The Rest Is Noise Series: “Grimes! Grimes!”: The Passion of Benjamin Britten

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“GRIMES! GRIMES!”

The Passion of Benjamin Britten

Aldeburgh is a windswept fishing town on the east coast of the British Isles. “A bleak little place; not beautiful,” the novelist E. M. Forster called it. He went on: “It huddles around a flint-towered church and sprawls down to the North Sea—and what a wallop the sea makes as it pounds at the shingle! Near by is a quay, at the side of an estuary, and here the scenery becomes melancholy and flat; expanses of mud, saltish commons, the marsh-birds crying.”

Some decades later, the great German writer W. G. Sebald fell even more deeply in love with the oblique charms of Aldeburgh and neighboring villages, and devoted his book The Rings of Saturn to the geography and history of the region. “I had not a single thought in my head,” Sebald wrote, describing one of his walks across the flats. “With each step that I took, the emptiness within and the emptiness without grew ever greater and the silence more profound .. . I imagined myself amidst the remains of our own civilization after its extinction in some future catastrophe.”

There are ruins all around Aldeburgh. At Dunwich, a few miles up the coast from Aldeburgh, an entire medieval town has slid into the sea. Around Orford, to the south, the landscape is dotted with relics of two world wars and the Cold War that followed—gun em-placements, designed to impede a Nazi invasion that never came; radar masts, employing the technology invented by researchers in nearby Bawdsey Manor; Atomic Weapons Establishment facilities, looking like skeletons of palaces. When the weather changes, these wide-open vistas of sea and sky, with their stone and metal memories of the past, can have a somewhat terrifying effect. A mass of black cloud rears up behind a sunlit scene; the sea turns a dull, menacing green; an abandoned house groans in the wind. Then, in the next second, the light changes. The water assumes an iridescent color, as if lit from within. Anonymous jewels sparkle in the beach. The sun appears under the ceiling of cloud and floods the world.

In the Aldeburgh churchyard lies Benjamin Britten. He was born thirty miles up the coast, in Lowestoft, in 1913. His childhood home looked over the beach to the North Sea, or the German Ocean, as it was called before the First World War.

Britten lived for most of his life in the Aldeburgh area, and he once stated that all his music came from there. “I believe in roots, in associations, in backgrounds, in personal relationships,” he said in a speech in Aspen, Colorado, in 1964. “I want my music to be of use to people, to please them .. . I do not write for posterity.” Britten designed many of his pieces for performance in Aldeburgh’s Jubilee Hall and in churches around the area. In 1948, with his companion, the tenor Peter Pears, and the writer-director Eric Crozier, he founded the Aldeburgh Festival, which featured his own music, contemporary works from Europe and America, and favorite repertory of the past; it was a kind of anti-Bayreuth, as intimate as Wagner’s festival was grandiose.

Above all, Britten wrote Peter Grimes, an opera of staggering dramatic force that is soaked in Aldeburgh to its bones. First heard in June 1945, one month after the end of the European war, it tells of a fisherman who causes the death of his apprentices and loses his mind from guilt. The story comes from the poet George Crabbe, who grew up in Aldeburgh in the later eighteenth century, and apparently based the character of Grimes on a real-life case. Crabbe described the estuaries thus:

The dark warm flood ran silently and slow; There anchoring, Peter chose from man to hide, There hang his head, and view the lazy tide In its hot slimy channel slowly glide . . . Here dull and hopeless he’d lie down and trace How sidelong crabs had scrawl’d their crooked race; Or sadly listen to the tuneless cry Of fishing gull or clanging golden-eye . . .

The first orchestral interlude in Britten’s opera brings the coast to life. High grace notes mimic the cries of birds; rainbowlike arpeggios imitate the play of light on the water; booming brass chords approximate the thudding of the waves. It is rich, expansive music, recalling Debussy’s La Mer and Mahler’s more pantheistic moods. Yet it hardly ravishes the senses: the orchestration is spare, the melodic figures are sharply turned, the plain harmonies flecked with dissonance. The music is poised perfectly between the familiar and the strange, the pictorial and the psychological. Like the tone poems of Sibelius, it gives shape to what a wanderer feels as he walks alone.

In his Aspen speech Britten provocatively compared the regimentation of culture in totalitarian states to the self-imposed regimentation of the avant-garde in democratic countries. Any ideological organization of music, he said, distorts a composer’s natural voice, his “gift and personality.” Everything about Britten’s style—his deliberate parochialism, his tonal orientation, his preference for classical forms—went against the grain of the postwar era. Luminaries of the avant-garde made a point of snubbing him; at the Dartington Summer School in 1959, Luigi Nono refused to shake his hand. Much else about Britten was at odds with Cold War social norms: his pacifism, his leftism, and especially his homosexuality.

Nonetheless, Britten succeeded in becoming a respected national figure, a focus of British pride. He was a little like Sibelius, a lonely, troubled man who became a patriotic icon. Even closer in temperament was Dmitri Shostakovich, whom Britten got to know in the 1960s. Despite the language barrier, the two composers formed a lasting bond. What they had in common was the ability to write elusive emotions across the surface of their music. Britten made his inner landscape as vivid as the rumble of the sea, the cries of the gulls, and the scuttling of the crabs.

Young Britten

Homosexual men, who make up approximately 3 to 5 percent of the general population, have played a disproportionately large role in composition of the last hundred years. Somewhere around half of the major American composers of the twentieth century seem to have been homosexual or bisexual: Copland, Thomson, Bernstein, Barber, Blitzstein, Cage, Harry Partch, Henry Cowell, Lou Harrison, Gian Carlo Menotti, David Diamond, and Ned Rorem, among many others. In Britain, too, the art of composition skewed gay. The two young composers who seized the spotlight in the early postwar era were Britten and Michael Tippett, neither of whom made an effort to hide his homosexuality.

The nexus of classical music and gay culture goes back at least to the final years of the nineteenth century, when aesthetes of the Oscar Wilde type gathered at Wagner nights in London and wore green carnations in their lapels. “Is he musical?” gay men would ask of an unfamiliar newcomer. As the century went on, conservatories and concert halls filled up with introverted boys who had trouble fitting in with their fellows. Classical music appealed to some gay youngsters because of the free-floating power of its emotions: while most pop songs explicitly address love and/or sex between modern boys and girls, opera renders romance in an archaic, stylized way, and instrumental works give voice to unspoken passions. Already in the first years of the century, this music had the reputation of being a “sissy” culture—the association troubled Charles Ives, for one—and its cultural decline in the postwar era may have had something to do with the discomfort that the homosexual ambience caused in the general population.

Gay composers of the early twentieth century seldom hinted at their sexuality in their work, although Francis Poulenc, Henri Sauguet, and other composers associated with the Ballets Russes inhabited a recognizably gay subculture. One who trembled at the edge of disclosure was the Polish composer Karol Szymanowski, whose output included an unpublished, now mostly lost novel of pornographic tendencies, titled Ephebos. In the wake of sexually liberating travels to the south of Italy and North Africa between 1908 and 1914, Szymanowski fashioned a fiercely sensuous style that recalled Debussy at his most turbulent and Scriabin in his high mystic phase. His 1914 song cycle The Love Songs of Hafiz dives into the heady world of the fourteenth-century Persian poet Hafiz, who used the allure of young men’s bodies as a metaphor for religious ecstasy, or perhaps the other way around. Szymanowski’s Third Symphony (1914–16), based on a similarly charged text by Rumi (“Oh, do not sleep, friend, through this night .. .”), culminates in an orgasmic whole-tone chord for voices, orchestra, and organ. And in the daring and strange opera King Roger (1918–24), the royal hero struggles to resist the Dionysian magnetism of a young shepherd who proclaims, “My God is as beautiful as I am.” The ending is ambiguous: the audience is unsure whether Roger has succumbed to the shepherd or overcome him. In the wake of the shepherd’s final orgiastic ritual, Roger is left alone, holding his arms to the sun of Apollo, C-major harmony blazing around him.

The conflict between Dionysus and Apollo is a well-worn metaphor. Stravinsky often mused upon the divide; in the Rite he sided with the Dionysian, in Apollon musagète with the call to order. Britten understood the polarity much as Szymanowski did, not as an intellectual problem but as an acute personal dilemma, a choice between sexual exposure and sexual restraint. He ended his operatic career by setting to music Thomas Mann’s novella Death in Venice, in which Dionysus and Apollo battle for the soul of a middle-aged man looking at a boy on a beach. What perplexed Britten was not his sexuality per se—he never concealed himself in a sham marriage, and sustained a loving relationship with Pears for more than half his life—but his longing for the company of underage males. Although that predicament places him outside most people’s experience, the disordering power of desire is a universal theme, and Britten’s music is a searing diary of its repercussions.

Britten grew up in an ordinary middle-class home. His father made a good living as a dentist, although he worried about money and took refuge in a late-morning glass of whiskey. Mrs. Britten, a gifted singer and a host of musical soirees, nurtured her son to excess, predicting that he would become “the fourth B,” after Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. Benjamin needed little prompting in the direction of the Bs; music was his native tongue, and he could harmonize before he could spell.

At the age of fourteen Britten began studying with Frank Bridge, an imaginative composer of Debussyish tendencies who quickly perceived the boy’s potential. The first year of Britten’s studies yielded, among other things, the orchestral song cycle Quatre Chansons françaises, which was not only amazingly accomplished in technical terms but disconcertingly mature in theme. One setting is of a Victor Hugo poem that depicts a five-year-old who plays outside a window behind which his mother lies dying; the juxtaposition of a childlike melody with shadowy harmonies prefigures many Britten works to come.

By the age of sixteen he was writing thorny, quasi-atonal pieces. The turn toward Viennese expressionism may have had something to do with the alienation he felt while at boarding school, where, according to ageless routine, older boys bullied younger ones. Britten marked his departure from Gresham’s School with an Elegy for Viola that traces anguished nontonal circles around a tonal center of C.

Intellectual precocity often goes hand in hand with emotional immaturity. Into his twenties and beyond, Britten held on to an exaggerated boyishness, indulging in games, pranks, schoolboy slang, and baby talk. At age forty he was still writing in a School Boy’s Diary. Adult realities scared him, most of all sex. As John Bridcut observes, in a book about Britten’s relationships with children, the composer was in some ways emotionally frozen at the age of thirteen.

In 1930 Britten received a scholarship to study at the Royal College of Music in London. He also gained an informal education courtesy of the British Broadcasting Corporation, which, then as now, offered the finest classical radio programming in the world. At a time when David Sarnoff’s NBC was playing Beethoven and little else, the BBC gave generous attention to living composers. Taking a dislike to Elgar and other mainstays of English music, Britten preferred the sharp new sounds coming out of Paris, Vienna, and Berlin, all of which could be sampled on the BBC’s far-ranging programs. A radio broadcast in April 1930 prompted an interest in Schoenberg; he proceeded to program Schoenberg’s Six Little Pieces at a musical soiree at his parents’ home. A broadcast of Berg’s Wozzeck in 1934 had him glued to his set, despite bursts of static. (He hoped to study with Berg in Vienna, but the idea was quashed on the grounds that Berg was “immoral” and “not a good influence.”) That same year the BBC gave Britten his first national exposure by broadcasting his choral piece A Boy Was Born.

In the semi-socialistic spirit of the time, various divisions of the British government had their art and propaganda units, giving employment to artists who had lost work in the wake of the collapse of the consumerist twenties economy. The General Post Office had a film unit that was responsible for telling the public about the many uses of mail. In 1935 Britten went to work for the G.P.O. Film Unit as the house composer; his first assignment was to write music for a film about King George V’s Jubilee stamp. Later projects included Coal Face, Telegrams, Gas Abstract, Men Behind the Meters, How the Dial Works, Negroes, and Night Mail.

Such English-style exercises in “music for use” sharpened Britten’s ability to write on any subject and for any occasion, and they also brought him together with the young poet W. H. Auden, who was contributing witty texts to Post Office films. The two men went on to collaborate on a BBC feature, Hadrian’s Wall; two song cycles, On This Island and Our Hunting Fathers; and the experimental operetta Paul Bunyan. Auden made it his mission to bring Britten out of his shell, socially, sexually, and intellectually. “Stand up and fold / Your map of desolation,” he instructed, in a poem dedicated to the composer in 1936. “Strike and you shall conquer.” Britten’s literary taste moved into the twentieth century, and his political views veered toward socialism and pacifism (Bridge having already nudged him toward the latter). There was an obvious Popular Front flavor to such projects as the 1939 cantata Ballad of Heroes, dedicated to fallen British fighters in the Spanish Civil War; the texts were by Auden and by Randall Swingler, literary editor of the British Daily Worker. Auden had no stomach for agitprop, though, and his slogans fell short of Hanns Eisler’s standards for proletarian song: “I must take charge of the liquid fire, / And storm the cities of human desire.”

Young Britten assembled a personal language out of whatever pleased his uncommonly sharp ear. His harmonic vocabulary stemmed both from continental models such as Berg and Stravinsky and from the more adventurous British composers of the time, particularly Holst, composer of The Planets. From Holst, Britten seems to have picked up the device of the enharmonic change, in which one note holds steady while the harmony pivots to a distant chord—a trick much used by twentieth-century tonal composers, notably Shostakovich. Britten also developed the habit of wavering bluesily between major and minor modes by modifying the third degree of the scale. Greatly impressed by a 1936 London production of Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, he mastered the Shostakovichian arts of parody and grotesquerie, and also took inspiration from operetta, vaudeville, and popular song.

Mrs. Britten died in 1937, and her will allowed Benjamin to purchase the Old Mill, in the tiny village of Snape, outside Aldeburgh—an eighteenth-century round house with a view of the river and marshes and the sea beyond.

Britten was distraught by his mother’s death, but he also felt liberated from the role of darling boy. For the first time he began seriously to explore his sexuality, and immediately felt torn between relationships with gay men his own age—in 1937 he got to know Peter Pears, the future love of his life—and romantically tinged attachments to teenagers. A friendship with the eighteen-year-old Wulff Scherchen, son of the conductor Hermann Scherchen, teetered on the edge of sexual contact. Eventually, Auden would confront Britten with his enthrallment to “thin-as-a-board juveniles, i.e. to the sexless and innocent.” It was a way of evading the disorder of adulthood, Auden said, a false flight into memories of boyhood. Auden further criticized his friend’s tendency to surround himself with a cocoon of caretakers and admirers—“to build yourself a warm nest of love .. . by playing the lovable talented little boy.” Auden concluded: “If you are really to develop to your full stature, you will have, I think, to suffer, and make others suffer.”

Britten ignored the advice. The sexless and the innocent attracted him to the end. He kept trying to build his warm nest of love, although some musicians and administrators who worked with him at the Aldeburgh Festival in later years found the love in short supply; the tenor Robert Tear recalled “an atmosphere laden with waspishness, bitterness, cold, hard eyes, with cabalistic meetings.” Britten developed the unattractive habit of cutting off contact with devoted associates who disappointed him or outlived their usefulness. Ironically, Auden himself was among the first who suffered. That perceptive but intrusive letter he sent to Britten in 1942 derailed their friendship.

Over the years, the list of ex-friends grew long enough that Britten reportedly called them his “corpses.” Yet he never ceased to think of himself as a vulnerable child: he acted not out of malice but out of a need to preserve the illusion of a boyish paradise. In the Thomas Hardy song cycle Winter Words, he set the poem “Before Life and After,” which may be his most personal statement. Over a solemn procession of triadic harmonies, the singer recalls “a time there was .. . when all went well,” a primal state before “the disease of feeling germed,” and wonders whether such a time could come again. His plaint becomes a sob: “How long, how long, how long, how long, how long?”

In April 1939, Britten traveled to America in the company of his increasingly close friend Peter Pears, with the intention of settling there permanently. The main reason for this unexpected move was sexual-psychological: the ill-defined relationship with Wulff Scherchen had grown so fraught that Britten felt the need to leave the country. But there was also a political explanation. Auden had moved to America at the beginning of the year, seeking an exit from what he would call, in his famous poem “In Memory of W. B. Yeats,” the “nightmare of the dark.” America was a new land, a liberal land, a refuge from the Europe of Fascism and appeasement. On a practical level, Britten had received a tentative job offer from Hollywood, or “Holywood,” as he called it in a letter to Scherchen. For the BBC he had composed some brawny music to accompany a King Arthur drama, and the director Lewis Milestone—for whom Aaron Copland later wrote Of Mice and Men—wanted Britten to score The Knights of the Round Table. Nothing came of that plan, and it’s just as well, since Britten’s sensitive ego would probably have suffered terrible scars in the movie business.

Much of what Britten knew of America came from Copland, whom he had befriended in England the previous year. On a visit to the Old Mill, Copland had played through his children’s opera The Second Hurricane. Britten was charmed by the freshness of the vocal writing and by the harmonious picture of young comrades on a common mission. “It would be nice to keep in touch with your triumphs and ‘problems,’ ” Copland subsequently wrote, “problems” being young males.

Britten rapidly disabused himself of the idea of becoming an American, although the outbreak of World War II and the attendant dangers of transatlantic travel prevented him from returning to England until 1942. He tried valiantly to adapt to the eccentric, bohemian lifestyle that Auden had cultivated in New York, but he could not find the cocoon of comfort he required. In the fall of 1940, he and Pears moved into a communal house hold at 7 Middagh Street, in Brooklyn Heights, overlooking the bridge. Living with them were Auden, Paul and Jane Bowles, the editor George Davis, and, up in the attic, Thomas Mann’s son Golo. The high-society stripper Gypsy Rose Lee was a frequent guest; Salvador Dalí, Christopher Isher-wood, Leonard Bernstein, and Golo’s brother Klaus also dropped by. When the Bowleses left, the novelist Carson McCullers moved in, with her alcoholic insanity.

Unable to work, Britten found asylum with the Mayers, German refugees on Long Island. “Everything here is crazes—crazes—crazes,” he wrote to his brother-in-law back home. “I’m gradually realising that I’m English—& as a composer I suppose I feel I want more definite roots than other people.”

Yet Britten gained much from his American experience. From Broadway shows he learned dramatic tricks that would serve him well in his operas from Grimes