In September 1960, Britten met Shostakovich for the first time, sharing a box with him at the Royal Festival Hall in London for the British premiere of the Russian composer’s First Cello Concerto. The two composers had enormous respect for each other and met on several subsequent occasions, the last time in 1972 when Shostakovich and his wife stayed at the Red House and he was given the rare privilege of seeing a half-completed Britten score: the draft of Death in Venice. Britten dedicated The Prodigal Son to Shostakovich, and in 1970 conducted the first performance outside Russia of Shostakovich’s 14th Symphony, which was dedicated to him.
The soloist in Shostakovich’s Concerto was Mstislav Rostropovich. Britten was so excited by his playing that when they met the following day he offered to write him a sonata for the two of them to play at Aldeburgh, thus inaugurating the warmest and most productive friendship of Britten’s later life. He began composing it after Christmas, and on 17 January 1961 he wrote to Pears: As far as I can I’ve got the cello piece in order, at least I must stop fiddling with it & get on with something else. I played it to Imo who was quite impressed, &, as if an omen, as soon as I’d played it over, the telephone rang & there was ‘Slava’ from Paris, & I had a wild & dotty conversation in broken German (very broken) with him. But he is a dear, & his warmth & excitement came over in spite of the bad line & the crazy language.180 Rostropovich was overjoyed with the five-movement Sonata when he received it in February. Britten was to write five more cello pieces for Rostropovich: the Cello Symphony, three solo suites, and a very late piece, the Tema ‘Sacher’ for a set of variations by 11 other composers to celebrate the 70th birthday of the conductor Paul Sacher. In addition he wrote a Pushkin song-cycle, The Poet’s Echo, for him to play on the piano with his wife, the soprano Galina Vishnevskaya, who also became a close friend. The three solo suites, composed in 1964, 1967 and 1971, are the most important solo cello music since Bach. Like Bach’s suites, they are mostly based on Classical dance movements, but all three suites contain fugues, a form that Bach included in his solo violin sonatas but not his cello suites. Britten solves the inherent technical problems very cunningly. The Third Suite, perhaps the most searching of the three, ends with a movement based on Russian folk songs arranged by Tchaikovsky and the Orthodox ‘Hymn for the Departed’ (also used by Tchaikovsky in his Sixth Symphony).
By the time Rostropovich and Britten gave the premiere of the Sonata at the 1961 Aldeburgh Festival, Britten had begun to compose his War Requiem. He had been asked in 1958 to write a piece for the consecration of the new Coventry Cathedral, built on the ruins of the old cathedral which had been almost entirely destroyed by bombs in 1940. He decided on a large-scale work for soloists, chorus and orchestra in memory of those who died in both world wars. His innovative plan was to intersperse the movements of the Requiem Mass, sung by solo soprano and chorus (with a separate boys’ chorus), with settings (for tenor and baritone solo and chamber orchestra) of poems by Wilfred Owen, the outstanding English poet of the First World War. It was an integral part of his scheme that the three soloists should represent the three nations which, as he told Vishnevskaya, had suffered most during the last war: Britain, Germany and Russia. So Pears and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau were the tenor and baritone soloists at the premiere, and Vishnevskaya was to have been the soprano. But the Soviet authorities would not let her sing standing on the same stage as a German, and so at the first performance the British soprano Heather Harper replaced her. Vishnevskaya did, however, take part in the later recording.
Owen’s poems provide a telling and sometimes bitter commentary on the Requiem texts: there is no trace of piety here. The cumulative effect of the text is an acute criticism of conventional Christian attitudes to war, which makes the War Requiem more ‘modern’ than any of Britten’s previous religious works, and arguably the most important pacifist statement that any 20th-century composer was to make. The two texts are closely integrated: thus the liturgical last trump in the Dies Irae, ‘Tuba mirum, spargens sonum’ (‘the wondrous trumpet, scattering its sound’) is followed by Owen’s ‘Bugles sang, saddening the evening air’, and the lines from the Offertorium: ‘quam olim Abrahae promisisti, et semini eius’ (‘which you once promised to Abraham, and his seed’), by Owen’s recasting of the story of Abraham and Isaac. Britten actually quotes from his own Canticle II when the voice of God offers Abraham a reprieve from sacrificing Isaac; but Owen continues: ‘the old man would not so, but slew his son, – / And half the seed of Europe, one by one’, and the last line is repeated over and over again by the two male soloists while the boys’ chorus return impotently to the words of the liturgy. The profoundest marriage of the two texts comes in the Agnus Dei, which acts as a refrain to the tenor’s infinitely sad song ‘One ever hangs where shelled roads part’, and to which Britten adds his own ‘Dona nobis pacem’.
The opening Requiem Aeternam begins in the tragic world of D minor familiar from the Sinfonia da Requiem. At the end of the work, after the apocalyptic climax of the Libera Me, comes Owen’s ‘Strange Meeting’, about an English and a German soldier who encounter one another in the underworld of death: ‘I am the enemy you killed, my friend.’ The poem’s last line, ‘Let us sleep now’, is mingled with the ‘In paradisum’ from the Requiem and the words are taken up by all the soloists and chorus in a great wave of benediction; it recalls the end of the Sinfonia da Requiem and its similar ebbing away into the sea that symbolises both reconciliation and death.
With the War Requiem Britten reached the apex of his reputation: it was almost universally acclaimed as a masterpiece. The recording that Britten conducted seven months after the first performance on 30 May 1962 sold over 200,000 copies in the first year of its release. Almost no serious composer since has been able to communicate on such a wide scale, and on such an important theme. Owen wrote: ‘All a poet can do is warn’, and although the existence of the War Requiem has plainly done nothing to end war in our troubled world, Britten was right to make his own great warning statement.
Britten hoped to finish his next major piece, the Symphony for Cello and Orchestra, in time for him to conduct it with Rostropovich at a festival of British music in Moscow in March 1963, but during the winter of 1962–3 he was plagued once again by health problems, and so just missed his deadline. He returned to Moscow in March 1964 to conduct it with the Moscow Philharmonic Orchestra. Shostakovich and Khachaturian were in the audience, and the Symphony was received so enthusiastically that the finale was encored. The Cello Symphony is once again cast in Britten’s tragic key of D minor (did Britten originally associate D minor with tragedy because of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, or could it have been Mahler’s Ninth?). The first movement is one of his darkest, the music struggling upwards from the murky opening sounds of tuba, contrabassoon and basses, but continually being beaten down by timpani strokes. There is an ‘all passion spent’ coda and a final whispered cadence into D major, anticipating happier events to come. The scherzo is a swift, uncanny piece, somewhat akin to the Second Quartet’s, but more disembodied. The timpani strokes return to punctuate the noble, tragic theme of the Adagio, whose middle section quietly introduces the tune of the finale, launched jubilantly in D major by a solo trumpet. (In the recording made of the first performance this tune is played in such a wonderfully abandoned manner by the Moscow trumpeter that one wonders if Britten had this particular sound in his head from the start.) The finale is cast in the familiar passacaglia form, but here in celebratory mood, ending with a coda whose lush thirds recall the Sibelius of the Fifth Symphony, and there is a similar feeling of achieved, secure – even ecstatic – happiness.
Much of 1963 was taken up with concerts celebrating Britten’s 50th birthday, culminating in a concert performance of Gloriana at the Royal Festival Hall on the actual day, 22 November. Britten was nonetheless able to write two substantial works during the year: the Cantata Misericordium, a setting of the parable of the Good Samaritan for baritone, chorus and small orchestra for the centenary of the International Red Cross; and a Nocturnal for solo guitar for Julian Bream, based on Dowland’s song ‘Come, heavy sleep’: another night piece full of disturbing visions, but ending in recovered calm. Now he at last turned to a project he had been thinking about for eight years. In 1955, before going off on his Far East tour, he asked William Plomer what to see in Japan, and Plomer suggested the Noh theatre. It so chanced that the Noh play Britten saw in Tokyo in February 1956, Sumidagawa, was about an innocent boy who escapes from robbers holding him, but dies of exhaustion after crossing a river in a ferry boat; his mad mother comes to look for him, and the ferryman takes her to her son’s grave. Britten, who had not expected to enjoy the performance, was much moved, and after he returned he talked to Plomer about turning Sumidagawa into an opera. The idea hung fire for some time, but by the end of 1958 Plomer had drafted a libretto, to which Britten responded enthusiastically. Then in April 1959 he wrote to Plomer about the idea of making it a Christian work (Here you can stop reading & have another sip of coffee to give you courage to proceed) … I can’t write Japanesy music … But we might get a very strong atmosphere (which I personally love) if we set it in pre-conquest East Anglia (where there were shrines galore).181 Plomer did not demur, and produced a new, Christianised libretto, which Britten finally began setting in January 1964, during a visit to Venice. He wrote to John Piper: Peter & I are settled in a rambling flat in a crazy old Palazzo on the Grand Canal. Very quiet & good for working in (only I’m a bit stupid so far). The weather is icy, & they all say (they always do) they’ve never known so much fog.182 It was here that Curlew River, as the new piece was called, was composed.
In transforming Sumidagawa into a Christian parable, Plomer and Britten gave the ending a miraculous aspect absent from the Buddhist stoicism of the original, where the mother weeps inconsolably for her son. In Curlew River the Madwoman, as Plomer called her (she is sung by a tenor, preserving the all-male Noh tradition) is rewarded for her constant hope: she hears her son singing from his grave; then his spirit appears and blesses her, and she becomes sane again. The rest of the story is close to the original, and although it is now a Mystery Play acted out by monks, who process in to their performing area to the plainsong hymn ‘Te lucis ante terminum’, which provides much of the musical material, the music retains an austere, non-Western quality. There is no conductor; the melodic lines are mostly unmeasured, and the players take their cues from one another. It is completely different from any music Britten had composed before. In spite of his disclaimer about ‘Japanesy’ music, there is a strong influence of Gagaku, both in the frequent use of heterophony and in the sound of the ensemble (there is much use of flute and drums and organ clusters that sound like the sho, a kind of Japanese mouth organ which Britten bought in Tokyo and taught himself to play). To the three instruments mentioned Britten adds only horn, viola and harp, plus the bell sounds – a single deep bell, then a range of high bells – that herald the miracle and suddenly bring light into the sombre landscape. At the climax of the work, the boy’s treble voice soars over the ensemble, with a piccolo representing his disembodied spirit. Britten creates a real feeling of transcendence here from his small resources.
Curlew River was first performed during the 1964 Aldeburgh Festival in the Norman church at Orford, an apt setting. Britten was already planning a sequel, based on the biblical story of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, who are cast into a fiery furnace by King Nebuchadnezzar for refusing to worship his golden image, but saved by their faith. The Burning Fiery Furnace was premiered in Orford at the 1966 Festival and was followed two years later by The Prodigal Son, thus completing a triptych of ‘parables for church performance’, as Britten called these pieces, based on the three cardinal virtues: hope, faith and charity. In The Burning Fiery Furnace Britten drew on the experience of writing Curlew River and the techniques he employs are more elaborate. The piece is still designed to be performed without a conductor, but much of the music is fast and rhythmic, and its sound-world is more brilliant and colourful than the first parable. Britten invents his own Babylonian music, drawing on the biblical ‘flute, harp, sackbut’ (he adds an alto trombone to the ensemble), together with invented percussion – anvil, multiple whip, Babylonian Drum. The instrumentalists process around the church to a superbly inventive Babylonian march, followed by the hymn to the pagan god Merodak, which is full of barbaric splendour. The vocal writing for the three Israelites, who always sing together, is particularly skilful, and Britten remembered it when in 1971 he wrote what sounds like a companion piece, his Canticle IV, based on Eliot’s poem ‘Journey of the Magi’. The Canticle has its own moment of transcendence based on plainsong, when the melody ‘Magi videntes stellam’ is introduced to accompany the repeated word ‘satisfactory’: a quietly mysterious moment.
The third church parable, The Prodigal Son, was inspired by the Rembrandt painting that Britten had seen in the Hermitage Museum on a Christmas visit to Russia with Pears in 1966. Despite some innovations in its musical language, for much of its length The Prodigal Son is a sad falling off from the high standard of the other two. The deadly hand of piety falls across the score. The most lively music occurs when the Tempter (the part originally sung by Pears), with his sprightly accompanying trumpet, lures the Younger Son away from his dull family towards the delights of the city. Yet the seductions of wine, women and gambling to which the Tempter introduces the Younger Son turn out to be as dreary as Britten’s memories of the Paris brothel he visited after his mother’s death. They are particularly unseductive because the boy tempters – a necessary condition of the all-male cast – are poor substitutes for women’s voices. The quality of the music does, however, recover during the Younger Son’s exhausted journey home, and his reduction to utter despair in desolate solo viola music that recalls the teenage Elegy.
In 1964 Britten changed his publisher. Since the deaths of Ralph Hawkes in 1950 and Erwin Stein in 1958, Britten had felt bereft of real support from Boosey & Hawkes. Donald Mitchell, who had been working on his behalf part-time at Booseys and was also adviser on music books to Faber & Faber, was able to persuade Faber’s chairman Richard de la Mare to start a new, associated publishing company, Faber Music, expressly to publish Britten’s music. Under Mitchell’s directorship, Faber Music also took on other living composers and soon became one of the leading contemporary music publishers. Mitchell was the ideal supportive figure Britten needed, as his self-confidence was still precarious, liable to evaporate at the slightest provocation. Ronald Duncan tells a characteristic story of Britten during the provincial tour of Lucretia in 1946, walking painfully down a hotel corridor trying to avoid stepping on the red lines on the carpet. If I can get right up and down the corridor without touching the lines, Britten told him solemnly, it will mean that I am a composer.183 Little had changed 18 years later: in November 1964 he was writing to Pears: I’ve been madly low & depressed … worried about my work which seems so bad always … I must get a better composer somehow – but how – – but how – – –?184 Meanwhile honours flooded in: 11 honorary doctorates, the First Aspen Award for ‘the individual anywhere in the world judged to have made the greatest contribution to the advancement of the humanities’, and in 1965 Britten was admitted to the Order of Merit, the highest award the Queen could confer. Honours, as you know only too well, don’t really touch one, he wrote to Yehudi Menuhin, but there are moments in one’s depressions, when one feels one’s work to be hopelessly inadequate (all too often!) that they do encourage.185
From Britten’s speech on receiving the First Aspen Award, 1964:
I certainly write music for human beings – directly and deliberately. I consider their voices, the range, the power, the subtlety, and the colour potentialities of them. I consider the instruments they play – their most expressive and suitable individual sonorities … I also take note of the human circumstances of music, of its environment and conventions; for instance, I try to write dramatically effective music for the theatre – I certainly don’t think opera is better for not being effective on the stage (some people think that effectiveness must be superficial). And then the best music to listen to in a great Gothic church is the polyphony which was written for it, and was calculated for its resonance … I believe, you see, in occasional music … almost every piece I have ever written has been composed with a certain occasion in mind, and usually for definite performers, and certainly always human ones … I can find nothing wrong … with offering to my fellow-men music which may inspire them or comfort them, which may touch them or entertain them, even educate them – directly and with intention. On the contrary, it is the composer’s duty, as a member of society, to speak to or for his fellow human beings.
On his doctor’s advice, Britten decided to make 1965 a sabbatical year from recitals and conducting. He and Pears took several long holidays. In January they went to India, where Britten was able to indulge his passion for bird-watching. He wrote to Rosamund Strode, who had succeeded Imogen Holst as his full-time music assistant, about their stay in Udaipur, north of Bombay: we used to take trips around in a boat seeing the most fantastic birds – Pelicans, Storks & Cranes of all kinds, Ibis’s, Cormorants & Darters, Stilts, Parrots etc. etc. – & crocodiles sunning themselves & eyeing us greedily!186 Britten was not taking a holiday from composing: during the Indian trip he wrote his Gemini Variations for the 13-year-old Hungarian Jeney twins. This light-hearted ‘quartet for two players’ based on a theme of Kodály exploited the twins’ ability to perform on flute, violin and piano duet. He also read Anna Karenina and made serious plans for an opera based on Tolstoy’s novel, with Vishnevskaya in the leading role. Colin Graham, who since Curlew River had become his regular producer, drafted a libretto, but the plan came to grief after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, when it became impossible for Britten to accept a commission from the Bolshoi. This, and an earlier idea to write a King Lear for Fischer-Dieskau, are the chief casualties among Britten’s various aborted opera projects.
Both Fischer-Dieskau and Vishnevskaya were at least given their own song-cycles with piano. Britten wrote Songs and Proverbs of William Blake for Fischer-Dieskau on his return from India in March. It is a sombre, deeply serious work, more concerned with experience than with innocence, and showing how strongly Britten responded to the subversive side of Blake. The Poet’s Echo, settings of Pushkin in Russian, was written for Vishnevskaya while Britten and Pears were on their second long holiday, with the Rostropoviches, at a composers’ colony in Armenia in August. The echoes described in the first song are hauntingly evoked in heterophonic canons, and the opening rising seventh becomes the insistently ticking clock of the final song, ‘Lines written during a sleepless night’. When Britten and Pears gave an impromptu performance of the songs to Vishnevskaya, Rostropovich and the curators of the Pushkin estate museum at Mikhailovskoye, near Pskov, the clock outside struck midnight just as Britten was playing the final song. After it had finished all of them sat in spellbound silence.187
Back in Aldeburgh in October, Britten began writing The Burning Fiery Furnace, but he was not well again and made slow progress. He managed to finish the composition sketch by February 1966, then went into hospital to have an operation for diverticulitis, a disease of the colon. While convalescing he wrote a letter to Pears which shows their relationship still to be the central point of his life. His only other composition that year was The Golden Vanity, a ‘Vaudeville’ for boys’ voices and piano, written for the Vienna Boys’ Choir, a setting of a traditional ballad about a brave cabin boy who sinks a pirate ship and, having been promised a large reward, is left to drown by his heartless captain. Copland had set the same story for voice and piano in 1952, and Britten probably knew his version. Copland’s piece is more matter-of-fact; Britten exploits the pathos of this story of another doomed innocent.
Meanwhile, a major expansion of the Festival was in hand. Britten had long wanted to have a larger performing space. He had known the Maltings at Snape since he had lived in the Old Mill, and when in 1965 they were closed and buildings came up for rent, it was decided to turn one of them into a concert hall. Derek Sugden from the firm of Arup Associates – involved at the time with both the Sydney Opera House and the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London – was made responsible for the conversion, which was completed just in time for the opening of the 1967 Festival. On 2 June the Queen and Prince Philip came to lunch at the Red House and afterwards the Queen ceremonially opened the Maltings with a gold-plated key. Britten conducted the choir and the English Chamber Orchestra in his new version of the National Anthem (which began with a breathtaking pianissimo: it seems strange that no one had ever thought of this before, since the first verse is a prayer), a specially written overture, The Building of the House, and Delius’s Summer Night on the River. Imogen Holst then conducted her father’s St Paul’s Suite, and Britten finished the concert with Handel’s Ode for St Cecilia’s Day. The acoustics of the hall turned out to be perfect, the best of any concert hall in Britain. The Festival, which had been gradually getting longer, was this year extended from two to three weeks. The Jubilee Hall was not made redundant – the premiere of Walton’s Chekhov opera The Bear was given there – but the nature of the Festival inevitably changed with its being centred on the Maltings, and its old intimacy was lost, which some regretted.
After a lengthy recital tour with Pears in the autumn, which began in New York and went on to Mexico, through South America and right down to Chile, Britten was ready to start The Prodigal Son. He decided to rent the Palazzo Mocenigo in Venice again, where he had composed Curlew River. He wrote to Plomer on his return at the end of February: To be in a place where man can still dominate (even over the pigeons!) somehow gives one confidence again in one’s own capacity – machinery just has to take a back seat. I worked as almost never before, with the result that I’m about 3/4 done, & have a pretty clear idea of what’s to follow.188 But there was soon a setback. In March he was taken ill with what he first thought was ’flu but, when his symptoms became more serious and he had to go into a hospital in Ipswich, was diagnosed as endocarditis, a consequence of his impaired heart. In spite of this he managed to finish The Prodigal Son in time for the 1968 Festival. He wrote another commissioned piece in the autumn, The Children’s Crusade, a setting of a grim ballad by Brecht for children’s voices and percussion, for the 50th anniversary of the Save the Children Fund, for which he supplied an appropriately dark-hued and at times quite violent score. The percussion that usually evoked images of liberation for him is used here to express an oppressive militarism.
He followed this piece with what was to be his last song-cycle for Pears and himself, Who are these children?, to words by the Scottish poet William Soutar, who had died in 1943. Several of the poems allude to the Second World War: one in particular, ‘The Children’, describes children killed by an air-raid and is full of the sound of sirens. The last song, ‘The Auld Aik’, about the felling of an oak tree, is monumentally simple and sad.
In 1967 the BBC commissioned him to write a full-length opera for television, and much of 1969 and 1970 was taken up with writing it. He had wanted to set another Henry James ghost story, Owen Wingrave, since he read it at the time of The Turn of the Screw. He approached Myfanwy Piper again to write the libretto. Owen Wingrave is a young man, the last scion of a military family, whose pacifist convictions compel him to reject the army career his family had planned for him. His parents are dead and he has been brought up by his aunt and a terrifying grandfather, Sir Philip, a retired general. The latter, horrified when Owen tells them his decision, disinherits him; he is also rejected by his unyielding fiancée, Kate. She dares him to spend a night in a room in the family house haunted by the ghost of an ancestor who once killed his own young son in a fit of rage. Owen accepts, and is found dead the following morning. The arbitrary tragedy of his death, however, is subsidiary to the real point of the opera, which is Owen finding his true self and asserting his independence from the particular kind of repressive convention his family represents. In his climactic ‘peace’ aria in Act II he proclaims: ‘In peace I have found my image, / I have found myself’; ‘peace’ here does not stand simply for pacifism but for all the values Britten stood for, including the rightness of his own sexual choices. The music moves through a series of quiet triads, once again recalling the ‘interview’ music in Billy Budd; over these triads the percussion float a gamelan music that symbolises freedom and ideal beauty. Then, in a chillingly expressionistic passage, with brilliant use of Sprechstimme, Owen confronts the apparitions of the ancestor and his son and declares his victory over them. Kate appears and their anguished duet ends with her accusing Owen of cowardice; in reply, he enters the haunted room, to an exultant C major chord with added sixth over a bass G: a similar chord to those at the end of Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder and Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde – two ecstatic gestures of acceptance. It is one of the great moments in Britten’s music.
Britten had hardly started on Owen Wingrave when he had to overcome a wholly unexpected trauma: the Maltings burnt down as a result of an accidental fire on the first night of the 1969 Festival. The Festival continued nonetheless: only one event had to be cancelled, and the planned production of Mozart’s Idomeneo was transferred to Blythburgh Church. Britten was determined that the Maltings would be rebuilt by next year’s Festival, which it was. But the strain of these unexpected problems cannot have helped his increasingly precarious health. In February 1970 he and Pears bought a house just outside the village of Horham, 25 miles from Aldeburgh, in deepest Suffolk. He had for some while been troubled at the Red House by the sound of low-flying aircraft from the nearby American base at Bentwaters. Chapel House, Horham would now become his composing retreat, and he had a small studio built – similar to Mahler’s composing huts – at the bottom of the garden.
In March and April Britten and Pears visited Australia, where the EOG were performing the three church parables at the Adelaide Festival. After Adelaide Britten went with the painter Sidney Nolan and his wife Cynthia into the desert, which greatly impressed him: it is pretty forbidding, but the light & the heat & sand do wonderful things – the most vivid colours, strangest shapes, oddest effects,189 he wrote to the teenage pianist Ronan Magill, with whom he had recently formed a close friendship. Britten and Nolan talked of collaborating on a ballet on an Aboriginal theme, which sadly came to nothing.
After Owen Wingrave was finally completed in August 1970, he began to make plans for his next, and as it turned out, his last opera. It would be for Peter – the longest and most demanding role Britten was ever to write for him – and on a story that summed up many of his lifelong preoccupations: Death in Venice.