Life lines

Musical Times, Spring 2005 by Howard, Patricia

The sheer charm of the letters is a constant delight and will persuade many of the genial sincerity of one notorious for his sometimes capricious treatment of friends, strained and even estranged relations with colleagues (especially librettists), and unmoveably closed mind towards those he perceived as his enemies (mostly critics). The letters to Pears are achingly tender, and there is an engaging honesty and spontaneity in all his communications. There is even rare written evidence of Britten's wit, notably in his suggestions for contributions to a planned edition of Opera magazine commemorating Verdi, for which Britten's tongue-in-cheek titles were: 'Verdi [...] "My experiences of "-by R. V. W.; "my study of" - by L. Berkeley; my "stealing from" - by A. Bliss; the "social significance" of - by Bush; "the psychological importance of" - by Tippett; "my abject humility in front of" - by self (Letters, pp.623-24). Page after page yields similar unsuspected revelations, but the rewards of this volume are due as much to the exhaustive annotations and supplementary documents as they are to the intrinsic interest of the original letters.

BOTH Kildea and Mitchell contain warnings about books which, like Claire Seymour's, aim to detect witting or unwitting personal revelations in the music. Kildea quotes from a BBC Today programme interview in August 2001 in which Philip Hensher claimed that Britten's popularity depended on the ideas behind the music rather than the music itself: 'What people are really listening to is the sentiment and not actually the quality of the music' (On music, p.i). Coming at the same issue from another angle, Mitchell argues 'the necessity to maintain a distance between the life and the work and not, absolutely not, to mistake one for the other' (Letters, p.6). It is, of course, difficult to discuss opera without engaging with the ideas behind the plots; and operas that focus so repeatedly on overt or concealed sexual motivation beg to be explained in terms of the composer's life, not to mention the lives of both the librettist and the author of the literary original. Many readers will identify with Colin Matthews who, when confronted with Britten's rejection as 'absolute rubbish' the proposition that all his operas were concerned with the loss of innocence, 'regretted ever since that [he] didn't have the courage to say, "Well, what are they about, then?" ' (Operas, p.317). Seymour sees no reason to apologise for dealing with 'the ideas behind the music', finding loss-of-innocence themes in every text. And she deliberately brings together life and work by investigating how far Britten's 'public voice' in the operas resolved his 'private beliefs and anxieties'.

Pace Kildea and Mitchell, there is something here worth exploring. If there is a problem with the public voicing of Britten's private concerns and anxieties, it lies in the distorting nature of some of Pears's roles. Britten's enduring love affair with Pears's voice muddies the bleak drama of Peter Grimes by heaping musical riches on a brutal misfit, seducing the listener into giving him a sympathetic hearing and the benefit of all kinds of serious doubt because of the literally spell-binding magic of the 'Great Bear' aria. The same sort of entrancing vocal beauty makes it difficult for us entirely to believe in the evil of Peter Quint (The turn of the screw), and impossible to judge Vere (Billy BuJa) as the moral coward he undoubtedly is. Yet it is absolutely necessary that the audience acknowledge Grimes as a danger to his apprentices, Quint as destructive of both adult and childhood innocence, and Vere as failing Billy, truth and justice. As far as these three operas are concerned, the public and private voices do not coincide: Britten's personal preoccupations get in the way of doing justice to the literary originals - though I'd be the first to argue that this is a price worth paying for such glorious music. But this is true for only a minority of Britten's operas. Those with a less dominant role for Pears - notably Gloriana, A midsummer night's dream, and Owen Wmgrave - are quite free of dramatic distortion. And by the time he came to write Death in Venice, Britten had resolved the tension between vocal expression and dramatic role. The music he wrote ior Pears fits Aschenbach like a glove, with no special vocal pleading to glamorise the humiliating lust of the ageing writer (it is the youth Tadzio who has the seductive music, though the seduction operates through instrumental rather than vocal timbres). Significantly, this opera explores self-knowledge (and self-destruction) rather than the corruption of others.