Life lines

Musical Times, Spring 2005 by Howard, Patricia

Life lines Britten on music Edited by Paul Kildea Oxford University Press (Oxford, 2003); xvi, 44#pp; £32. ISBN 0 19 816714 8.

Letters from a life: selected letters of Benjamin Britten, volume three: 1946-51 Edited by Donald Mitchell, Philip Reed & Mervyn Cooke Faber & Faber (London, 2004); xxvi, 758pp; £25. ISBN 0 571 22282 x.

The operas of Benjamin Britten: expression and evasion Claire Seymour The Boydell Press (Woodbridge, 2004); x, 358pp; £55, $99. ISBN 0 85115 865 x.

THE ARTIST'S JOB IS TO DO, not to talk about what he does' (Britten in 1962, in Britten on music, p.214). Artists, however, will talk whether or not it is their job to do so, and there is an irresistible fascination in hearing their authentic voices in a medium other than their chosen one. Paul Kildea has gathered together all Britten's published articles and programme notes, speeches and drafts, and transcribed interviews. The interest and quality of the content varies enormously from much-told anecdotes of the composer's childhood to valuable insights into the genesis of a work, especially into the collaboration of composer and librettist. (There is more - much more - on this in both Letters from a life and The operas of Benjamin Britten, leading me to suspect that there is available in published and unpublished sources, letters, annotated scripts and remembered conversations as full a documentation of this fascinating aspect of composition as exists for any opera composer in history.) Hobby-horses abound. Britten's attitude to the role of the composer in society gets full and frequent coverage, showing a consistent approach throughout his career, the only discernable development being a tailing off in his early enthusiasm for commissions. While in the 19405 and 19505 he relished 'being useful', 'serving the community" or 'working to order', by 1963 his response was more muted: 'As I get older I find working to a commission more and more irksome, and now I usually only accept one when it coincides with some already existing plan of my own' (On music, p.240). This change of heart is typical of the collection as a whole: the early writings have an air of soap-box preaching, the later comments stem more directly from the composer's own experience. The sunniest essay in the book is a script recovered from a BBC Talks for Sixth Forms (1946) on 'The artist and his medium'. No doubt the legacy of Reith and the genial aura of Uncle Mac informed the almost jolly presentation of serious facts, but this piece quite uncannily catches the composer's spoken voice as I remember it, and also reproduces the admirably direct diction and unpretentious honesty of his conversations with young people.

BOUQUETS and brickbats to other musicians form a substantial part of the book. There are tributes to a diverse range of admired composers (including Bridge, Schoenberg, Bliss and Tippett), to performers whose special gifts enriched Britten's own music (Dennis Brain and Cecil Aronowitz), to some of his librettists - especially his essay on EM Forster, which seems to me to be far and away his most cogent and able writing on literature - and to members of the team who made the Aldeburgh Festival possible. Such items reveal Britten to be more appreciative of the gifts of colleagues than has often appeared to be the case. His antipathy to critics dates from an early encounter, and Kildea gently points up the irrationality of his reaction. From a notice that (accurately) described his Three two-part songs (1932) as 'good from one who, I believe, is only 19; even though they were reminiscent in a quite peculiar degree of Walton's latest songs', Britten inferred an assessment that 'damned them entirely as being obvious copies of Wallon' (On music, p. 115). His misreading of this judgement nurtured a suspicion of criticism that intensified over the years, damaging that self-confidence which is essential to a creative artist. His hypersensitivity was reinforced by those around him. Pears showed a similar refusal to countenance adverse comments: Ernest Newman's telling and balanced criticism of The rape of Lucre tia, quoted at length in Letters from a life, was dismissed by Pears as 'simply puerile' (Letters, pp.214-17).

It is striking to note the extent to which Britten's opinions have been overtaken by developments in artistic thought and practice. Anyone today professing an uncritical acceptance of 'the canon' would be considered naïve, but Britten's comment, made in 1940, that 'the great European tradition [...] is nothing but centuries of experience of what people like to hear and what players like to play' (On music, p.27) is a reminder that it is only recently that its authority has been questioned. More interesting still, we discover him reaching out towards historicallyinformed performances, barely embryonic in the 19605. It is hard to imagine that his criticisms of Beethoven, expressed in 1963 as 'what galled me was the crudity of sound; the orchestral sounds seem often so haphazard' (On music, p.228), would not have been swept away by hearing a good periodinstrument orchestra. His dissatisfaction with a performance of the St Matthew Passion makes the point even more clearly: 'written for a small group of young singers (half of them boys) in a smallish Gothic church - how can we recapture its original edgy resonance across the spaces of the damp (acoustically) Festival Hall with a large chorus, mature and expressive soloists (half of them women) - to say nothing of the pitch having crept up nearly half a tone, and with a paying audience rather than a worshipping congregation?' (On music, p.237). The increasing rarity of such performances (and frequency of alternative presentations) are almost enough to make one believe in progress!