5. Success and authority, 1951–5.

It was natural, in the light of Britten's success as a composer, especially in opera and its performance, for the Arts Council to commission a major opera from him for the 1951 Festival of Britain. For his part, he must have realized that his first substantial work written specifically for Covent Garden ought also to break new ground, and in the event Billy Budd, besides representing a considerable musical advance, also marks a distinct transition in Britten's operatic output from a focus on oppression and its internalization to an exploration of authority and its ramifications. The issue of authority is of particular importance and also confusion to homosexual people. Pertinent in Britten's case is the conflict over parents, who are loved and adored on the one hand as encouraging protectors and mistrusted on the other as figures of authority, as uncomprehending as the rest of society in assuming universal heterosexuality and censuring homoeroticism. A crisis on this issue would predictably be generated as the composer moved into the ‘establishment’ (symbolized by his being created a Companion of Honour in 1953).

Inviting a major literary figure like E.M. Forster to become his librettist was possibly to risk a recurrence of the difficulties with Auden, but Forster was a master of prose, not poetry, and the author of Howard's End and A Passage to India held the promise of helping Britten move beyond his preoccupations with the innocent and the oppressed. After some discussion, the two settled unshakably on Melville's Billy Budd (see P.N. Furbank, E.M. Forster: a Life, London, 1977–8, ii, 283–6). In adapting the story, Forster wanted to ‘rescue Vere from Melville’ (that is, from the excessive respect for authority and discipline implicit in Melville's account of him), to ‘make Billy, rather than Vere, the hero’, and to suggest redemption through love, or at least eternal hope, through the image of the ‘white sail’, mitigating and limiting Melville's belief in Fate. But the Prelude–Epilogue frame in which the aging Vere recalls the action places the dramatic emphasis firmly on his moral choice and predicament. In this respect, one of Britten's main achievements was to develop the ambiguity and uncertainty implicit in Vere's actions and words through purely musical means. Notable is the way the stratified texture at the opening of the Prologue projects the conflict between B and B , which then persists as a musical ‘problem’ reflecting what attracted Britten to the topic, ‘the quality of conflict in Vere's mind’ (see Rupprecht, E1996). The famous ‘interview’ interlude in which, with triadic chords each harmonizing the notes F, A or C but contrasted by dynamics, orchestration and tessitura, Britten suggests the indeterminate nature of the private moment in which Vere tells Billy that he has been condemned has also been shown to promote an uneasy, unstable tonal dialectic expressing an essentially equivocal mental state rather than any firm triumph of F major (Whittall, E1990). Near the end of the Epilogue, Britten appears to dissolve and dispel the forces of both good and evil (the melody of Billy's farewell, a reference to the interview chords, and the ominous brass motif associated with Claggart as evil) in a final, radiant B chord. But that very epiphanic moment sets off once again the hefty drum-beat motif that underpins the trial and ultimately derives from the sea chase earlier in Act 2. The implication that Vere is hopelessly contaminated by his role in killing men – as leader in battle as well as naval disciplinarian – is powerful on the social as well as personal level. The advance of Billy Budd on Peter Grimes in both dramatic and musical terms is nowhere so telling as in this culminating moment, but is also readily apparent in almost every other aspect of the score.

The music of Billy Budd took over a year to write and months to score, leaving time only for two small-scale instrumental pieces written for individual soloists, Lachrymae, for viola (William Primrose) and piano, and Six Metamorphoses after Ovid, for oboe solo (Joy Boughton); the dedicatees played them at successive Aldeburgh festivals in 1950 and 1951. In addition, there was the ‘realization’ of Purcell's Dido and Aeneas for the English Opera Group's 1951 season. In the aftermath of Billy Budd Britten wrote the extraordinary Canticle II, on the Chester Miracle Play version of the story of Abraham and Isaac – a footnote to the theme of the opera, perhaps, but arresting in its own right for the opening, in which the alto and tenor voices combine to invoke the voice of God, punctuated by wide piano arpeggios reminiscent of the opening of the first quartet.

The death of George VI in 1952 catapulted Britten into another large-scale opera for Covent Garden. That year, Imogen Holst arrived at Aldeburgh as amanuensis and devoted disciple: her presence at festival concerts with Britten and Pears added status to Britten's English lineage – her father's work was also admitted into the local canon. Britten had been exploring various libretto ideas for some time with Forster's friend, William Plomer, an able literary figure personally less demanding than the novelist, when Lord Harewood began negotiations that led to the commission of an opera on the coronation of Elizabeth II in 1953. Elizabeth's Tudor predecessor seemed the appropriate subject for what was intended as a quintessentially ‘national’ opera with a Verdian sweep about it. To base it on Lytton Strachey's Elizabeth and Essex, however, was to put the image of the Virgin Queen to as tough a test as Vere had undergone. His portrait deploys Freudian psychology to underpin an anti-authoritarian view of monarchy. Britten no doubt intended to create a portrait of monarchy, warts and all, in which a cultured homosexual man could believe: the brilliance of the celebratory style he devised (avoiding Elgarian imperialistic overtones) as well as the subtlety of his response to Elizabethan music in the songs and dances show that he was as inspired by this project as by the challenge of Billy Budd. Plomer had him read, as an antidote to Strachey, J.E. Neale's biography. Elizabeth's own speeches lie behind the debated Norwich episode that enshrines her ideal concept of authority rooted in humanity, intelligence and generosity. To invoke the ‘conflict between public and private’ to explain Gloriana, however, fails to get at the ultimate confusion that is part of homosexual social experience, and undermines the opera: if Britten imagined he was creating an Aida, or more pertinently a Boris Godunov, in which the private, human and vulnerable side of monarchy could be displayed in a healing manner, the downbeat ending, in which the aging, bald heroine muses on her mortality, only raised in the minds of a contemporary audience a spectre of empty and meaningless authority. Gloriana touched a national nerve-ending, and prompted not only its insecure dismissal by the first-night gala audience but also intensified the increasingly hostile response to Britten of the musical cognoscenti, disturbed by the cult status accorded him in the Mitchell and Keller Commentary of 1952.

All the more remarkable, then, that the next opera, begun during the preparations for Gloriana, should directly explore child sexuality and homoeroticism through Henry James's The Turn of the Screw. The horror of this gothic tale turns on the harrowing dilemma into which the reader is forced between experiencing the children, Miles and Flora, either as objects of depraved desires on the part of their dead servant and governess, Peter Quint and Miss Jessel, or as the victims of the hysterical fantasies of their new Governess, whose instability is hinted at by her frustrated desire for their distant guardian. The topic was suggested to Britten by Myfanwy Piper, a member of his ‘extended family’ through her husband John, designer of most of the opera productions after Peter Grimes. In her Britten found an ideal librettist for the adaptation of literary works; her work is seen at its best in the verbal images she produced for James's silent Quint, suggesting the man's imaginative allure to a child rather than any ‘evil’. Making the ghosts palpable militated against James; but Britten, aided by Piper, found other ways to reinforce the ambiguities and claustrophobic atmosphere, such as the division into short scenes separated by ‘variation’ interludes and a tonal scheme that mirrors the title. The theme of these variations is moreover the upbeat opening gesture of a bipartite theme, its first element comprising all 12 notes through which, at its second plain statement, the ghosts voice their power. The ‘downbeat’ second element – ingeniously derived by inversion from the original series (Evans, D1979, p.214) – quickly evaporates into the coach-ride of the opening interlude, but emerges climatically at the beginning of Act 2 as the music for the ghosts' inspired quotation from Yeats's The Second Coming, ‘the ceremony of innocence is drowned’. Throughout the opera, it provides the thematic material from which significant statements of both the Governess and Quint are derived. No more powerful or appropriate musical way could be found to match the dilemma of the original story. Critical approaches, which differ widely, reflect the success of this and other ambivalent musical symbols (such as the orchestration). One feature of the opera is the development of Miles, Britten's first extended role for boy treble. It was hauntingly sung in the first production (and Britten's recording) by the young David Hemmings (fig.6), whom the composer fell for. The evocative mnemonic rhyme, ‘Malo’, set by Britten to curiously self-revolving, abject music, managed acutely to symbolize the sexually active, precocious and yet guilty child and provide a focus for the Governess's final lament while undercutting her drive to resolution. The Turn of the Screw is arguably Britten's aesthetically and musically most satisfying work in the genre as well as the richest in dramatic tension and personal allusion.

The composition of three operas in so short a time had left little time for other music. What came between Gloriana and The Turn of the Screw, however, was among the most important of the song cycles, Winter Words, on lyrics and ballads of Thomas Hardy. A nostalgic mood is set by the first song, with its evocation of November twilight in the fused dominant and tonic chords resolving on to D (minor). It is captured differently in the cantata-like account of The Choirmaster's Burial, with its miraculous setting of an old hymn tune and evocation of honest country musicianship. And finally, in Before Life and After, accompanied by low-lying triads in the left hand that conflict increasingly with the voice and piano right-hand's lyrical dialogue, the lost world of nescience is hymned as the final D major is reached – though the conflict has been intense enough to disturb any notion of soothing resolution or fulfilment of any such goal.

What came after The Turn of the Screw was directly affected by its schematic design. The vocal stanzas of Canticle III, Still Falls the Rain, completed in November 1954, interact with the interspersed variations for horn and piano in a manner recognizable from the scenes and interludes in the opera. An allegory of Christ's passion linked by the poet, Edith Sitwell, to the air raids of 1940, it was an opportunity for the composer to test again the possibility of Christian salvation on a conclusive B , this time purging the almost serial-style chromaticism of the opening in expressive two-part counterpoint, and finally resolving onto a vocal monotone both the airiness of the refrain (‘Still falls the rain’) and the recitative-like stanzas (one of them with a Sprechstimme interjection, unusual in Britten, to mark the quotation from Marlowe's Dr Faustus in the poem).

Britten, Benjamin