6. Transition and triumph, 1955–62.

Having concluded a series of operas that offer as solid a claim to the attention of operagoers as any other 20th-century works, Britten must have been dimly aware of a need to fill in gaps in his total output as well as to try out new things – he wrote to Edith Sitwell that ‘I am on the threshold of a new musical world (for me, I am not pretentious about it!)’ (Cooke, D1999, p.167). For the moment, however, exhaustion set in, and the composition of a major work, the full-length ballet The Prince of the Pagodas, a project with the choreographer John Cranko for Covent Garden, was set aside for an extensive tour with Pears from November 1955 to March 1956, much of it in Asia (where they had as travelling companions their friends Prince Ludwig and Princess Margaret of Hesse and the Rhine; fig.7). They appear to have sought out indigenous, traditional dance, music and drama, such as that of Japan (to bear fruit in the church parables). In Indonesia, first Java and then, during a free two-week period, Bali, Britten made a more detailed study of local musical styles. The brassy, brilliant sound of the Balinese gamelan was predictably more arresting to him than the less demonstrative Javanese. From Ubud, where he heard the Peliatan gamelan, he wrote to Imogen Holst extolling the music as ‘fantastically rich – melodically, rhythmically, texture (such orchestration!!) & above all formally. … At last I’m beginning to catch on to the technique, but it's about as complicated as Schönberg’ (Cooke, D1998, p.70).

Gamelan music was not new to him; he had been introduced to it in America by Colin McPhee, who spent much of the 1930s in Bali, becoming an authority on its music, which he incorporated into his own works. The sonorities received confirmation from a European source when Britten played Poulenc's Concerto for two pianos with its composer early in 1945 – the work contains substantial ‘gamelan’ passages in its mixture of styles (Brett, E1994, pp.238–9). Furthermore, although McPhee's comments indicate Britten's initial ambivalence, he soon latched on, using a heterophonic pseudo-gamelan sound to characterize the moon turning blue in Paul Bunyan and deriving the deep bell sounds in the ‘Sunday Morning’ interlude in Peter Grimes from the representation of the gong in McPhee's two-piano transcriptions of Balinese Ceremonial Music. Heterophonic passages and pentatonic scales can be traced in many Britten contexts (Cooke, D1998), but it was in The Turn of the Screw (see Palmer, in Howard, E1985) that gamelan-like sounds seeped into the colour of Britten's instrumentation to suggest not simply the ghosts but also Quint's allure for Miles and the attendant danger.

The visit to Bali provided the material (in the form of sketches and recordings) for a more literal reference to the gamelan in The Prince of the Pagodas (which opened on New Year's Day 1957), although the idea of employing such music may have occurred earlier in 1955 as the result of another performance of the Poulenc concerto. There is a corresponding shift of dramatic emphasis. Cranko's scenario is a Lear-inflected fairy tale. On being passed over in favour of her haughty sister by their foolish father, the emperor, the beautiful princess Belle Rose is carried off to Pagoda Land, where, to gamelan music, the pagodas revolve or swell at her touch, offering her food and finally blindfolding her. To another gamelan piece a green salamander enters who turns into a handsome prince as the trumpet plays a melody of Siegfried-like heroism and phallic intensity. Since the princess is blindfolded, and the gamelan music is attached to the pagodas (their captives are ultimately liberated) as well as to the disguised prince, sexuality, if suggested at all, is literally polymorphous. These are latent beings, waiting for the liberation that Rose's love will effect, but surely connected through their music to a vision that is either utopian or regressive: innocence or nescience, pre-verbal, even pre-visual, depending only on touch. The score, shot through with echoes of Tchaikovsky, Prokofiev and Stravinsky, gloriously opulent and uninhibited, might serve as a model of Britten's orchestral brilliance. Ears now used to ‘world music’ swallow the gamelan episodes without finding them extraneous; yet, like the exotic references in The Turn of the Screw, they belong to the phenomenon of ‘orientalism’, that is, Western projections onto peoples thereby made Other.

Britten was to travel further in that direction: during summer 1957 Plomer suggested a libretto derived from the nō play Sumidagawa that had so impressed the composer in Japan. Its gestation took some time. Meanwhile, because of increasingly burdensome public exposure, Britten and Pears moved out of Crag House, which they exchanged in November 1957 for the Red House with the artist Mary Potter (a member of their recorder group, for whom Alpine Suite was written in 1955). Near a golf course on the road to Leiston, it now houses the Britten-Pears Library. Britten was working at the time on Songs from the Chinese, settings of translations by Arthur Waley for Pears to sing to the accompaniment of Julian Bream. Although the texts, which are largely about the transient nature of beauty and youth, provide a basis for exoticism, Britten avoids it in favour of a musical language that not only exploits the guitar's capabilities but also suggests the spare, thematically orientated manner that was to occupy him after 1961.

Meanwhile, the next large work, begun in late 1957 and given at the 1958 Aldeburgh Festival, claims a special place in Britten's output. Begun as the result of a television commission that failed to materialize, Noye's Fludde became the centrepiece of Britten's investment in what has eventually become known as ‘outreach’, for it involves children of all ages in its performance and includes the audience who join in the hymns around which it is built. Brilliantly managed is the physical involvement of the children, as violinists in first position, buglers playing simple school-derived fanfares, recorder players galore, a variety of percussionists (including the innovation of the ‘slung mugs’ signifying the first raindrops; fig.8) and as a chorus of child-animals with cries of ‘Kyrie eleison’ and ‘Alleluia’: everyone can be included along with the few professionals, Britten appears to be saying, in a score that is uncompromisingly interesting on all levels and therefore with no patronizing air. As if to reinforce the point, the storm is an extended passacaglia on a theme, like that of The Turn of the Screw, both tonally anchored and comprising all 12 notes: this ambivalent device is not surprisingly attached to the destruction and abjection caused by the deity. Towards the end a handbell choir, slightly reminiscent of Balinese metallophones, epitomizes the rainbow, an image that melts into that of a newly recovered universe signified by Tallis's canon, which is disturbed briefly by an organ interlude that has not unreasonably been interpreted as a moment of residual hostility to the church as an institution. The impression most listener-participants carry away from this freshly conceived music-theatre event, however, is one of great spiritual and musical satisfaction.

If the Serenade can be seen as preparatory to Peter Grimes, the Nocturne of August–September 1958 is even more closely linked with A Midsummer Night's Dream, completed in 1960. In place of the Serenade's virtuoso painting of atmosphere, the Nocturne explores the dreaming state of mind to be conjured up so powerfully in the opera. The cycle is continuous – here the poems tend to be fragments of larger works rather than discrete lyrics – and it is held together by a gossamer thread of recall, the soft breathing motif of the opening string accompaniment and the rapturous melisma set to ‘nurslings of immortality’ in the opening song. This latter motif not only signifies the poetic vision but points to the eventual outcome of the work on a D chord. Dream-like, too, is the way the piece keeps aspiring to a blissful, clear C major (as in the Keats poem at the mention of ‘Sleep’) while continually being forced into stranger worlds of experience symbolized on the one hand by the obbligato instruments that join the basic string accompaniment (and in the Keats setting take over from it) and on the other by the constant flux of the harmony which explores areas scarcely imagined in the Serenade. The cycle closes with a Shakespeare setting in which the dichotomy of the self and the loved one is mirrored by the flux between and eventual fusion of the worlds of C and D that have inhabited the earlier songs. The orchestration, reminiscent of Mahler (to whose widow Britten dedicated the work as if to acknowledge the earlier composer’s influence), signals the seriousness and passionate nature of this dialogue of the soul, an exploration in miniature of the predicaments that were to extract such a rich response from Britten in his opera.

The same summer saw the completion (as a 50th birthday offering to Prince Ludwig, who drew Britten’s attention to the poems) of Sechs Hölderlin-Fragmente, which take up again the themes of the Songs from the Chinese in a fairly severe lieder-like style. At the heart of the cycle lies a radiant answer to the unbelieving questioner of the nature of Socrates’ love for Alcibiades in which the singer takes up the chromatic piano melody now ‘naturalized’ by the plain triads of the accompaniment. The concluding two songs, however, return to the autumnal atmosphere of the earlier cycle. The rigorous motivic and canonic workings of these songs prepare for the heterophonic yet tonally centred procedures of the final decade. A more jesting ‘academic’ approach to Schoenbergian procedures is to be found in the subsequent Cantata Academica, written in 1959 for the quincentenary of Basle University. With its ‘Tema seriale con fuga’ and other academic trappings lightly worn, a ponderous Latin text, and fairly unbuttoned manner (occasionally recalling Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex quite strongly), it is an occasional piece well calculated for the average university music group. A more spectacular piece of the same year, the Missa brevis, was written for George Malcolm and the boys of Westminster Cathedral Choir, and well calculated for the notably reedy tone of that group compared to the more usual white-toned English boys’ choir. In the Sanctus the boys magically project 12-note collections over D major triads in the organ to exciting effect, but Britten follows Bach in making the Agnus Dei a moment of personal tension that disturbs the otherwise lofty atmosphere of this tiny masterpiece.

A culminating work for the operatic stage of this period is A Midsummer Night's Dream, written to celebrate the enlargement of the Jubilee Hall at Aldeburgh. The idea occurred barely a year ahead of the first performance (in the 1960 festival), and Britten and Pears together cut and rearranged Shakespeare's play as a libretto. Britten (The Observer, 5 June 1960) said that the play appealed to him as the work of a very young man and as a story that involved three distinct groups, the Lovers, the Rustics (as he called the mechanicals) and the Fairies, which interact. More likely, after exploring the ambiguity of relationships in a realistic setting in Billy Budd and the fantasy of the unthinkable in the context of James's ghost story, he found in this play, which literary critics were just beginning to read as saturnalian rather than romantic, an ideal vehicle for pursuing his interests in the difficulties and dangers in human relationships. A crucial difference from Shakespeare occurs as the curtain rises: it is plain from the heavy breathing in the orchestra that we are already, in more senses than one, in the woods. Britten dispenses with the social context of Athens and the background of reality as an initiating device in favour of the darker world of the Nocturne, and moves here the furthest distance from the realistic borough of Peter Grimes into a private world, one of possibilities rather than limitations. The folk-festival or May-games aspect of Shakespeare's play, then, is matched by a contemporary notion of misrule, the world of the libido.

As if to reinforce the unreality, operatic convention itself is part of the subject, most obviously in the broad comedy of the mechanicals' play, a wicked send-up of 19th-century styles. The chorus that opens the opera is one of unbroken boys’ voices singing one of Britten's spiky unison tunes, as different from the romantic notion of fairies (and opera choruses) as could be imagined. On cue comes the expected entry of the prima donna and male lead, but in this case he is far from the ardent tenor of the Romantic era and as close as one can get to the primo uomo of 18th-century opera seria, the castrato. Along with the historical reference goes the association of unmanliness, and thus of gender liminality, that haunts the modern image of the homosexual, and the impression is enhanced by the Baroque style of his set pieces and the pseudo-gamelan sounds that attend his magic herb. A distant relation of Quint, he already has his Miles in Puck, not the hero's baritone friend of grand opera but a lithe tumbler with an adolescent voice who speaks rather than sings. The lovers sing lines that are eternally syllabic, in even notes, a sure sign in Britten's musical language that, though conventionally ‘good’, they are limited; their litany-like set piece after waking from their dream fails to separate their personalities, so that what is often seen as Shakespeare's own gloomy prognosis for love and marriage in patriarchal society finds an echo in Britten's pessimism. The only really tender relationship, and the only one that crosses social boundaries, is between the bewitched Tytania and the grotesque Bottom: the latter even usurps Oberon's falsetto voice in recalling it. But Bottom ends up back with his pals, and Tytania's radiant coloratura is silenced. The one truly romantic moment, as we might guess, is a regressive (and irresistible) transformation at the end of Act 2: Puck's ‘Jack shall have Jill / Naught shall go ill’ rhyme, sung by the fairy boys in 3rds against the ‘motto’ chords in a lush D major context that bleeds Shakespeare's verse of every drop of its irony.

In summer 1960 Britten revised Billy Budd, compressing its four acts into two. In September an invitation to a Shostakovich première led to his meeting the Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, who highly admired him, and with whom he immediately struck up a rich musical friendship and partnership (engagingly described by Carpenter, especially 397–404). This quickly led to a reawakening of abstract instrumental composition, abandoned since 1951 but for a few pieces for the Aldeburgh recorder group, a variation on Sellenger's Round for a composite coronation-year composition and a Fanfare for a pageant at Bury St Edmunds (1959). Too much has often been made of this ‘lapse’; Britten had no need of the ideology that demanded mastery in absolute instrumental forms. His adopting the Vaughan Williams model of national pre-eminence ruled out direct competition in symphonic music but not writing for outstanding, friendly and admiring performers – the impetus behind the ebullient Sonata in C for cello and piano, as it was behind the solo works of a decade earlier. 1961 and 1962 were otherwise dedicated to choral music, where it was necessary to stake a claim. A Hymn of St Columba (1962) is a slightly dark piece emanating from a bizarre anniversary, while Psalm 150 is the simplest of school songs written the same year for South Lodge (now renamed Old Buckenham Hall).

Britten’s crowning choral work, and for some possibly the pinnacle of his entire output, is the War Requiem, begun in the second half of 1961 as the result of a 1958 commission for the festival marking the consecration of the new cathedral at Coventry (see England, fig.14). Arguably, Britten became a victim of his own success, drowning his authentic ‘private voice’ as a result of inscribing himself into the English oratorio tradition with a grandiloquent work for soloists, massed choral forces and orchestra. An ingenious medievalism was evoked by troping the Latin text with a vernacular commentary. The historical resonance, combined with an evocation of the sublime in the form of a bombed cathedral in Britain's industrial midlands and of the metaphysical in the notion of reconciliation beyond the grave, gave the piece a portentous and grandiose character which seems oddly more of the age of Elgar than that of post-World War II. Some listeners have wondered whether the evocation of the end of Elgar's Dream of Gerontius in the concluding chorus is sufficiently undermined by the interruptions of boys and bells sounding the ominous augmented 4th that underpins the work. In terms of politics, too, questions have arisen about the application of a World War I pacifist message in a post-World War II context, as though the holocaust were not a factor to be reckoned with, as well as the silence on the topic of nuclear disarmament so germane to the early 1960s. The integrity of Britten's homosexual politics explains a great deal here, particularly the use of fellow pacifist and homosexual Wilfred Owen's poetry to transmit his anger about the fate of young men sent to their deaths by an unfeeling patriarchal system as well as his critique of empty religious forms in collusion with that system; possibly a metaphorical extension can be made to all innocent victims. But the choice of a major establishment genre in which to couch the powerful message of pacifism can only be explained as part of a strategy, perhaps unconscious, to gain acceptance for the artist while maintaining the subversion of his message. ‘All a poet can do is warn’ (in the words of Owen); but if the medium overwhelms the message, the warning loses urgency, irony is overwhelmed, and reception tends to become complacent.

A return to the more typical and more modest occasional style of Britten's choral music came a year later in Cantata misericordium, commissioned for the centenary of the International Red Cross. The string quartet component, the bass-tenor duo (Pears and Fischer-Dieskau in the early performances and recording) and the Latin text recall the grander work. But the scale is more suited to the swift telling of the simple and relevant tale of the Good Samaritan. A mixture of harp and piano brilliantly characterizes the spine-chilling anxiety of the baritone Traveller before he is attacked, and the subsequent focus on the Samaritan (the priest and Levite are chorally described rather than vocally personified) is dramatically apt for the moral (‘you now know who your neighbour is: go and do likewise’) without the point being laboured.

Britten, Benjamin