4. Return to England, 1942–50.

Any bid for pre-eminence, as Britten must have realized on arriving back in England in April 1942, was a matter not simply of matching Vaughan Williams's achievement but of contributing something new and powerful to British musical life. The choice was opera. Vaughan Williams had been unsuccessful in this sphere and, further, no English opera had made its way into the standard repertory. But the risk of failure was greater, as Britten was aware. He still played childlike superstitious games to bolster his confidence as a composer (Carpenter, 239–40), and made comments like the one remembered by Tippett, with whom Britten and Pears struck up a close friendship: ‘I am possibly an anachronism. I am a composer of opera, and that is what I am going to be, throughout’ (Carpenter, 193–4).

Pears had worked on the scenario of Peter Grimes, the story that the two had culled from Crabbe's The Borough after reading Forster's article. It was an unlikely and unpromising tale of a rough fisherman who beat and lost his apprentices, went mad and died. Isherwood, who turned down the job of librettist, was ‘absolutely convinced that it wouldn't work’ (Brett, E1983, p.36). But they persevered, turning Grimes into a more sympathetic figure of ‘difference’, a misunderstood dreamer. Montagu Slater, whom they now contacted, further shaped the libretto in a way that uncannily connected the private concerns of a couple of left-wing, pacifist lovers to public concerns to which almost anyone could relate.

The author Colin MacInnes confided to his private diary in the late 1940s that ‘Grimes is the homosexual hero. The melancholy of the opera is the melancholy of homosexuality’ (Tony Gould, Inside Outsider: the Life and Times of Colin MacInnes, London, 1983, p.82). Its theme of the individual persecuted by the community for no other reason than his difference cried out to be interpreted in this way, but could not then be publicly articulated. A more remarkable aspect of the allegory, however, had to do with ‘internalization’, the classic form of oppression. Those who do not have full status in society come to believe the low opinion others have of them: Grimes's fate is ultimately determined not simply by his isolation but by his capitulation to Borough opinion at the climax of Act 2 scene i, a much delayed, extremely powerful cadence on to B , the Borough's own key. On striking his friend Ellen in response to her ‘We've failed!’, Grimes takes up the offstage church congregation's ‘Amen’ in his ‘So be it’, proceeding to the long-awaited full cadence with ‘and God have mercy upon on me’ set to a motif that dominates the rest of the opera; the four triadic chords that define its limits and the angry brass canon it prompts both indicate that there can be no escape. Here Grimes internalizes society's judgment of him and enters the self-destructive cycle that inevitably concludes with his suicide. The two terrifying manhunts may have served as catharsis for Britten's own fear of persecution on returning to England as homosexual and pacifist and intensified the social message about internalization. The remaining problem, which apparently held up the opera for almost a year, was how to combat society's tendency to pathologize deviant behaviour such as Grimes's. To emphasize the social theme of the individual's tragic internalization of community values, the references to a domineering father in earlier versions of the libretto, for instance, had to be erased. The result was a brilliant appeal, made more palpable and convincing through music, to the alienation of every member of the audience: ‘In each of us there is something of a Grimes’ (Keller, in Brett, E1983, p.105).

It was a feat to get the audience to identify with an allegorical figure (easily interpreted as ‘the homosexual’) and to locate the problem as one of society's vicious treatment of difference. The opera also laid bare the paranoid nature of society's scapegoating someone wrongly felt to be threatening, and it questioned the operation of violence in which everyone is brutalized, not merely aggressor and victim. It also raised the issue of responsibility in the relation of individual and state in modern democracies, brought to the fore by the focus on the deviant as an ordinary working man. The authors' passionately held views on these topics, realized in music of enormous persuasiveness, led to success from the moment of the opera's first performance at Sadler's Wells Theatre, London, on 7 June 1945 (see Opera , fig.27). It was quickly taken up by other companies in Europe and the USA, and in due course became one of the rare 20th-century operas to enter the repertory.

Britten's actual return to England had been anticlimactic. Although the tribunal he faced, as a conscientious objector, called him up for non-combatant duties, he was allowed on appeal to go free. This was also true of Pears. Their giving recitals all over the country for CEMA probably counted in their favour, as did Britten's continuing work for the BBC. Pears meanwhile branched out into opera and was taken into the Sadler's Wells Opera Company; seeing him in this new context evidently persuaded Britten that he should take the part of Grimes, originally planned for a baritone. Through Pears, Britten met such people as Eric Crozier, the staff producer who was to direct Grimes, and Joan Cross, artistic director of Sadler's Wells, which led to the company's giving the first performance.

There was a lull in Britten's flow of composition around this time, owing partly to a serious attack of measles for which he was in hospital and then off work in March and April 1943. Several projects were abandoned, but during the months he was resting he composed, at Snape, the Serenade for tenor, horn and strings. In this work he invented his own kind of shadowed pastoralism, not the ideal England of the folksong composers but a place in which the worm finds the bud and a darker side of medieval experience is explored (in the Lyke Wake Dirge); the high ostinato that is also the strophic vocal line enabled a particularly fruitful orchestral dialogue to suggest deeper levels to this poem. The Serenade was followed by the Prelude and Fugue for strings, written for the tenth anniversary of the Boyd Neel Orchestra, with a part for each of the 18 players in the fugue. More important was a commission from a clerical visionary in the arts, Walter Hussey, which afforded Britten the opportunity to set lines from Jubilate Agno by the 18th-century poet Christopher Smart, who himself had a persecution complex. At the heart of Rejoice in the Lamb, framed by a Purcellian prelude and postlude and cheerful choruses and solos, lies a chilling choral recitative rehearsing the theme of oppression that was to boil over in Peter Grimes, and a spiritual resolution (‘But he that was born of a Virgin shall deliver me’) that looks forward to the very different scenario of The Rape of Lucretia. The Serenade was dedicated to Edward Sackville-West, an elegant new gay admirer who had helped with the choice of poems. He was working on a radio version of The Odyssey called The Rescue (broadcast in November 1943) for which Britten wrote extensive incidental music. The year ended with a setting of The Ballad of Little Musgrave and Lady Barnard for a music festival organized by a British soldier in a German prison camp. The delayed composition of Peter Grimes began in 1944, which otherwise produced only a Festival Te Deum and two carols for Sackville-West's BBC programme ‘A Poet's Christmas’, one of them a setting of Auden's ‘Shepherd's Carol’.

The success of Peter Grimes led to a fresh outburst of compositional activity. The Holy Sonnets of John Donne, another cycle written for Pears, much of it during illness, is among Britten's darkest works, couched in a severely modernist musical language incorporating what he had learnt from Purcell's declamatory style and (in the last song) ground bass technique. He himself attributed its despairing and angry mood to a visit to the Belsen camp where he and Yehudi Menuhin played for survivors during a ten-day tour of Germany in July 1945 immediately preceding composition. Purcell is also a presence in two other major non-operatic works: the third, final movement of the String Quartet no.2, entitled ‘Chacony’, is built on statements of a ground bass grouped in sets and separated by solo cadenzas for three of the instruments. The first movement is among Britten's most radical experiments with sonata form, both in the enormously extended exposition and the condensed recapitulation, in which the three successive phrases of the first theme are superimposed. He wrote to Mary Behrend, who commissioned it, that ‘to my mind it is the greatest advance I have yet made’. The third work, a set of variations on a very good dance-tune by Purcell, came about as the result of a film commission from Basil Wright (now with the Crown Film Unit, the successor to the original GPO unit) for the Ministry of Education. The film, with a commentary (by Slater) spoken stiffly by Malcolm Sargent, now seems dated, but the clarity and directness of Britten's score shines through in the concert version, entitled The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra.

A revolt within Sadler's Wells (several singers refused to take part in a recording of Peter Grimes) might have impeded further success in opera. But Britten had already begun planning, in summer 1945, a season at Dartington with an independent company giving opera on a small scale. In the event, Crozier and Cross broke away from Sadler's Wells, and Glyndebourne took over from Dartington. Crozier's enthusiasm for a French troupe, La Compagnie des Quinze, provided a model for the new Glyndebourne English Opera Company and led to his translating one of their plays, André Obey's Le viol de Lucrèce. Meanwhile, Britten had been in touch with the Rhodesian poet Ronald Duncan – they had collaborated over a Pacifist March in 1936–7, he had helped Britten change Slater's mad scene in Act 3 of Peter Grimes, and Britten was writing music for his play This Way to the Tomb in late 1945. Duncan put aside his planned libretto on Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and set to work on Obey's play, preserving his narrators as Male and Female Chorus, to be sung by Pears and Cross. The result is not without problems. Instead of Slater's relatively workmanlike language, Britten was faced with an overwritten verse drama of the kind that T.S. Eliot had made fashionable. But the opera works well as a treatment of oppression, with gender as the mark of difference. Like Grimes, Lucretia is a victim. Roman society is also portrayed as corrupt and oppressive, and she is raped by an Etruscan prince, Tarquinius, who embodies its worst features. But there is nothing alienated about her. Whereas Grimes, implicated in his apprentice's deaths, is musically represented as a tarnished yet innocent victim of society, Lucretia is truly innocent, a victim of a vicious patriarchal order. Equally a victim of internalization, she is forced (in a manner familiar to rape victims) to create her own guilt out of the aggressor's crime. This cruel act is accomplished musically by the recall of his ‘Yet the linnet in your eyes / Lifts with desire’ during her ‘confession’. The introduction of a specifically Christian perspective, especially in the conclusion, leads to difficulties because, although a religion fully addressed to victimization and sacrifice, it sees suicide as sin, not noble sacrifice. It is easy enough to dispel these doubts, however, while listening to the E major finale, another brilliant passacaglia; and the opera also develops a distinctly Purcellian recitative style that matches the Baroque quality of Duncan's lines. Its scoring and pacing, too, mark a distinct advance over Peter Grimes.

In spite of a double cast of fine singers (one included as Lucretia the radiant Kathleen Ferrier in her operatic début), The Rape of Lucretia played to poor houses on tour after its Glyndebourne performance in July 1946. Britten and his supporters now founded the English Opera Group, independent of Glyndebourne. After Duncan's idea of a version of Mansfield Park was rejected, Crozier wrote a libretto for Albert Herring, moving Maupassant's short story Le rosier de Madame Husson from the French provinces to an imaginary Suffolk town, ‘Loxford’. Among its weaknesses are pert caricatures of, and condescending attitude towards, provincial working-class people. But the Oedipal subject matter touched an English nerve: the point of Maupassant's story lies in the subsequent ruin and degradation of the hero, not his mother-domination. One reason why the opera disturbs, why it can have the effect of Mozartian or Shakespearean tears behind laughter, is that it presents an intensified version of a complicated situation between mothers and sons. The sinister, obsessive nature of the music for Mrs Herring – one of the best of Britten's many predatory women – and the true musical pathos of Albert, as well as his rising anger in the important aria in Act 1 scene iii, create a viable central comic situation, close enough to the truth to hurt.

It is also notable that Albert does not ‘become a man’. He becomes himself, in his own way, without having subscribed to society's pattern of initiation: he returns without any trophy (the crumpled lost wreath thrown into the audience at the end a suitable symbol of his virginity). What Albert does sing in dismissing his mother and the rest of those arrayed against him is a splendid new integration of ‘light music’ into Britten's style, not simply the enjoyable pastiche of Paul Bunyan and the cabaret songs. Those whom he confronts and confounds on his return have just sung the Threnody, one of the most striking of Britten's many vocal passacaglias, one that invokes Verdi more obviously than Purcell, and that earlier critics often felt overbalanced the work. It is easy to see why they might from purely burlesque productions (like Frederick Ashton's original, from all accounts) without suggesting the sinister potential in characters like Lady Billows and Mrs Herring as well as their absurdity. It should also be noted that once again the physical plays an important part. Sid and Nancy's sexual appetites, portrayed in music of extraordinary excitement and allure, are as powerful as their spiked lemonade (and the Wagnerian reference that accompanies it) in enabling Albert to find himself.

During the English Opera Group's 1947 summer tour of Albert Herring and The Rape of Lucretia, Pears proposed the idea of an Aldeburgh Festival. It was an inspired response to Britten's vulnerability, personally as well as musically, to the kind of hostility he had experienced in his early operatic ventures. The festival also had the advantage of institutionally personifying him and what he stood for when he and Pears were about to move into Crag House, in the centre of the town. Moreover, besides benefiting from Britten's abilities as an accompanist of the highest rank, it offered a further outlet and focus for his other performing abilities (not to mention his astute grasp of finances). With Albert Herring, he had for the first time conducted one of his own operas. Apparently he never fully enjoyed the role, yet he won the devotion of almost every musician who performed under his direction and became a notable interpreter of other composers' works. The London critics were pointedly not invited to the opening, and many of them suspected its potential for cliquishness and provinciality. But by virtue of his abilities and his principles Britten drew to Aldeburgh the foremost international musicians of the age, whether composers or performers, after forming partnerships with them (such as his Schubert duet performances with Richter or his recitals with Rostropovich) in such a way as figuratively to invert the relation of country town to capital. The closeness of the Aldeburgh family (or clique) was often, and sometimes brutally, disturbed when members were suspected of giving less than their best. To have a literal family to whom to attach himself was always a prerequisite for Britten; having colleagues whom he trusted in a place that he knew was an extension of that. Like all unhappy families, it became increasingly unhappy in its own particular way and for a variety of reasons (explored particularly by Carpenter, 319–21, 368–70, 376–7, 520–29 and passim), including Britten's continuing insecurity. But, it was a positive force in British music, and encouraged Britten's work immensely.

A trio of joyful works followed in 1947, the first such outpouring since the lull before the composition of Peter Grimes (1946 had seen merely the Occasional Overture, commissioned to celebrate the opening of the BBC Third Programme and later withdrawn by Britten, and a slight organ work). The 17th-century cantata form exemplified in Purcell's longer songs impressed Britten into adopting it for Canticle I, a setting of Francis Quarles's poem ‘My beloved is mine’, inspired by passages from The Song of Solomon. In contrast to this serious and full-hearted work for his tenor, A Charm of Lullabies was a pleasant cycle written for a favourite mezzo-soprano, Nancy Evans, recently married to Eric Crozier. The third was a cantata for the opening of the first Aldeburgh Festival on 5 June 1948, with an official première a few weeks later (24 July) to celebrate the centenary of Lancing College (Pears's old school). Britten must have been by this time secure enough in his underlying convictions as a composer to ignore the undoubted disapproval of modernist taste for any endeavour involving a large number of amateur musicians. Apart from Peter Pears as the adult saint, Saint Nicolas required only a professional string quartet and percussionist, with a proficient organist and duo pianists. The school choir was supplemented at Lancing by parts for choirs of other linked schools, and the work included two hymns for the audience. This was not among Britten's most adventurous or even most accomplished works, and would have appeared ludicrous to the postwar avant garde. But from the lilting A major-Lydian waltz to which the story of Nicolas's birth and growth to adolescence is told to the broader issues of both involvement in Christian history and shared experience, it seems now as courageous and adventurous as the experimental music of the time. Forster, who had met and admired Britten and Pears, and was attending the first Aldeburgh Festival as lecturer, called it ‘one of those triumphs outside the rules of art’ (The Listener, 24 June 1948) and reported with enormous enthusiasm about the entire festival.

Meanwhile, the English Opera Group needed new material to keep going, and Britten had promised a version of The Beggar's Opera for their 1948 season, to be directed by Tyrone Guthrie (who had recently produced Peter Grimes at Covent Garden). Fortunately, Britten worked from an early edition of the original in which the tunes lack Pepusch's bass lines. He could therefore abandon the constraints of the Purcell realizations and construct both harmony and orchestration; he even brought numbers together in interesting cumulative sequences. The project signifies the culmination of a process of selfconscious rapprochement with history and national identity, part of what Britten thought necessary, as a newly connected and ‘located’ artist, to fulfil his role. Today, the work seems over-elaborate, trading immediacy for musical invention: the music goes upscale, like the accents of the opera singers who generally take the roles, and compared with the Brecht-Weill Die Dreigroschenoper it sounds musically tame and lacking in bite. The drama is in line with the critique of society, religion, the law, family and social order that Britten's works notably encompass. But the tone, as in Albert Herring, often veers towards cosiness in a way that undercuts the portrayal of brutality and mendaciousness that Britten would earlier have condemned more roundly in musical terms. The process is best understood with reference to Britten's own ambivalent position as a ‘discreet homosexual’ (Alan Sinfield's term), which encouraged both protest or subversion but also accommodation to the status quo. The particular consistency of that mix at any given time is a key to a deeper understanding of his career.

For the 1949 season, Crozier again worked on a project involving audience participation, the ‘entertainment for young people’ Let's Make an Opera, which included four audience songs. The opera that formed the second half of the event was The Little Sweep, a scaled-down version of the oppression theme in which the middle-class audience can identify with the stage children, who help poor mistreated working-class Sam, the chimney-sweep, to freedom. This constituted genuine release and fulfilment for Britten even if Carpenter (p.176) is right to comment on its regressive psychology.

Britten was deliriously happy while writing the opera in spring 1949; less so with the project it interrupted, the Spring Symphony. He described his ‘doubts and miseries’ over it to Serge Koussevitzky, who commissioned it. The doubts must have been largely about projecting an orchestral song cycle as a symphony. He explained the symphony as ‘not only dealing with the Spring itself but with the progress of Winter to Spring and the reawakening of the earth and of life’, and its form as ‘in the traditional four-movement shape of a symphony, but with the movements divided into shorter sections bound together by a similar mood or point of view’ (Britten, 1949–50, p.237); he saw no need to produce a traditional symphonic ‘argument’ but rather wanted to project a series of controlled gestures in four distinct parts, the second and third analogous to the slow movement and scherzo of a symphony, and with a single poem for the more extended, joyous finale. The separate settings have an effect comparable to the series of discrete numbers through which Britten had learnt in his operas to generate cumulative feeling and climactic structures. The first invocatory movement is in ritornello form, and a fairly strict thematics of instrumentation persists, suggesting Baroque ‘affects’ rather than Romantic arguments. In the finale, a celebratory episode complete with rude blasts on the cowhorn, things are kept in motion by a rousing waltz tune upon which is projected, in a climactic peroration, the famous Sumer is icumen in cast in duple time. The emotional centre of the work, however, lies in the final section of the second part, a setting of W.H. Auden's Out on the Lawn. Britten would have known the significance of this poem (from which he selected four of the 16 stanzas) as a description of an actual spiritual experience of June 1933 which the poet called a ‘Vision of Agape’ and which prefigured his later conversion to Christianity. Britten's setting, which incorporates some of his most distinctive orchestral and vocal effects, recalls for an anguished moment in its last stanza the mood of the more radical Our Hunting Fathers, again providing a reminder of the darker reality of life, a touch that balances and therefore validates the ‘retrogressive’ search for ‘innocent’ states of mind in other parts of the score.

In late 1949 Britten found time to write a wedding anthem, Amo ergo sum, for his friends Lord Harewood and Marion Stein on a text by Ronald Duncan, and in early 1950 a charming and classic set of choral songs, the Five Flower Songs, for the Elmhirsts of Dartington Hall.

Britten, Benjamin