio dramatisation and commented in his diary: a wonderful impressive but terribly eerie & scarey play.162 William Plomer did not care for James, but whether that was the reason Britten chose yet another new librettist is not certain; in any case he asked Myfanwy Piper, John Piper’s wife and an old friend from pre-war Group Theatre days, to adapt the novella for him. In fact she had suggested the subject to him. ‘It is a curious story’ is the libretto’s first line – and it is; but as Myfanwy Piper guessed, it was absolutely right for Britten. A governess arrives at Bly, a remote East Anglian country house, to look after two children there, Miles and Flora. Their parents are dead, and their uncle and guardian, who has engaged the governess, has no contact with them. The governess imagines herself as being a second mother to the children, and at first she is charmed by them; only gradually does she discover that they are not as innocent as they seem. At the same time she sees a strange figure on a tower who, as she learns from the housekeeper, Mrs Grose, must be the ghost of Peter Quint, the master’s valet. He had died not long before, as had the previous governess, Miss Jessel. The two had been lovers, and it becomes apparent that they had corrupted the children (James strongly hints that in Quint’s relation to Miles the corruption was sexual) and that the children are still in their power in some way. The story becomes a battle between the governess and Quint for Miles’s soul; in the end Quint admits defeat when Miles curses him, but the boy then falls dead in the governess’s arms.
James’s story allows both for a literal interpretation – that the ghosts are real – and a ‘psychological’ one – that they are figments of the governess’s overheated imagination, so much so that she succeeds in frightening Miles to death. Ambiguity was certainly part of James’s larger intention, which was to emphasise the atmosphere of terror and of evil, and to make the reader ‘think the evil, make him think it for himself’.163 Ambiguity was central to Britten’s vision too, but in the opera the ghosts are plainly real: they have singing roles, and there is a scene in Act I when Quint appears to Miles in the governess’s absence. The first act builds towards this crucial scene: the sensual sounds of female voices and Miles’s soft, sweet treble prepare us for what is one of the great seduction scenes in opera, as Quint calls to Miles in melismatic phrases that sound oriental (though their inspiration in fact was Pears singing Pérotin’s motet Beata Viscera), and beguiles him with irresistible words: ‘I’m all things strange and bold … I am King Midas with gold in his hand’. The climax of the act, when Miss Jessel appears too, is, as Christopher Palmer remarked, as much sexual as dramatic, ‘a fabulous fountain of sound’.164 We, too, may be seduced by this music; but in Act II we quickly learn the reality of evil, as the ghosts come together to proclaim (to a variation of Quint’s melisma) ‘The ceremony of innocence is drowned’ – a line Myfanwy Piper took from Yeats – and their work of corruption is gradually revealed in full.
The structure of the opera is unusually tight. There are two acts, each of which contains eight short scenes; each scene is preceded by an orchestral variation, usually anticipating its mood and colour, which is based on a 12-note theme built out of fourths and fifths. Before the initial statement of the theme comes a prologue (a late addition to the score) which sets out the background to the story. As the variations proceed, there is an inexorable feeling of the screw tightening, as the opera builds towards its terrible conclusion. There is a strong contrast between the mostly diatonic and still hopeful Act I and the expressionistic chromaticism that dominates Act II, where we hear the music darken into nightmare. The first hint of something sinister occurs when a high chromatic violin line, a premonition of Quint’s melisma, creeps in as the governess arrives at Bly; this later becomes associated with the celesta, Quint’s particular instrument and in the opera the very embodiment of the uncanny. The music for Quint and Miss Jessel at the end of Act I, with celesta, harp and gong, has an entirely exotic feeling, prefiguring the Balinese sounds of The Prince of the Pagodas and Death in Venice. Britten had returned to the familiar chamber orchestra of Lucretia and Herring: he knew all the players of the English Opera Group orchestra personally, and was writing for them as individuals.
In October 1953 Britten developed acute bursitis, a swelling in his right shoulder, and had to cancel all engagements. He spent Christmas at Schloss Wolfsgarten near Frankfurt with Prince Ludwig of Hesse and the Rhine and his Scottish-born wife Margaret, known as ‘Peg’, whom he had met through the Harewoods (Prince Ludwig and Lord Harewood – a grandson of George V – were cousins). Both Hesses, Peg in particular, were to become close friends. I’ve been thinking & thinking about Act I & having lots of ideas,165 Britten wrote to Myfanwy Piper (with his left hand), but as yet he had written no music. He did not begin composing The Turn of the Screw until 30 March 1954, having by then recovered the use of his right hand. He worked at tremendous speed, finishing the composition sketch on 23 July, and with the help of Imogen Holst all was ready for the first orchestral rehearsals in early August. The premiere, conducted by Britten, took place in the 18th-century Teatro La Fenice in Venice on 12 September. Jennifer Vyvyan was the governess, Quint was sung by Pears. The 12-year-old David Hemmings, who was later to become a film star, most famously in Antonioni’s classic 1960s film Blow-Up, played Miles. Britten became infatuated with David Hemmings for a while, an uncanny parallel to the role he was creating for him, as well as an anticipation of the story of Death in Venice. Pears found this particular obsession hard to cope with, though as usual he was tolerant and compassionate. Hemmings in adult life has seen the relationship only as rewarding for him: ‘Of all the people I have worked with, I count my relationship with Ben to have been one of the finest … And it was never, under any circumstances, threatening … Did I feel that he was desperately fond of me? I suppose I did, but I must say I thought far more in a sort of fatherly fashion; and I had a very bad father–son relationship.’166
In April 1955, Britten wrote to Edith Sitwell about his Canticle III, ‘Still falls the rain’, which after he returned from Venice he composed as an epigraph to the opera: Writing this work has helped me so much in my development as a composer. I feel with this work & the Turn of the Screw … that I am on the threshold of a new musical world … your great poem has dragged something from me that was latent there, and shown me what lies before me.167 He was exaggerating about Canticle III, since that piece could not have come into being without The Turn of the Screw, which is one of his finest masterpieces, and a work that opened up new musical landscapes for him. But he did attach great importance to the Edith Sitwell poem, whose subtitle is ‘The Raids 1940, Night and Dawn’, and which relates Christ’s Passion to the horror of the Blitz. It is one of only two Britten works to refer directly to the Second World War. Canticle III was dedicated to the memory of Noel Mewton-Wood, a fine pianist who had performed at the Aldeburgh Festival, and a fellow homosexual who, after the death of a lover, committed suicide at the age of 31. Britten wrote to Edith Sitwell: in its courage & light seen through horror & darkness [I] find something very right for the poor boy.168 The horn part was written for Dennis Brain, who was also to die tragically (in a car accident two years after the premiere). The structure of the piece is very lucid, and its language and grammar are close to The Turn of the Screw. Six verses for voice and piano, each beginning with the same vocal phrase in B flat for the words ‘Still falls the rain’, alternate with a theme and six variations for horn and piano.
Now he had another huge task ahead of him, a full-length ballet, which John Cranko, who had devised the choreography for Gloriana, had invited him to write for Covent Garden. But Britten was exhausted: in the past ten years he had composed eight operas, the Spring Symphony, Saint Nicolas and over a dozen smaller pieces, and he needed a rest. Yes we will have a holiday next year – no more years like this in a hurry,169 he wrote to his sister Barbara at Christmas.