3. North America, 1939–42.

Britten left for North America in April 1939. There were many reasons for him to try his hand abroad: the growing cloud of fascism over Europe; the plight of pacifists in the war that seemed inevitable; the departure of Auden and Isherwood in January; the frantic pace of his career and the need to determine his own direction; discouragement from patronizing or hostile reviews (to which the thin-skinned composer had already begun to show sensitivity); the opening up of new opportunities; and the curtailing of difficult emotional and sexual situations from which, from his letters, he appears to be trying to rescue himself – with Scherchen, Berkeley and perhaps others. The way was now clear for a commitment to Pears, and the union of the two men took place early in the visit, which began in Canada. After a trip to New York, they visited Copland at Woodstock in the Catskills and rented accommodation there for part of the summer. They then went to Amityville on Long Island to visit Pears's friend Elizabeth Mayer, who accommodated them and also provided a surrogate mother for Britten.

The music of Britten's American years reflects his emotional turmoil. Young Apollo, written in summer 1939 for a CBC broadcast with the composer as piano soloist, was inspired not only by the last lines of Keats's Hyperion but also by Scherchen; originally designated op.16, it was withdrawn and not heard again until after Britten died, either because of the personal association, or (more likely) because of its dependence, musically, on an elaboration of the A major triad, a kind of musical minimalism that was not the order of the day. Les illuminations, completed in October, presents a fuller and more complicated picture of (homo)eroticism, focussed on the inevitably confused subject who ‘alone holds the key to this savage parade’. It incorporates a typical double focus on the major triads on B and E which is used not only to sustain ambiguity over long musical stretches but also (as in the opening fanfare) to express simultaneously exhilaration and confusion. Whatever one makes of the dedication of Antique to Scherchen and Being Beauteous to Pears, or of the direct sexual imagery with which the latter ends, or indeed the cruising depicted in Parade (its theme taken from the abortive Go play, boy, play suite), it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the piece as a whole encapsulates a certain hard-won victory over the distancing effect from the purely corporeal to which British middle-class education was dedicated. It joyously and unashamedly reclaims music as an immediate, physical act. It is ironic that the decade of technical struggle towards professionalism should have led to the moment at the end of Phrase, after the transfigured exclamation ‘et je danse’ on a top B , where the string orchestra turns into a giant guitar to accompany a delirious diatonic melody supported by root position major chords. Copland – surely the ‘older American composer’ who said of Antique that he ‘did not know how Britten dared to write the melody’ – was shocked; even Pears labelled this incandescent work ‘a trifle too pat’ (Mitchell and Keller, D1952, pp.65–6): it is difficult to trust erotic joy on hearing it (at least, when it is unclouded by chromaticism), and musical solutions of personal problems are suspect. It is for reasons like this that one can see the Britten of this period castigated by friends and enemies alike for being too ‘clever’ and why even Copland ‘picked certain things in Ben to pieces’, as Colin McPhee put it, adding that ‘he must search deeper for a more personal, more interesting idiom … good craftsmanship is not enough’ (Brett, E1994, p.237).

The Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo, completed almost exactly a year later and written for and dedicated to Pears, can be taken as a further gesture towards this reclamation of the physical (as before, through another language and culture) and the official inception of their partnership. Among the other works, Sinfonia da Requiem, ‘combining my ideas on war & a memorial for Mum & Pop’ (Letters, 803), is a culmination of much of the earlier symphonically conceived music and is characteristic of later works in combining personal and social concerns. The Japanese government, who paid for it, would not perform it at the festival celebrating their empire's 2600th anniversary; one can only wonder at Britten's naivety in accepting the commission.

1939–42 was a prolific period, for Britten also completed the Violin Concerto in the summer and autumn of 1939 when Britain declared war. The work opens in a suitably foreboding manner and ends in melancholy and nostalgia – so different from the ebullient Piano Concerto of little more than a year earlier. There was also the rather homespun Canadian Carnival, a Sonatina romantica to wean a keen amateur pianist host from Weber, Diversions for piano (left hand) and orchestra, two two-piano works, a second Rossini suite, to be used by Balanchine in a work for Lincoln Kirstein's American Ballet Company, String Quartet no.1 and the eccentric-sounding Scottish Ballad for two pianos and orchestra. Among works completed early in the visit, besides the Violin Concerto and incidental music for a further BBC play, was a setting of seven poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, intended for Pears's Round Table Singers, but abandoned. In late 1941 came another occasional piece (now called An American Overture) heavily indebted to Copland and written for Rodzinski and the Cleveland Orchestra; when it came to light in the early 1970s, Britten commented that his ‘recollection of that time was of complete incapacity to work; my only achievements being a few Folk-song arrangements and some realisations of Henry Purcell’ (Letters, 985).

One important project of the American period, Paul Bunyan, was also one of its most problematic, a patronizing attempt by W.H. Auden to evoke the spirit of a nation not his own in which Britten was a somewhat dazzled accomplice – he was vague about the nature of the title role's manifestation and staging only six months before it opened. A bruising response from ‘old stinker Virgil Thompson’ [sic] and the other New York critics did not help matters. The work was withdrawn and reinstated as op.17 only when Britten took it up near the end of his life (a good overture, wisely abandoned as too long, was subsequently orchestrated and published). The composition and production of Bunyan involved Britten and Pears in exchanging the luxury of the Mayer Long Island household for Auden's louche and alcoholic lifestyle in a Brooklyn Heights villa; from this bohemian atmosphere they fled soon after the production of Bunyan at Columbia University in May 1941. They took up an invitation to stay with the duo pianists Rae Robertson and his wife Ethel Bartlett at Escondido in California (where the Scottish Ballad, dedicated to them, was mostly written); there they came across the radio talk by E.M. Forster printed in The Listener that began: ‘To talk about Crabbe is to talk about England’. Dissatisfaction with American life had already surfaced in Britten's letters (‘the country has all the faults of Europe and none of its attractions’, he wrote to a friend: Letters, 797), as well as in one of those illnesses that often signalled his dissociation from his surroundings. Forster's article served as a catalyst to initiate the next stage in Britten's progress.

The flight to North America had enabled Britten to find out more about himself in general, to mature as an artist and person, and to find a certain level of acceptance among others and, more important, in himself about his sexual orientation (although many people recall continuing signs of shame). It had also given him an opportunity to reflect on his direction. The epiphany brought about by Forster's article not only sent him and Pears to Crabbe for the extraordinary subject of his first real opera but also may have given him the idea that if he did return it should be with the intention of becoming the central ‘classical music’ figure in Britain (as Copland was struggling to do in the far more diffuse culture of the USA).

Whether or not this was a fully conscious process, Britten began to define his relation to the British musical tradition during the American years. There was, for example, the need to release aggression towards it, palpable in the 1941 essay ‘England and the Folk-Art Problem’, a statement so angry that it studiously avoids mentioning Vaughan Williams or Holst; Parry and Elgar are projected as the binary opposition haunting English composition, the one favouring ‘the amateur idea and … folk-art’, the other somewhat surprisingly seen as emphasizing ‘the importance of technical efficiency and [welcoming] any foreign influences that can be profitably assimilated’. The authenticity of folksong is intelligently attacked, and composers' dependence on it as raw material is deemed either unsatisfactory or the sign of a need for discipline which the second rate cannot find in themselves. Actual English folktunes are allowed a certain ‘quiet, uneventful charm’ but ‘seldom have any striking rhythms or memorable melodic features’. Yet the ambivalence, reflected in so many aspects of his life, did not prevent Britten from making a considerable investment in arranging them – ostensibly for himself and Pears to perform, though as time went on and volume after volume succeeded the first (printed in 1943) ulterior motives might be suspected. They gave Britten the chance, for example, to declare his independence from the ‘Pastoral School’ by conceiving the exercise of arrangement very differently. Unlike Cecil Sharp and Vaughan Williams, who assigned an idealized, essential artistic quality to the melodies which their accompaniments were thought to reflect, Britten recognized that the venue changed the genre and turned them in effect into lieder or art-song, and proceeded brilliantly on that premise. To see how far he got one should turn from the easy seductiveness of The Salley Gardens and the psychological perceptiveness of The Ash Grove to the exquisite and exhilarating settings of Moore's Irish Melodies published in 1957.

Equally important in this redefinition of himself are Britten's ‘realizations’ of the music of Purcell and his contemporaries – the Tudor composers (except for Dowland) were out of bounds because of their adoption by Vaughan Williams and the pastoralists. Two song arrangements date from at least 1939, several were done in the USA, and a much larger number were prompted by the 1945 celebrations of the 250th anniversary of Purcell's death. The choice was in tune with Britten's aesthetic as an aspiring dramatic composer: he had already adopted a rhetorical style far beyond the parameters of contemporary English songwriters with their devotion to speech-rhythm, and was later in the booklet accompanying Peter Grimes to make a manifesto-like statement about restoring ‘to the musical setting of the English language a brilliance, freedom and vitality that have been curiously rare since the death of Purcell’ (Brett, E1983, p.149). The results are not so easy to assess as the folksong arrangements. Partly it is a matter of culture and epoch: ‘realization’, prevalent up to the 1950s, became extinct in the light of understanding of the appropriate delivery of 17th-century song. To historically informed taste, Britten's contribution appears to vie for attention with Purcell's melodies or declamatory gestures, and the bifocal effect inevitably becomes distracting. Britten is at his best when Purcell's music is at its strangest: Saul and the Witch at Endor, for instance, is inspired in its use of piano sonorities to re-compose the work. The character and extent of these pieces (which number 40, far greater than the demand for mere recital fodder) raise another issue, however, about whether the process is more to do with appropriation or competition than homage, not a simple musical act enabling Purcell to be ‘heard’ but rather another Oedipal episode in Britten’s complicated trajectory.

With a relation to indigenous and historical music more clearly defined, one further element of the British tradition demanded attention. As if to think of England were to think of choral music, on the journey home Britten wrote two substantial pieces, the unaccompanied Hymn to Saint Cecilia and A Ceremony of Carols for boys' voices and harp. These pieces combine a secure technique and an exquisite sound palette, a modernistic coolness in expression with a plentiful supply of emotional intensity, a musical language distinguished at once by its pronounced character as well as its restraint: all the marks of a classicism that cannot easily be discerned in earlier British music of the century.

Britten, Benjamin