In February 1955, Britten and Pears rented a villa in Zermatt in Switzerland for a few weeks’ skiing. They invited Beth, Mary Potter – the painter wife of the writer Stephen Potter, whose marriage had just broken up – and Ronald Duncan and his wife Rose Marie to stay with them. On the first day, Mary Potter injured her leg, and Britten wrote an Alpine Suite for three recorders for her to learn to play with Pears and himself while she was recuperating.
He began writing the ballet, The Prince of the Pagodas, but was in no hurry to finish it. By the autumn he had sketched the first of the three acts and begun the second. On 31 October he and Pears set off on a five-month trip to the Far East, the longest journey they were ever to make. It was partly a holiday, but the two of them gave many recitals as well. Starting in Holland, they travelled across Europe to Yugoslavia, then Istanbul. They flew to India (where Britten was impressed by the sitar playing of the young Ravi Shankar), and on to Malaya, Bali, Hong Kong and Japan. During the trip Britten wrote a series of long letters, a kind of diary, to his godson Roger Duncan. He had told Ronald Duncan that he would like to become a second father to Roger: would Duncan mind?170 Duncan made no objection, knowing that he was himself an inadequate parent. No relationship brought out the latent paternal longings in Britten more than this one. Britten had Roger to stay at Aldeburgh, visited him at school, gave him presents and wrote him several hundred letters and cards over the next ten years. In the travel diary letters, Britten gives vivid descriptions of his experiences. Driving through the jungle in Ceylon, we saw some exciting things: lots of monkeys of course, sitting in the road & leaping through the trees, some wild cats (with long striped tails), the car was charged by a large water buffalo (luckily it missed), and, finally just after it got dark a LEOPARD streaked across the road in front of the car! We couldn’t believe our eyes, so we stopped the car & sat waiting, and it came back onto the grass verge and watched us, for nearly two minutes, & we could see it baring its teeth at us in the lights of the car!171
In Singapore they were joined by the Hesses who accompanied them for the rest of the journey. The climax of their trip was visiting Bali, where Britten at last encountered live the gamelan music that had fascinated him since first discovering it through Colin McPhee. An added attraction was that the gamelan orchestras were sometimes made up of beautiful young boys. Britten wrote to Imogen Holst: The music is fantastically rich – melodically, rhythmically, texture (such orchestration!!) & above all formally. It is a remarkable culture … At last I’m beginning to catch on to the technique, but it’s about as complicated as Schönberg.172 The experience of Bali had a profound influence on him: above all its music, but also the sensuous Hinduism he encountered there, which gave him an ideal of a religion without guilt, a possible alternative to Christianity and its obsession with sin.
Back in England, he now had to get back to work in earnest on The Prince of the Pagodas. He was supposed to finish by September 1956, but the first performance was postponed until Christmas, which gave him a little more leeway. Even so, it was a hard job to complete the 641 pages of full score in time, with the now obligatory help of Imogen Holst, together with Rosamund Strode, a professional soprano and a postgraduate student of Imogen’s. This was by far the longest purely orchestral score Britten was ever to write. The Prince of the Pagodas has a simple fairytale plot. The princess Belle Rose is spurned by her father, the Emperor of the Middle Kingdom, in favour of her wicked sister Belle Épine. She is carried off to Pagoda Land, where she meets a giant salamander, who reveals himself as a prince. The two of them return to the Middle Kingdom and free the Emperor from the clutches of Belle Épine, who has become Empress, before returning to idyllic happiness in Pagoda Land.
Even if The Prince of the Pagodas did not engage Britten on the same intensely personal level as, for example, the Violin Concerto or the Serenade or his operas, in many other respects it is one of his most important works. The sheer inventiveness of it is extraordinary – so many memorable ideas – as is the sustained brilliance of the orchestral writing. The quality of the music is the equal to Tchaikovsky’s ballets, which served as Britten’s model for a large part of the score (Duncan recalls that Britten told him he kept a score of Sleeping Beauty beside his bed while writing the piece).173 Most fascinating of all, unsurprisingly, is the Balinese-influenced music for Pagoda Land. Britten creates his own gamelan from the struck instruments of the symphony orchestra, including gong, xylophone, vibraphone, harp, celesta and piano duet. The result is an astonishingly accurate replication of the original. This first extended use of gamelan-inspired music was to have huge implications for Britten’s future work.
The Prince of the Pagodas was finally produced at Covent Garden on New Year’s Day, 1957, and had a further 22 performances that year. It was a moderate success, but after 1960 was never produced again in Britten’s lifetime, and since Britten fell out with Cranko over the latter’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, he tended to forget about his ballet, as he had done with other pieces that summoned up unhappy memories.
During 1957 he and Pears decided they must move house. Life at 4 Crabbe Street had become difficult, now that Britten was so famous. As his sister Beth wrote: ‘Passers-by would peer over the fence and, when they made the fence high, peered through the holes. There was no privacy.’174 A practical solution presented itself: Mary Potter lived in the Red House, a substantial brick farmhouse half a mile from the town centre, on the edge of the golf course where Britten’s father had often played. After her marriage ended, Mary Potter wanted somewhere smaller, so she suggested an exchange of houses with Britten and Pears. In December, while working on Noye’s Fludde, Britten wrote to Edith Sitwell: You can imagine the final bars of the opera are punctuated by hammer-blows! However we are now about half in, & can already see that it is going to be lovely. A little further from the sea, but with a splendid garden, & it is a beautiful old house.175 There was also a tennis court and a croquet lawn, and later a swimming pool was built, and a library. One of the outhouses was converted into a first-floor studio where, as Britten later told Edith Sitwell, he could bang away to my heart’s content.176 But in some ways the move was a sad one, for as Beth said: ‘Ben could no longer work looking out at his beloved sea.’177
The first piece Britten wrote at the Red House was Songs from the Chinese, settings of Arthur Waley’s translations for Pears and a new accompanist, the guitarist Julian Bream. He then immediately turned to Noye’s Fludde, a theatre piece for children, his finest work in a genre he had more or less invented himself. The text was taken from the Chester Miracle Plays, whose direct, unsentimental language was an immediate safeguard against either the pious or the twee. As in Saint Nicolas, Britten cleverly combined amateur and professional instrumentalists and singers. He also again built congregational hymns into the structure of the piece. The opera begins with ‘Lord Jesus, think on me’, a confession of universal sin, and ends with Tallis’s ‘The spacious firmament on high’, sung in canon to provide a resplendent conclusion. At its centre, the Victorian seafarers’ hymn ‘Eternal Father, strong to save’ appears as the climax of the storm that initiates the flood – a passacaglia, whose theme happens to provide a perfect bass to the hymn. Aside from Noye, the intransigent Mrs Noye and the (spoken) Voice of God, all the parts are performed by children, who also play the majority of the instruments, including a multiplicity of recorders, eight bugles, 12 handbells and a range of unpitched percussion. The score is full of marvellous sounds evoking a vivid and happy childhood world: the recorder choir and open string pizzicatos for the building of the ark; the joyful shouts of ‘Kyrie eleison’ together with bugle calls (here purged of their military associations) for the procession of animals into the ark; the combination of piano and the specially invented ‘slung mugs’ for the first spots of rain; a fluttertonguing treble recorder for the dove who is sent out to find land; the gently dissonant sound of handbell clusters at the end, a kind of Christian gamelan, full of innocently sensual pleasure. Despite the authoritarian presence of the Voice of God, whose whims have caused all this mayhem, Noye’s Fludde is largely a work free from guilt, a vision of earthly delights.
Life at the Red House eventually settled down into a routine, with the housekeeper Miss Hudson supervising the cooking as she had at 4 Crabbe Street. Britten liked plain food, the kind he had had at school, including rice pudding and ‘spotted dog’ (a suet pudding with sultanas). He had an intense dislike of shellfish, and of a number of other foods including mushrooms, tomatoes and pears. He liked most of all what Nellie Hudson called ‘nursery food’,178 and would sometimes consume a whole tin of condensed milk. But he also had a taste for fine wines. Pears was more of a gourmet, and when he was there the cooking would be more elaborate. When composing, Britten kept to an orderly schedule. He rose early, took a cold bath (another legacy from his schooldays) and was at his desk from 9:00 until 1:00. In the afternoon he wrote letters and took a walk, in later years with his dachshunds, always paying keen attention to the birds he saw. While on his walk he also planned his next day’s work. Tea was an important ritual. Significantly perhaps, Britten could not cook – according to Pears he could just about boil an egg – but he was adept at making tea, blending different varieties. Following tea, he returned to his studio until dinner at 8, after which there might be a little reading, or listening to music on records, before early bed, often with the score of a string quartet.
At the 1958 Festival Noye’s Fludde was premiered in Orford Church. It was produced by Colin Graham, who became associated with almost all Britten’s later operas. That year Britten wrote two new and especially fine song-cycles for Pears, some settings of Hölderlin with piano for the 50th birthday of Prince Ludwig of Hesse, and the Nocturne for tenor, seven obbligato instruments and strings. The two central poems of Sechs Hölderlin-Fragmente, ‘Sokrates und Alcibiades’ and ‘Die Jugend’, express Britten’s own philosophy of beauty in ecstatic progressions of triads that recall the redemptive ‘interview’ music of Billy Budd. The Nocturne had its origin in a setting of Tennyson’s ‘Now sleeps the crimson petal’ which Britten had originally written for the Serenade. He eventually found no place for it there, and was perhaps also wary of its openly erotic nature. Although the song does not appear in the Nocturne, its repeated rocking accompaniment figure for strings pervades the later cycle’s opening song, Shelley’s ‘On a poet’s lips I slept’, and then acts as a ritornello linking the remaining seven songs. As in the Serenade, Britten chose a sequence of poems, here by eight different poets, all again on the same nocturnal theme, but darker and stranger than in the earlier work. The dark heart of the Nocturne is reached in two consecutive songs that look forward to the War Requiem: lines from Wordsworth’s Prelude about fears of the French Revolution are set to a disquieting timpani accompaniment, anticipating the shell-fire drumbeats in Wilfred Owen’s ‘Be slowly lifted up’ in the later work; this song is followed by Britten’s first setting of Owen, ‘The Kind Ghosts’, a chillingly seductive vision of death. Each of the songs has a different instrumentation, using the obbligato instruments in turn; the last, a Shakespeare sonnet, is a passionate love song, richly scored for the whole ensemble. As in the Serenade this last song brings a benediction: the poet is happy because in sleep he dreams of his absent beloved. Here we seem to stand on the threshold of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, to which Britten would soon turn.
First he had to get two commissions out of the way. One is a small masterpiece: the Missa Brevis for boys’ voices and organ, written for George Malcolm, the organist of Westminster Cathedral, the Roman Catholic cathedral in London, and its choir. The sound of these strong-toned boys’ voices was quite different from the softer, rounder tone of Anglican cathedral choirs. Britten was excited by this sound, and was further to exploit it in his War Requiem. The other commission is an outstanding piece of occasional music, if nothing more: the Cantata Academica for soloists, chorus and orchestra, composed for the 500th anniversary of the University of Basle. Both here and in the Cantata Misericordium which he wrote four years later, Britten had to set rather ungainly Latin texts, and in a few places in the Cantata Academica at least (which he referred to in a letter to Plomer as his Basel chore) duty gets the better of inspiration.
Now he began the major task of a new opera. The Aldeburgh Festival was expanding under its energetic manager Stephen Reiss, who had taken over from Elizabeth Sweeting in 1955. Britten was keen to build a new theatre, and a site was found, but in order to save money it was decided instead to enlarge the Jubilee Hall. For its reopening on 11 June 1960 Britten decided to make a three-act operatic version of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. He and Pears made their own adaptation of the play, cutting it to half its length and omitting Shakespeare’s Act I entirely, so that the opera opens in the magic wood and remains there until the final scene in Theseus’ palace. All the elements of Shakespeare’s drama, however, are present. There are the three intertwining worlds, each given its own characteristic music. The world of the fairies is marvellously evoked, with the fairies sung by boys, Oberon by a counter-tenor (Alfred Deller, who had revived this voice, created the role), while Puck is a speaking part played by a boy acrobat, always accompanied by solo trumpet and drum. I got the idea of doing Puck like this in Stockholm, Britten wrote, where I saw some Swedish child acrobats with extraordinary agility and powers of mimicry.179 The tangled quartet of lovers, soon to be more confused by Puck’s mistakes with his love potion, sing with passionate urgency, giving the lie to those who claim that Britten cannot write love music, let alone heterosexual love music. The rustics, Shakespeare’s ‘rude mechanicals’, have appropriately down-to-earth music, full of deliberate clichés, culminating in their presentation of the play, ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’, which they have been rehearsing throughout the opera. Britten enjoys himself hugely here with parodies of bad 19th-century opera, including a Donizettean mad scene. The fairies’ orchestra is full of exotic sounds: celesta, harpsichord, vibraphone; while the magic wood itself is unforgettably introduced by muted strings playing continuous ascending and descending glissandi. Britten used the largest orchestral forces he could fit into the Jubilee Hall, but had to restrict himself to 12 strings: for the Royal Opera House production in 1961 (and the recording in 1966) the string numbers were expanded.
Within the magic world he had created Britten felt secure, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream is the most benign of all his operas. Oberon is a strange, yet not a sinister figure, and his punishment of Tytania, making her fall in love with the first creature she sees after waking, does not result in any serious wrong: her love scene in Act II with the ‘translated’ Bottom, which might have been grotesque, results in perhaps the most sensuously beautiful music that Britten ever composed. The closing ensemble of Act III also has exquisite, unearthly beauty, after the Fairy King and Queen are reconciled, all has been resolved in the mortal world and the fairies appear to give their blessing. Britten had been trying all his life to capture the perfection of innocence: here he does so.