2. College and the profession, 1930–39.

The Birds, A Wealden Trio (a carol for women's voices) and several instrumental pieces had been sent off as part of a successful application for a scholarship to the RCM. Although this was an improvement over Gresham's, Britten did not in later years conceal his dismay at the ‘amateurish and folksy’ atmosphere he encountered among the students. Arthur Benjamin was his piano teacher, and he went to John Ireland for composition lessons, though Bridge remained more influential. Britten seems to have aroused defensiveness (and perhaps seductiveness) in the erratic Ireland, and the lessons have often been portrayed as a dismal failure. Later, Britten admitted to Joseph Cooper that ‘Ireland nursed me very gently through a very, very difficult musical adolescence’ (Letters from a Life, A1991, p.147).

Living in London, however, gave the young composer the opportunity to widen his knowledge of the repertory. Although Bridge had steered his interests in the direction of modernism (he would not have encountered Schoenberg at the RCM, as Henry Boys later noted: Letters, 397), the young Britten was still in love with Beethoven and Brahms during his early years there and showed little of his later hostility to the English ‘pastoral school’. His diary entries from January 1931, however, chronicle a fascinating array of performances and reactions to them: he ‘could not make head or tail’ of Schoenberg's Erwartung; found Stravinsky's Rite of Spring ‘bewildering & terrifying’ but his Petrushka ‘an inspiration from beginning to end’; and the Symphony of Psalms quickly became a classic for Britten. Mahler's Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen was ‘a lesson to all the Elgars & Strausses in the world’ – Mahler was of course to become a major influence on his orchestral technique and sense of compositional irony, and in 1943 he wrote about the Fourth Symphony that ‘I have almost more affection for that piece than for any I know’. Britten found himself ‘absolutely incapable of enjoying Elgar, for more than 2 minutes’. He later told Walton that hearing his Viola Concerto and overture Portsmouth Point at that time ‘was a great turning point in my musical life … you showed me the way of being relaxed and fresh, & intensely personal & yet still with the terms of reference which I had to have’. Many of the observations have to do with individual performers, not just conductors and soloists, but also players in the orchestra. After a performance by the Berlin PO under Furtwängler in 1932 he wrote: ‘F's readings were exaggerated & sentimentalised (esp. so in last item [Tchaikovsky's Symphony no.6] – no wonder a member of the audience was sick!! The orch, is a magnificent body, tho’ slightly off colour to-day (e.g. wind intonation, 1^st clar. & 1^st Horn) Strings are marvellous. Timpanist great. Marvellous ensemble and discipline’.

By 1933 his attitudes were clarifying. From 3 March dates his comment on ‘two brilliant folk-song arrangements of Percy Grainger … knocking all the V. Williams and R.O. Morris arrangements into a cocked-hat’. Early in 1935 he complained to the composer Grace Williams about the ‘“pi” and artificial mysticism combined with … technical incompetence’ in Vaughan Williams's Five Mystical Songs, and later in the year he lamented to Marjorie Fass, a quaint intimate of the Bridges, the news of Berg's death: ‘The real musicians are so few & far between, arn't they? Apart from the Bergs, Stravinskys, Schönbergs & Bridges one is a bit stumped for names, isn't one? Markievitch may be – but personally I feel that he's not got there yet. Shostakovitch – perhaps – possibly’. In October 1936 Britten condemned the Sibelius in Moeran's G minor Symphony: ‘This is going to be almost as bad as the Brahms influence on English music I fear’. By 1952 Britten admitted that ‘I play through all his [Brahms's] music every so often to see if I am right about him; I usually find that I underestimated last time how bad it was!’. That quotation comes from the frankly canonizing anthology edited by Donald Mitchell and Hans Keller in which Lord Harewood presented what is tantamount to an official lineage: Monteverdi, Purcell, Bach, Gluck, Mozart, Weber, Schubert, Verdi, Mahler, ‘even Tchaikovsky, if he is played in a restrained, though vital way’, Berg and Stravinsky.

At the end of the second year at the RCM Britten won the Cobbett Chamber Music Prize with his Phantasy in F minor for string quintet. It received its first professional performance at a Macnaghten-Lemare concert in 1932 together with three two-part songs on poems of de la Mare (his first published works). The Phantasy is more adventurous and focussed than the String Quartet in D of the first year and shows a tug of war between Ireland, who appears to have been pushing Britten to the vocal-pastoral version of Englishness (he wrote mainly vocal music during his first year with Ireland), and Bridge.

More remarkable is the Sinfonietta, his op.1, written in three weeks during summer 1932 and first performed at another Macnaghten-Lemare concert in January 1933, with Britten himself conducting it at the RCM in March (the Mendelssohn prize for which it was submitted went to another student, though Britten received a consolatory £50). Its opening A–B dissonance and adventurous scoring aggressively advertises an allegiance to European modernism, and even when it lapses into English rhapsodic lyricism in the slow movement the tautness of the ensuing violin duo rescues it from any debility. The debt to Schoenberg's first Kammersymphonie (pointed out by Erwin Stein in Mitchell and Keller, D1952), ultimately extends perhaps to the manner of thematic derivation that Peter Evans has argued as central to Britten's technique. The careful working out of themes and contrasts also dominates the Phantasy Quartet for oboe and strings, also written in 1932, and first performed in August 1933 on the BBC. As remarkable as either is an ambitious Double Concerto in B minor for violin and viola begun in May 1932 and interrupted for the composition of the Sinfonietta. It shares features with op.1, such as the three-movement plan, the rhapsodic middle movement leading directly into the tarantella-like finale. Though perhaps less self-consciously modern, with its virtuoso solo writing, it is longer than the Sinfonietta and equally well sustained and argued. (It has been realized from Britten's annotated composition sketch, his customary original short score written in pencil.)

In December 1932 Britten graduated and garnered a £100 travel grant. He returned to Lowestoft after a further Macnaghten-Lemare concert which included the unfinished quartet Alla quartetto serioso: ‘Go play, boy, play’. He intended to use the money to go to study with Berg, but his parents, to whom the RCM authorities had suggested that Berg was in some way ‘immoral’ and ‘not a good influence’, scotched the plan.

So he stayed at home, riffling through his voluminous juvenilia for material for his Simple Symphony and getting the first performance on the BBC of A Boy was Born, an ambitious set of choral variations in which his hard-won instrumental technique was problematically assigned to voices. Even here, though, the unusual juxtaposition of an accompanimental texture built on the ‘snow on snow’ image in Christina Rossetti's ‘In the bleak midwinter’ and the regular strophes of the Corpus Christi carol sung by a boys' chorus is characteristic of later Britten. In March 1934 he visited Florence for a performance of his Phantasy oboe quartet at the ISCM festival, which brought him to the notice of the international new music community. Later in the year came the Te Deum in C and the Jubilate Deo in E for St Mark's, North Audley Street, London, whose choir furnished the boys for the BBC performance of A Boy was Born. Apart from his father's death in April 1934, things were beginning to turn out well for Britten's 21st birthday: the BBC performed the Sinfonietta; OUP decided to publish more works (Boosey & Hawkes were to step in barely a year later with an exclusive contract and, slightly later, a regular stipend); and he finally visited Vienna – though with his mother as chaperone and without meeting Berg – where he began work on the Suite for violin and piano.

At this point Britten started job hunting, and in May 1935 found ideal employment under Albert Cavalcanti in John Grierson's General Post Office Film Unit, working on the documentary The King's Stamp. It offered the challenge of writing to order at high speed, devising sound-effects and matching aspects of film technique that had a lasting impact on his composition. More important, it gave him entry into an artistic and intellectual world as liberating for him as the Diaghilev circle had been for Stravinsky. At its centre, and the most influential of all Britten's close friends, was the poet W.H. Auden, who quickly gave him the vacant post of composer in his ‘gang’ of artists and writers (Carpenter, 69). It included those associated with the GPO Film Unit, including Christopher Isherwood, and with the experimental Group Theatre, for which Britten wrote incidental music, including that to the Auden-Isherwood The Ascent of F6. Also involved in the GPO films was Montagu Slater, eventually the librettist of Peter Grimes, for several of whose plays Britten wrote the music. Films that involved an Auden-Britten collaboration, such as Coal Face and Night Mail, though celebrated, are only a small proportion of his projects, which included Lotte Reiniger's film about the Post Office Savings Bank, The Tocher, from which in 1935–6 was drawn material for the choral and orchestral suites based on Rossini. Britten's facility in this field led to work with other film companies and to an even longer association with the BBC (1937–47) on feature programmes and radio dramas whose music is only now beginning to reveal latent trends as well as a wide range of parody. If the clever cabaret songs (some to words by Auden) written for Hedli Andersen cause no surprise, the pseudo-Bach arias in one of R. Ellis Roberts's pretentious BBC religious features, ‘The World of the Spirit’, show how easily Britten could have fallen into a more conventional ‘neo-classicism’.

Britten's political awakening was much accelerated by his fresh circumstances. Dazzled by his new friends, he embraced their values and politics, which allowed him the ‘outsider’ status and rebellious stance he needed to jettison the safety of Lowestoft: he must have enjoyed, and been pained by, arguing about communism with his mother and refusing to go to Communion with her, as well as the slight disapproval of the ‘Brits’ (the Bridge ménage à trois) towards his clever new friends. Politics went hand in hand with a growing awareness of his sexuality and its social implications. He had carried off the asexual British schoolboy role rather well – for one thing, it concealed the obscure wounds also revealed in the stories, probably fictional, of early sexual abuse from a schoolmaster and his father's liking for boys, told to Eric Crozier and Myfanwy Piper (Carpenter, 19–25) – but his undoubted desire for ‘his own kind’ was beginning to break through. Many of his new friends, including Auden, who imparted a carpe diem message and undoubtedly lectured Britten on the topic, were almost openly gay, at least among themselves, and he must have realized that the left-wing, pacifist, agnostic and queer model they offered him provided a suitable identity niche in which to lodge his particular personal concerns, though few of his friends believed that he was ever entirely comfortable with it.

The immediate result of the friendship with Auden, apart from the flood of film scores, was a large orchestral song cycle on human relations to animals that would both attack the fox-hunting set at home and act as a parable for the worsening political situation abroad. Early in 1936, Auden chose three poems and wrote a prologue and an epilogue. In April Britten attended the ISCM festival in Barcelona, where he played his Suite with Antonio Brosa and heard Berg's Violin Concerto. The important new work, Our Hunting Fathers, went forward during the summer, and predictably met some disapproval at its first performance at the Norwich Triennial Festival in September. Later even Britten himself treated it as something of an embarrassment. Perhaps Auden's voice ventriloquizes too insistently; yet it is Britten's first major work to encapsulate a social or political issue in a way calculated to challenge received opinion because of the unusual combination of high drama and biting irony in an up-to-date eclectic score brilliantly orchestrated. If this way of thinking about music and art were all that Auden gave Britten, it was ultimately the gift that turned him into a composer of lasting impact. On this aspect of his work, Britten later wrote (in connection with Sinfonia da Requiem), ‘I don't believe you can express social or political or economic theories in music, but by coupling new music with certain well known musical phrases, I think it's possible to get over certain ideas’ (Letters, 705).

In January 1937, Edith Britten died unexpectedly after on illness. Britten was both devastated and, at a level just beginning to find expression in his diary, relieved to be free from her controlling influence. An immediate result was an exploration of those submerged sexual feelings that Auden, Isherwood and others had attempted to urge to the surface. On 6 March, at lunch with the conductor Trevor Harvey, he met a tenor, named in his diary as ‘Peter Piers’. A year later they were sharing a London flat. For some time there was a parental element in Pears's relation to Britten preventing a complete union, which only came about as a result of happy sexual experiences early in their time in North America (1939–42). It was a fortunate match for Britten on account of his real need for protection. On a cultural level it was unusual for being between two individuals of the same race, class and age, each with commensurable and connected talents that led to their spurring one another on.

In 1937 and for some time after, Britten was still trying out potential liaisons of a similar kind. But much of his own affectional and sexual imagination he invested in people younger than himself. In summer 1938 he renewed contact with Wulff Scherchen (son of the conductor Hermann), who had made an impression four years earlier in Florence. Scherchen, now 18, responded with alacrity and an affair appears to have ensued. Piers Dunkerley, a slightly younger boy whom Britten had met in 1934 while visiting his old preparatory school, brought out a typically parental, advisory streak in the composer: ‘I am very fond of him – thank heaven not sexually’, he wrote, ‘but I am getting to such a condition that I am lost without some children (of either sex) near me’ (Letters, 403).

So it was prove: the ease with which he could enter into children's worlds, as well as the precipitous moments in his encounters with young boys, are outlined in some detail by Carpenter (especially 341–54). It seems that Britten was captured at many levels by the notion of return to a perfect state symbolized by childhood – it has been called ‘innocence’, but a more useful concept is that of the ‘pre-symbolic’ explored by disciples of Lacan or of ‘nescience’ in the words of Hardy's poem ‘A time there was’ (set in Winter Words). The entry into the ‘symbolic’ (language) and the patriarchal order make this state impossible to recapture, and much of Britten's music is about the difficulty and pain of separation from it, but it is arguably his principal fount of non-verbal inspiration. Lack produces desire (in the already lost adult); and the sexual element that occasionally obtrudes, and can never satisfy or be satisfied, is a symptom of that lack. What Britten discovered – possibly aided by his constant invocation of pre-symbolic elements such as the mother's voice (many noted that Pears's voice strongly resembled his mother's) – was a way of accessing powerful messages from beyond the pre-verbal barrier, even perhaps occasionally of breaking that barrier, at a time when musical modernism was setting up barbed wire fences everywhere and driving ‘art’ music increasingly into the cold unfeeling camps of masculine intellect and order.

Meanwhile, the stream of film and incidental music was augmented by some important events, such as the amazingly rapid completion of a major new work, Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge, for the Boyd Neel Orchestra to play at the Salzburg Festival in August 1937. With its penetrating and unexpected parodies of genres and styles, and magnificent fugue and finale containing other references to Bridge's music, this work became for a time a standard against which other Britten works were judged. His adopting the congenial variation form had been foreshadowed in the slight Temporal Variations for oboe and piano written and performed at the end of 1936 and abandoned – the Times critic's reaction was to become a standard refrain: ‘It is the kind of music that is commonly called “clever”’ (Letters, 784). The same might have been said of the Auden song collection that followed the Bridge Variations. On this Island open with a Baroque flourish and Purcellian melisma that no sensitive English songwriter of the previous 50 years would have countenanced, and ends with a throwaway dance-hall tune to match Auden's parody of bourgeois materialistic existence. December 1937 saw the completion of the suite of Catalan dances, Mont Juic, written in collaboration with Lennox Berkeley in memory of Peter Burra, a close friend of Pears's. Berkeley was to move to the Old Mill at Snape that Britten had bought using his inheritance from his mother.

The following year brought an unusual triumph when on 18 August 1938 Britten played the first performance of his Piano Concerto, a display piece dedicated to Berkeley, at the BBC Promenade Concerts under Sir Henry Wood. An eloquent passacaglia-style Impromptu supplanted the weakest movement, the cheekier Recitative and Aria, in a 1945 revision. But the original slow movement belongs more fully to a work that is as much a milestone as the Bridge variations. After the responsible, serious instrumental pieces of the 1930s, this display of high spirits touched with sentimentality indicates a willingness to abandon a too-limiting decorum and give in to sensuality. The reference in this simply joyous, often almost campy work is Poulenc rather than Shostakovich, Prokofiev or any more approved master. No wonder Britten's friends and chief defenders, as well as the avuncular journalistic critics, deplored it: according to Marjorie Fass, the Brits ‘all utterly agree with the drastic criticisms of The Times & Sunday Times & Observer & Telegraph’ (Letters, 577), and even Peter Evans refers to ‘the irritatingly smart vulgarity of the final march’ (D1979, p.47). Britten himself could not ‘see anything problematic about the work. I should have thought that it is the kind of music that either one liked or disliked – it is so simple’ (Letters, 576).

After this, apart from incidental music for a big Basil Dean production (J.B. Priestley's Johnson over Jordan) opening in February 1939, there were several parting salutes to Britten's radical affiliations: incidental music for the Group Theatre production of the Auden-Isherwood play On the Frontier, and a partsong Advance Democracy, written for the Co-operative movement to words by the editor of Left Review, Randall Swingler (both in November, 1938); and in February–March 1939 an orchestral cantata, Ballad of Heroes, to words by Swingler and Auden in commemoration of the British members of the International Brigade who fell fighting the fascists in Spain.

Britten, Benjamin