7. Further travels, 1963–9.

Britten's 50th birthday year was marked by a number of events, including a visit to Moscow, a book of tributes from friends (Gishford, C1963), a Prom concert (12 September 1963) at which he conducted the Sinfonia da Requiem, the Spring Symphony and the first performance in Britain of Cantata misericordium, and on the birthday itself a concert performance of Gloriana. In a public tribute Hans Keller proclaimed him ‘the greatest composer alive’, greater even than Stravinsky (Music and Musicians, xii/3, 1963–4, p.13). There was another side to this institutionalization. Musical taste in Britain, long starved of avant-garde stimulation, insulated even from modernism, was now moving on owing to radical changes by the new BBC Controller of Music, William Glock, and a new generation of composers such as Peter Maxwell Davies, Harrison Birtwistle and Cornelius Cardew. The general audience was as usual accepting of merely a few pieces that had crept into the repertory, a situation exacerbated rather than relieved by the success of the War Requiem. Having worked to gain the position that Vaughan Williams had held, Britten was made doubly insecure by the isolation of preeminence. Accordingly he set out on new paths somewhat unheralded.

First came a return to the grand, purely orchestral statement not heard from him since Sinfonia da Requiem. The Symphony for Cello and Orchestra, completed early in May 1963, was part of the series of works for Rostropovich. Referred to by its composer during composition as a sinfonia concertante, it proceeds, in spite of the opening dark flourishes that appear to herald a conventional concerto arrangement, as a discourse between equal forces, the soloist democratically exchanging roles with the orchestral basses at the recapitulation of the extensive and regularly proportioned sonata-form first movement. The dark, furtive-sounding Scherzo is followed by an Adagio that connects to the last movement and is strongly related to it. The year closed with a more intimate instrumental work, Nocturnal after John Dowland, for Julian Bream, whose interpretations of Dowland songs with Pears had become justly celebrated. Writing for the virtuoso guitar rather than the accompanimental lute, and adopting the strategy of the earlier Lachrymae, Britten allows the theme, the song Come, heavy sleep, to emerge in Dowland's own accompaniment only after eight insomniac variations (the last a ground-bass treatment of a detail from Dowland's accompaniment) have succeeded each other without ever achieving the final repetition of the second strain, whose curtailed presentation lends a witty and moving air to the conclusion.

Meanwhile, there was the long-postponed Sumidagawa to face. For the purpose, Britten, Pears and entourage (Graham as stage director and Holst as amanuensis) took an unusual six-week working vacation in Venice. The conception belonged to the visit to Japan eight years earlier, when Plomer had recommended that Britten see all forms of Japanese theatre, but particularly the nō. Although his initial reaction was of embarrassed amusement at the stylized acting, he soon became entranced by the story of a distraught mother searching for her lost child, went to see it again, and procured a translation of the Sumidagawa of the early 15th-century dramatist Jūrō Motomasa. He later visited the kabuki theatre, enjoyed shamisen songs at a geisha evening and heard the gagaku orchestra whose sounds were to reverberate in Curlew River. The principal nō characteristic of limiting expressivity in acting and presentation in search of a more profound underlying truth that springs from its stylization resonated with Britten's own training, and its all-male cast appealed to a gender identification intensified by upbringing and sexual orientation. Plomer and Britten initially planned an operatic translation of the original, presumably with musical imitation (‘oh, to find some equivalent to those extraordinary noises the Japanese musicians made!’: Cooke, D1998, p.141). In April 1959, however, came a change of heart: not a nō pastiche (‘which, however well done, would seem false and thin’) but a medieval church drama set in pre-conquest East Anglia. It was to be a Christian work, with ‘Kyrie eleison’ replacing ‘Amida Buddha’: in 1963 Britten finally identified himself as ‘a dedicated Christian’ (see Carpenter, 421)

In Curlew River Britten made a radical attempt to return Western music to its melodic origins (before the disease of harmony germed, as it were). A plainchant hymn, Te lucis ante terminum, provides the melodic fount (and, typically, the outer frame), its intervals extended to include the augmented 4th for the cry of the curlew and of the protesting Madwoman. The resonant acoustic works with the plainchant-inspired lines, already blurred by the heterophonic technique, emphasized here to a new degree, to create a new kind of ‘harmony’ more like the bright but kaleidoscopic hues of stained glass, with similar iridescence. Characterization is by single instrumental colours – the Ferryman his active horn, the Traveller a double-stopped double bass, the Madwoman a flute, imitating her extraordinary vocal line with its heavy portamento. The organ (imitating the shō) pours cold water on the ensemble; the harp injects its prismatic detail; and the percussion suggests otherness, whether exotic or historical. A disciplined ensemble of actor-singers and instrumentalists in monks' habits – three of them assuming the masks of the main characters in a ritual robing – performs, without conductor, from a score with special notational features to promote synchronization. The audience is mesmerized by an hour's-worth of radical renovation which opens out into time unaccounted for or differently measured. It is a ‘parable’ about various Christian themes – charity, the afterlife – but the focus is on the visionary Madwoman, one of Britten's few really sympathetic portrayals of women, sung by Pears in the original.

1964 was marked by other innovations in Britten's life. He parted company with his longtime publishers, Boosey & Hawkes; the literary publishers Faber & Faber founded Faber Music for him, with Donald Mitchell its head. Rosamund Strode entered the Aldeburgh household as Britten's music assistant, replacing her friend and mentor Imogen Holst (who continued to be involved with the festival). In July Britten flew to Colorado to receive the first Aspen Award for an outstanding contribution to ‘the advancement of the humanities’. In his acceptance speech, later published, he encapsulated his views about the relation of the composer to society, and about his own needs. ‘I want my music to be of use to people, to please them … my music now has its roots, in where I live and work. And I only came to realise that in California in 1941’ (Britten, 1964, pp.21–2). Later in the year, Britten reported to Plomer that his doctors had ordered rest, and that he and Pears would take 1965 off, beginning with a lengthy trip to India with the Hesses. He nevertheless composed the first of the three cello suites before the New Year (having earlier written cadenzas to Haydn's Cello Concerto in C for Rostropovich). Soon after his return from India, in March, he was awarded the Order of Merit (in place of T.S. Eliot who had recently died); this was the highest possible British honour (Vaughan Williams was the last musician to belong among the 24 most eminent living citizens personally appointed by the queen).

Composition continued in the ‘sabbatical’ year. The Indian holiday saw the completion of Gemini Variations, 12 variations and a fugue on a theme by Kodály written for Hungarian prodigy twins, Zoltán and Gabriel Jeney, who between them covered the flute, violin and piano and could accordingly change instruments between variations and during the final fugue. The following month produced a work in complete contrast – the bleak Songs and Proverbs of William Blake, inspired by Fischer-Dieskau's darkly coloured voice and extraordinary musicianship as well as Britten's most personal concerns. The cycle, a continuous one, interleaves a ritornello-like setting of the seven proverbs with seven songs that paint an increasingly sombre picture of human existence. Musically, the construction depends on a 12-note series arranged in three four-note segments, and only achieved as a melodic statement by the voice in Proverb VII to suitable words: ‘To see the World in a grain of sand’. Most remarkable is the powerful setting of Blake's insight into the processing of anger, A Poison Tree. Britten, who must surely have known the truth of Blake's words while spectacularly failing to act on them, at least in the Aldeburgh situation, uses a 12-note vocal melody closely related to the original set. It comes readily enough round to a cadence on E minor on its return to the first note in the initial ‘healthy’ statement (‘I told my wrath, my wrath did end’), but then develops, with the help of inversion in the bass line (symbolizing the internalization process), into a terrifyingly effective and highly dissonant contrapuntal build-up ending in the hollow chordal triumph (over the inevitable E pedal) of the death of the foe. There is no mild consolation of the kind offered in Winter Words in the prospect of, or longing for, nescience. The all-too-knowing subject is revealed in full frailty – a portrait (from a composer so often connected merely with ‘innocence’) all the more remarkable for its unblinking honesty and bleak integrity.

At another point in the ‘sabbatical’, Britten was tempted by a commission into writing a didactic work celebrating the 20th anniversary of the United Nations – it was performed in New York, Paris and London on the very day, 24 October 1965. Voices for Today is an unaccompanied choral work (with ad libitum organ part) for large mixed chorus with a smaller chorus of boys, or boys and girls. It begins sententiously though quietly with an anthology of positive thoughts from the world's great thinkers and poets – all of them noticeably male – before opening out into a setting of Virgil's fourth Eclogue. Shorn of its pagan specifics this becomes an address to a Christ-like boy figure, the harbinger of a new pastoral life of plenty and peace. So much high-mindedness somehow dampened the musical response. A more robust expression of Britten's musical character comes out in the Pushkin cycle, The Poet's Echo, written for the excitingly dramatic voice of Galina Vishnevskaya and first performed by her on 2 December 1965 with Rostropovich accompanying.

Britten had written to Plomer about an idea for ‘another opera in the same style’ less than a month after Curlew River's first performance. The Burning Fiery Furnace predictably replaced Japanese sources with story from the book of Daniel. Three young Israelites, Ananias, Misael and Azarias, attempt to deal with the favours and demands of Nebuchadnezzar and the jealousy of his astrologer and people. A crisis around naming (the trio are forced to accept the Babylonian names Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego) makes this a parable of identity and difference. The luxury of Babylon, indicated by the dancing boys' ‘cabaret’ as well as the increased opulence of the scoring, can be understood as a reflection of the ‘never-had-it-so-good’ Britain of the Macmillan era and its anti-Semitism related to the growing anti-immigrant racism of the time. The identity politics may obliquely refer to the ‘coming out’ process for the homosexual (Hindley, E1992), but it is quite likely that Britten himself supported the literal Christian parable of faith. He devised a charmingly literal pun by emphasizing the interval of the 4th to mirror the appearance of the fourth figure in the furnace, the Angel (many such felicities are detailed by Evans, C1979, pp.480–89). The score is a little slow to get off the ground but reaches a cold and sinister brilliance with the march and hymn in praise of the heathen idol, answered by the four cool voices from the furnace. The extra brass and percussion, with more extrovert musical gestures (the alto trombone's brazen portamentos), effect the move to the Middle East from the Far East of the dramatic form, a collapsing of distinctions characteristic of orientalism.

Two fairly slight works intervened before the third and final church parable. The Golden Vanity, a ‘vaudeville’ with a libretto by Colin Graham, the dedicated stage director of the church operas, takes a folksong (one Vaughan Williams himself had set) as the basis for what has been described as a children's Billy Budd owing to the relation between the perfidious sea captain and his gallant cabin boy. It was written (in August 1966) for the Vienna Boys' Choir, who performed it at the 1967 Aldeburgh Festival. Hankin Booby is a salty little folk dance for wind and drums, originally written for the opening concert of the Queen Elizabeth Hall, London, and later incorporated into the Suite on English Folk Tunes. But a concert hall closer to home occupied much energy during this period. The Maltings at Snape had been discovered by Stephen Reiss, manager of the festival, as an available space to improve on the now-outgrown Aldeburgh facilities. The way Britten threw himself into this project, cajoling and demanding by turns, shows not only how much he wanted to be able to mount his larger works, both instrumental and operatic, at the festival but also how very seriously he took himself and his position in British culture by this time (Carpenter, 454–8, 468–70, 472–5). The Maltings concert hall was opened on 2 June 1967 by the Queen, and the initial concert included Britten's arrangement of the national anthem and his specially composed overture, The Building of the House, with its (optional) choral setting of the Elizabethan metrical version of Psalm cxxvii, ‘Except the Lord the house doth make’. The Cello Suite no.2 occupied Britten during the summer.

The Prodigal Son is the least immediately appealing of the church parable triptych, but inside its purposely reticent interior is a significant return to the issues of patriarchy and authority. By assigning the viola to the title figure, moreover, the composer indicated his personal identification. A warm baritone Father, lyrically extolling the virtues of husbandry with Britten's favourite alto flute as accompaniment, signals a reconciliation with the patriarchy that is as unexpected dramatically as the rooted B triads are musically unusual in the melodically orientated music of the church parables. But an interpretation at one level leads to a contradiction at the next. The frame is broken by the Abbot's being in mufti and notably failing to present his religious credentials (‘you people … do not think I bid you kneel and pray’); he is a home wrecker (‘see how I break it up’) who insinuates himself as the alter ego of the younger son. The similarity with Quint has often been noted. The temptations (of wine, the flesh and gambling) are cleverly presented by a distant boys' choir – Britten's own idea – so that the Tempter can mediate them in extraordinary Sprechstimme with glissando harmonics on the double bass. That these temptations are not too musically alluring should not be surprising: Britten's idea of sin can never have involved bars, bath-houses, casinos or other material delights. No wonder they are overshadowed by the accelerating march home, in which the various instrumental strands suggest the coming together of a fragmented existence, ending in the radiant B of the father's acceptance. But the listener is also left to wonder if those B chords are not too restricting and binding, as alien as the Tempter himself. Auden's warning to Britten about the dangers of building a warm nest of love for himself seems appropriate to invoke.

On returning in February 1968 from Venice, where much of the opera was completed, Britten contracted infective endocarditis, which postponed its completion until April. The Maltings enabled the festival to be extended, and after the summer performances Britten settled down to recording projects there, including Schubert songs with Pears, the Brandenburg concertos, English string music and two LPs of Percy Grainger, culminating in early 1969 with a televised Peter Grimes. During the same period he wrote Children's Crusade for the 50th anniversary of the Save the Children Fund. The down-to-earth style and impersonal tone of Brecht's Kinderkreuzzug, a ballad about the death of a wandering band of children in the war-torn Poland of 1939, allowed Britten's anger to surface. The manipulations of a 12-note row appear to symbolize, here as elsewhere, the dying civilization of Europe, reflected through the fate of the children and their dog, whose death ends ‘a very grisly piece’ (as Britten himself called it) on an unsentimental note. This was shortly succeeded by one of the grimmest of the song cycles, Who are these Children?. The 12 songs are settings of ‘lyrics, rhymes and riddles’ by William Soutar (1898–1943), the caustic Scottish invalid poet. The riddles and rhymes in Scottish dialect, portraying the relatively carefree life of the ‘natural’ boy, as it were, are interleaved with settings of English poems depicting the cruelty of modern civilization in terms of irony and sheer pain. Commentators have invoked the Donne Sonnets to characterize the relentless accompanimental figuration of Slaughter; the background to the title song is a 1941 photograph of children in a bombed village staring uncomprehendingly at a fox-hunting party riding through; and the actual pitches of the wartime air-raid siren are used as an ostinato in The Children, a poem written in response to bombing in the Spanish Civil War (Johnson, in Palmer, D1984, p.305). The last song, to a dialect poem about the feeling of an oak, brings to reality in the ‘natural’ cycle the foreboding of the first ‘English’ poem, ‘Nightmare’. It is an uncompromising vision ending with the much-repeated word ‘doun’ (signifying ‘the end of everything’, Britten told Johnson). Some relief came between these works in the lucid C major music Britten composed for one of his favourite instruments and performers: the Suite for Harp was the first of a number of pieces for Osian Ellis, a valued collaborator and alternative accompanist for Pears, and its final variations on the Welsh hymn tune ‘Saint Denio’ constitute a special compliment to his and the harp's nationality.

The decade ended in flames with the dramatic conflagration of the Maltings concert hall on the first night of the festival, Saturday 7 June 1969. Britten's calm and practical nature excelled in such circumstances, and his leadership ensured that the festival programme continued. Served by an able administration and local builders, rebuilding with improvements forged ahead in time for the 1970 festival. There were other less flammable but perhaps more indicative disappointments about the decade. Two shelved opera projects that came to a head between 1963 and 1965, King Lear and Anna Karenina, both scotched because of premature press reports, show that Britten was beginning to accept his limitations. In returning to social protest in connection with boyhood at the end of the 1960s, he was all but announcing that his obsessions were what made him function. He could not entirely adopt the ‘universal’ voice expected of the ‘classical music’ composer, however much he had tried in the War Requiem to do so. To his credit he knew that, but could not be absolutely explicit about his private obsessions to the extent of their losing resonance for other human beings of his class and culture.

Britten, Benjamin