8. Final testaments, 1970–76.

Britten was no fan of television: he did not own a set until Decca gave him one for his 60th birthday. But with the Maltings available, he determined around 1968 to go ahead with a television opera on a more obscure Henry James ghost story which for him had ‘much the same quality as the Screw’ (Carpenter, 508). Owen Wingrave, completed in August 1970, recorded in November and broadcast simultaneously in Europe and America in May 1971, is at one level a final testament on pacifism. The hero, scion of a military family, determines not to embark on an army career; disinherited as a result, he is goaded by his financée's taunt of cowardice into being locked into the haunted room of the family mansion. On unlocking the door in remorse, she discovers him dead. The opera places great condemnatory weight on tradition and the family, the power of which is maintained in the almost complete absence of male authority (an old general totters through his expected gestures) by three women portrayed with unmitigated hostility in both music and television image as shoring up the patriarchy; we are barely invited to sympathize with any of them. ‘The massive audience was a wonderful opportunity for Britten to make his personal statement about war and the empty glory of heroism, in the context of the Vietnam War and the shooting of students … on Kent [State University] campus’ (Graham, in Herbert, E1979, p.54). Given McClatchie's successful attempt (E1996) to show at another level how the discourse of homosexuality is displaced on to that of pacifism, the work may equally represent Britten’s pessimism about gay militancy, recently energized by the New York Stonewall Riots of 1969. Owen's determination to be true to himself in the face of the enemy – tradition and the family – leads to a classic ‘coming out’ scene that Britten, schooled in a discretionary age, could never have contemplated for himself. James cannot resist the irony of Owen's embracing peace only to die ‘all the young soldier on the gained field’, a point that Britten and Piper underscore (Owen's reaction to past military heroes, like his own ancestors, is to want to ‘hang the lot’). Similarly, Britten and James send Owen literally back into his closet at the end of the opera, and kill him off as well: at least he has found ‘peace’. Musically this happens in one of Britten's most celebrated arias not only accompanied by diatonic triads (like the ‘interview’ scene in Billy Budd) but also given an overlay of gamelan music – the kind that in The Prince of the Pagodas signifies at best utopianism or nescience, at worst polymorphous perversity, definitely not erotic allure. Britten's musical irony, in which each level peeled away reveals a further one beyond, extends to a critique of his own exoticism. The Wingrave family portraits are heralded by a pseudo-gamelan flourish with a militaristic tattoo on the drums; it opens the opera and recurs whenever they loom. The almost inaudible pitches, however, consist of one of the several 12-note collections of the opera, one that notably provides the diminished intervals that consign the Wingraves to the obsolescent and evil European past. Britten once compared Balinese music to Schoenberg in terms of complication, but mapping the one onto the other was to commit a meaningful kind of sacrilege: it undermines any attempt to think of signs as stable in his music and supports a pessimistic reading. Self-determination is a chimera, the opera seems to say, for there is always some ghost to disturb the perfect dénouement. Just as the pacifist can fight militarism only in its own terms (and lose in those terms), so the problem of the homosexual is to escape the history of sexuality into a new life without replicating the old ‘straight’ order, something understandably inconceivable to Britten. As in Peter Grimes, Britten appears instinctively to have anticipated an argument that would take queer theorists a decade or more to articulate. This opera may seem to preach, but it repays study as the testament of a man resigned to the way things are but nevertheless continuing to protest.

The 1970 Aldeburgh Festival was marked not only by the attendance of the Queen for the reopening of the Maltings but also by an article in The Observer (7 June), ‘At the Court of Benjamin Britten’. This put a name to the atmosphere typified architecturally by the extraordinary aperture on the side of the auditorium in which Britten, Pears and Imogen Holst would appear as icons to be worshipped and as judges of all that took place. Britten seemed to be losing his draw, his music gleefully seen as increasingly ‘thin’ by cognoscenti, the working conditions alienating performers, Aldeburgh politics becoming extra-Byzantine and the Russians failing to turn up because of political problems of their own. The pointless game of Tippett versus Britten seemed to be going in Tippett's favour. Not unexpectedly, Britten retired further into the Suffolk countryside, taking a house at Horham to escape Aldeburgh's increasing aircraft noise. In the following summer, Britten and Pears, full of ambitious ideas for the expansion of the Maltings into a full-scale arts centre and music school, clashed with the long-suffering festival manager, Stephen Reiss, in a deplorable manner that led to his resignation. The first three months of 1971 nevertheless saw the completion of two new works. Canticle IV, Journey of the Magi, a slightly detached and interior setting of the uneasy T.S. Eliot poem about death-in-birth and the difficulty of change, was written for the three singers, James Bowman, Pears and John Shirley-Quirk, who were to be principals in the next opera, already then in the planning stage. The third and most passionate Cello Suite incorporates four Russian themes, three folksongs arranged by Tchaikovsky and the moving Kontakion (Hymn for the Dead) which, as in earlier Britten solo works, are offered in their plain forms only at the end. It marks the culmination of a body of work inspired by Rostropovich's rich and romantic performance of the Bach unaccompanied suites.

In September 1970 Britten asked Myfanwy Piper to write a libretto for an opera on Thomas Mann's novella Death in Venice, an idea he had entertained for some time. The project moved forward at an unusually deliberate pace for Britten, and was not thrown off the rails by advance publicity, or even by the need to do something about the cardiac deterioration his doctor diagnosed in August 1972. The composer was both determined and ‘desperately keen to make it the best thing I have ever done’ (Carpenter, 534). The composition sketch was finished by Christmas 1972, the scoring early the following spring. Britten's need to complete the work is understandable because it views the great themes of his music, from a fundamentally different and freshly revealing viewpoint. Aschenbach the writer's relation to a handsome young boy, Tadzio, is created entirely in his imagination through the play of bodily form, motion, gesture and sound. His obsession is reflected by dense motivic allusion and serial manipulation in the music, and the beauty of Tadzio appropriately represented by dance and the bright ring of Balinese-inspired sounds. A particularly brilliant decision was the assignment to a single singer of the seven Hermes-like characters who stage Aschenbach's journey towards death – or is it transfiguration? This has led critics into interpreting the work as a parable of artistic endeavour, hinging on the need for balance between Dionysian urges and Apollonian regulation along the lines of Mann's response to Nietzsche's theory of art.

But two facts have to be recognized before the critic can dispense with sex in favour of metaphysics: one is the cry wrung from Aschenbach at the end of Act 1 (‘I – love you’), the other (elegantly outlined by Travis, E1987, pp.132–3) that the notes accompanying the tortured 12-note monologue in which Aschenbach laments his creative impotence at the opening of the opera resolve into the ‘Tristan chord’, with a two-octave upward displacement of its tenor note B. The E–F tensions of Act 1 can also be seen to be derived from Wagner's opening melodic gesture. Sex and sexuality cannot, then, be spirited away but are presented along Nietzsche's inclusive model as reaching to the highest peaks of the intellect, not opposed to it. Further, the discourse Mann presents and Britten develops with Hellenic references – the Games of Apollo and The Dream – belongs to an older order of same-sex relations than 19th-century homosexuality, that of Greek pederasty, which embraces the entire history and condition of culture in the West. Imbuing the image of Tadzio with the sounds of Bali, moreover, took Mann's discourse a stage further, elaborating on his suggestion of the Asiatic origins of the libidinous cult of Dionysus, and also of the cholera carried by the sirocco. This was dramatically apt, since the mind-driven Aschenbach through whom we perceive both Venice and Tadzio would be culturally conditioned to project them both in terms of the exotic, that which is Other. This Asian-derived music, then, opens up the meanings of the opera to embrace the European philosophical discourse of Self and Other, and in turn to invoke the West's insatiable appetite for colonization – the same patterns of domination being apparent here as in classical pederasty. These are some of the themes of this multifarious and magnificient work, at one level a ‘musical autobiography’ (Carpenter, 554), at another an engagement with postwar, post-colonial Britain and the culture of the West.

After the completion of the opera, and celebrations of events with personal friends, Britten went into hospital on 6 April 1973, and underwent an operation on 7 May to replace a failing heart valve. The operation was successful, but he suffered a slight stroke which affected his right hand, and the results were ultimately disappointing. Convalescence did not go smoothly and Britten felt unable to compose, perhaps for the first time. 60th birthday celebrations in November were held without his participation. Rostropovich visited in January 1974 to play the Cello Suite no.3 to Britten, who made some revisions. A little later Donald Mitchell interested him in revising the String Quartet in D (1931) for publication by Faber Music. At the National Heart Hospital where the operation was done, Britten became friendly with a senior sister, Rita Thomson, who went to Aldeburgh that Easter to look after him and stayed for the rest of his life. He improved notably under her care and began slowly to face serious work again, revising Paul Bunyan, some numbers of which had been given at the 1974 Aldeburgh Festival.

The first new work, completed in July that year, was Canticle V, The Death of Saint Narcissus. The setting of a dense and complicated early poem of T.S. Eliot, it was written for Pears to the accompaniment of Ellis's harp, a poignant reminder that the composer's accompanying days were past – but not the imagination that could create the beautiful, damaged ‘dancer before God’ in so few and eloquent strokes, faintly recalling the erotic intensity of Les illuminations. A projected Christmas opera along the lines of Noye's Fludde never progressed beyond sketches, but while staying with Margaret Hesse at Wolfsgarten, he began the Suite on English Folk Tunes, and completed it in November. Its subtitle, ‘A time there was…’ comes from the Hardy poem, ‘Before Life and After’, that closes Winter Words, and the work, undertaken as a frame for Hankin Booby (1966), provides an elegant and nostalgic farewell to the folk and traditional music from which Britten had drawn so much; it was ‘lovingly and reverently dedicated to the memory of Percy Grainger’, with whom he identified as against the other English folksong composer-collectors. Another work recalling the brilliance of Britten's writing for unaccompanied chorus followed almost immediately. Sacred and Profane, written for Pears's Wilbye Consort and completed in January 1975, takes eight medieval lyrics and sets them with a breathtaking directness and artful simplicity. Most moving in their intensity are the two laments for Christ on the cross, but good humour is not lacking, especially in the final song, which not only catalogues the attributes of death and decay with verve but ends on a suitably defiant note. The delight that Britten took in modifying simple strophic shapes in setting these medieval poems also provides enormous pleasure in A Birthday Hansel, a short cycle of Burns poems for high voice and harp written at the request of Queen Elizabeth for her mother's 75th birthday (4 August 1975); completed in March, they were performed for the Queen Mother by Pears and Ellis the following January.

These three works were in a sense a final tribute to the musicianship and voice of Peter Pears, who was kept away from Aldeburgh for extended periods during Britten's illness. In autumn 1974 he was in New York for the Metropolitan Opera production of Death in Venice and during this period Britten, after hearing a broadcast of their last British recital in 1972, put down in writing all that Pears's voice, personality and artistry had meant to him: their exchange of letters is deeply expressive of their remarkable partnership, unparalleled in 20th-century music (for the texts, see Carpenter, 568–9).

At the 1975 festival, Janet Baker sang Berlioz's cycle Nuits d'été, and Britten decided to compose something for her on verse from Robert Lowell's free translation of Racine's Phèdre. An opera being now beyond his physical powers, he wrote a dramatic cantata in Handelian form, in which Phaedra addresses other characters (Aphrodite, Hippolytus, Oenone, Theseus) in discrete arias and recitatives, the latter accompanied by the traditional continuo instruments, harpsichord and cello. There is no glorification of Hippolytus in Phaedra, merely a ‘thin’ presto depiction of Phaedra's obsession, with Racinian irony (see Palmer, D1984, p.410). Theseus is more beautifully outlined in a sweeping Apollonian A major theme (in key and opening gesture it recalls Theseus's celebratory theme in Act 3 of A Midsummer Night's Dream). But more glorious still is the dénouement, in steadily rising ten-part string chords, an unusual sonority for Britten, in which the sexual outlaw, having made her forthright confession, finds nobility, peace and purity in an almost unsullied C major; sweet, fleeting, reminiscences of her life flicker as she dies and her spirit ascends in an apotheosis of muted string diatonic chord clusters rising through two octaves over the expiring pedal C.

Hans Keller, to whom Britten dedicated his last major work, the String Quartet no.3, wrote that here the composer had taken ‘that decisive step beyond – into the Mozartian realm of the instrumental purification of opera’ (Herbert, E1979, p.xv). Another way of putting that without endorsing the genre over the substance is to say that there is really no music of Britten's that fails to render meanings. Owing to his eternal seeking and questioning and the ambiguity with which he managed to imbue the common musical symbols of his tradition, those meanings are rarely simple. Quotations from Death in Venice occur in the recitative introduction to the passacaglia finale, appropriately sketched on a last visit to Venice in November 1975, and allusions to the opera are made in various ways throughout. The agenda probably includes the redemption or transfiguration of Aschenbach, with whom the composer clearly identified, to whose E major both first and last movements reach. But the most complete tonal resolution, on Britten's ‘own’ C major, occurs in the enigmatic central movement of the five, ‘Solo’; and the end, when it arrives, not only comes ‘with a question’, as Britten put it, but draws attention both to the arbitrary nature of closure (in art as in life) and in retrospect to the more complete closures earlier on (see Rupprecht, in Cooke, D1999, p.258). Whatever the interpretation, few listeners will doubt that this is as profound a work as anything Britten wrote.

It is nevertheless appropriate that his last complete work, finished in August 1976, was the unpretentious and cheerful Welcome Ode, written for a local occasion – a visit of the Queen Mother to Ipswich – and designed for ‘young people's chorus and orchestra’. As Evans pointed out (D1979, p.292), the development of instrumental teaching and growth of youth orchestras in Britain made it possible for Britten to demand a good deal, and it is fitting that his mission as a composer should have ended not with the high-flown quartet but this straightforward and unpatronizing gesture to the children he loved so much. In fact, work had become increasingly difficult during 1976, and was made up largely of what he might at other times have called ‘chores’ – a Tema ‘Sacher’ that Rostropovich could play for the 70th birthday of Paul Sacher, an arrangement for viola and string orchestra of Lachrymae and some folksong arrangements for Pears and Ellis. In July he started on a project to mark Rostropovich's first season with the National SO in Washington, DC, a cantata setting of the poem Edith Sitwell had dedicated to him, ‘Praise we Great Men’. The work remained incomplete, reaching a performable state only through the efforts of Colin Matthews, the young composer who had assisted with the scoring of Death in Venice and had become more intimately involved in Britten's composing as the older composer became increasingly infirm.

During the 1976 Aldeburgh Festival, in which the revised Paul Bunyan was staged and Phaedra made a deeply emotional impact, Britten was awarded a life peerage. Plenty of musicians had received knighthoods but none a peerage; according to Rosamund Strode, ‘Ben didn't mind about himself in the least. He just felt it was marvellous for music’ (Carpenter, 580). Others have viewed his acceptance with puzzlement or irony: but it seems entirely characteristic of the man who wanted so much to belong to the society he thought he didn't fit into. By this time he was desperately ill, and even took communion from a bishop who visited. On his birthday in November he took leave of his closest friends, and during the night of 3–4 December he died in the arms of Peter Pears.

Britten, Benjamin