Britten, Voice and Piano

Lectures on the Vocal Music of Benjamin Britten

Graham Johnson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351218207
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

This collection of eight 'lectures' by internationally acclaimed pianist, Graham Johnson, is based on a series of concert talks given at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama as part of the Benjamin Britten festival in 2001. The focus of the book is on Britten's songs, starting with his earliest compositions in the genre. Graham Johnson suggests that the nature of Britten's creativity is especially apparent in his setting of poetry, that he becomes the poet's alter-ego. A chapter on Britten's settings of Auden and Eliot explores the particular influences these writers brought to bear at opposite poles of the composer's life. The inspiration of fellow musicians is also discussed, with a chapter devoted to Britten's time in Russia and his friendship with the Rostropovitch family. Closer to home, the book places in context Britten's folksong settings, illustrating how he subverted the English folksong tradition by refusing to accept previous definitions of what constituted national loyalty. Drawing on letters and diaries, and featuring a number of previously unpublished photographs, this book illuminates aspects of Britten's songs from the personal perspective of the pianist who worked closely with Peter Pears after Benjamin Britten was unable to perform through illness. Johnson worked with Pears on learning the role of Aschenbach in 'Death in Venice' and was official pianist for the first master class given by Peter Pears at Snape in 1972.

Lecture 1
The young Britten 1913–35

DOI: 10.4324/9781351218221-2

Edith, Benjamin, Robert (junior) and Robert (senior), c. 1930

Benjamin Britten was born in November 1913, the fourth of four children, and six years younger than his brother Robert – a Benjamin in a Biblical sense. He was protected and indulged by his mother (aged 40 at his birth), who believed from very early on that he would become one of the ‘great Bs’ of music. (This is rather comical considering the composer’s later dislike of the music of both Beethoven and Brahms.) Edith Britten (née Hockey) was a very strong character and almost unreasonably ambitious for her son. She was also a fine amateur singer with a voice that had a timbre very similar to that of Peter Pears.¹ (Pears himself told me that Edith Britten’s rendition of Liza Lehmann’s enchanting song The Swing especially delighted her son.) It is nothing new for highly gifted musicians both to benefit and suffer from an over-protective parent. Mrs Britten’s early death in 1937 (his father died in 1934) left Britten an orphan at the age of 23. It is significant that the flowering of the composer’s friendship with Peter Pears took place only after both of his parents were dead; it seems noteworthy that Pears took on a protective role in Britten’s life as his public voice and exponent and often shielded him from criticism and worry.

1. This was noted by Basil Reeve, who mentioned it to Beth Britten. See Benjamin Britten Letters from a Life, Volume 1, eds Donald Mitchell and Philip Reed (Faber and Faber, 1998), p.14.

The first sound that the composer of the War Requiem remembered was the sound of an exploding Zeppelin, very near to his house in Lowestoft, the coastal town in Suffolk where his father had a dental practice. This reminds us that Britten was a young child during the First World War, and that talk of the bereavement experienced by almost every family in Britain at the time must have been among his earliest memories of adult conversation. (Whether the sound of this Zeppelin played a part in his lifelong horror of war we shall never know.) Britten’s first attempts at composition date from 1919 when he was six – incidental music for a play he had written himself entitled The Royal Falily (he was unable to spell ‘family’, just as he was to mis-spell ‘waltzes’ as ‘walztes’ on another early manuscript). The fact that the six-year-old Britten wrote a fanfare (decorative notes on paper rather than precisely imagined music), and that he stage-managed the whole enterprise, is a prophecy of the highly controlling opera composer of the future. This piece was inspired by the death of Prince John, the youngest son of King George V.² It is interesting that even as a child Britten already had one foot in the fantasy of fairy-tale and the other in the realities of what was happening in the outside world. In those days royal tragedies were discussed with heartfelt loyalty at the dinner tables of faithful subjects across the land. ‘The Child is father of the Man’ as Wordsworth put it: this is the same composer who would later work for the GPO Film Unit when he was able to produce music for films on contemporary subjects at very short notice.

2. Prince John was the subject of a BBC television play by Steven Poliakov in January 2003.

Benjamin Britten, aged ten, 1923

Britten began piano lessons at about the age of eight but, no doubt thanks to his mother, he was already way ahead in his musical development. The early 1920s saw the composition of a ‘Symphony’ in F major/minor for violin, cello and piano as well as an incomplete ‘Symphony’ in C for piano. Right from the beginning Britten’s attraction to the voice is also apparent. There were many early songs dating from this period but only two were selected for posthumous publication in 1985. Is it sheer chance (or can one detect a humorous intent on the part of the publisher) that the texts of both songs (Burns’s ‘O that I’d ne’er been married’ and Longfellow’s ‘Beware!’) are almost comically appropriate to Britten’s status as a lifelong bachelor? The Longfellow poem with which our festival began has a note of wary misogyny:

Beware! (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow)

I know a maiden fair to see,

Take care!

She can both false and friendly be,

Beware! Beware!

Trust her not,

She’s fooling thee! Beware!

She has two eyes, so soft and brown,

Take care!

She gives a side-glance and looks down,

Beware! Beware!

Trust her not,

She’s fooling thee! Beware!

For someone of eight or nine to write music that is this direct, this aware of the vocal line and potential of the human voice, is almost a Mozartian feat. The trap that most young composers fall into is running before they can walk; here this is avoided. The musical calligraphy of this piece (the manuscript is reproduced in the Mitchell/Evans Pictures from a Life) is extraordinarily neat for so young a composer (the proud creator ‘E.B. Britten’). His attention to spacing, lay-out and the painstaking addition of a decorative scroll for the title shows the meticulous nature of someone who was to remain fussy and demanding with his publishers, and always insistent on their close attention to his wishes.

This commentary now continues as a chronology, year by year, which forms an overview of Britten’s vocal output in these early years; if full details of the piano pieces, orchestral works and chamber music were also to be listed this would of course be a much longer catalogue. Works preceded by an asterisk are still to be published and are usually still relatively unknown to the public and most scholars:³

3. Much work has been done on Britten’s juvenilia recently, and several of these unpublished early works were broadcast on BBC Radio 3 in ‘Britten’s Apprenticeship’: four programmes (November to December 1995) with Philip Reed and Paul Hindmarsh (presenters). Other early works have received concert performances.

1923 (aged 10–11)

*‘Here we go in a Flung Festoon’ (Kipling) voice and piano

*Recitative: ‘And Seeing the Multitudes’ and aria: ‘Blessed are they that Mourn’ (incomplete) for voice and piano

1924 (aged 11–12)

This year seems to have been given over to works for piano and strings. In October 1924 Britten saw Frank Bridge, his future teacher and mentor, conduct his orchestral suite The Sea at the Norwich Triennial Festival.

1925 (aged 12–13)

The achievements of 1925 include larger-scale orchestral music, not forgetting piano music: ten waltzes, six *scherzos, seven *fantasias and four *sonatas. It is little wonder that Britten composed so little for solo piano in later life; he seems to have exhausted his curiosity for this medium early on. The most unusual piece so far was *Variations on Dyke’s ‘How Bright these Glorious Spirits Shine’ for chorus, string orchestra, organ and piano. A *Mass in E minor was begun in March.

1926 (aged 13–14)

Britten passed his finals (Associated Board Grade VIII) with honours. The fascination with piano writing continued unabated: an example is *Sonata (Grand) No. 8 in C minor, but titles like Mazurka, Rondo, Suite fantastique, Poème all make an appearance. The onset of puberty seems to have caused a veritable flood of music. Britten also begins to write for his beloved viola (a piece entitled *‘First Loss’) – an instrument which he had begun to study in 1923. *‘The Brook’ for voice and violin strikes a Schubertian note, at least in its title. In terms of precocity Britten was somewhere between a Mozart and a Schubert – indeed, the twelve- or thirteen-year-old Britten struggling to become himself makes a fascinating comparison with Schubert at the same age in 1811. Between 12 November and 5 December 1926 Britten composed a set of six songs for voice and piano; these have not since seen the light of day.

1927 (aged 14–15)

*Four Nursery Rhymes for voice and piano were composed in January of this year; these were perhaps inspired by a contemporary vogue for humorous settings of this kind by Victor Hely-Hutchinson and Herbert Hughes. In February he composed a *Kyrie in B-flat minor for chorus and orchestra. *Eight Rounds (Sacred) for voices shows a continuing interest in choral music. A *Cavatina for String Quartet shows that Beethoven was still a revered model (see, for example, the Cavatina from that composer’s String Quartet Op. 130). The most ambitious choice of text so far was a scene from Shelley’s *Prometheus Unbound in B flat for chorus, strings and piano. The young composer’s *Piano Sonata No. 10 (September) happens to be in the same key. In October Britten once again attended the Norwich Triennial Festival; here he heard Frank Bridge conduct the première of his Enter Spring. After the performance Britten’s viola teacher, Audrey Alston, introduced the young composer to the visiting celebrity. This meeting, a month before Britten’s 14th birthday, was arguably the most important of his life. The next day (28 October) Bridge looked at some of the younger composer’s more recent compositions and agreed to take him on as a pupil. From then on Britten visited Bridge’s homes in London and Friston (near Eastbourne in Sussex) on a regular basis; his progress to technical mastery was now amazingly quick and sure-footed.

Britten with Ethel and Frank Bridge, c. 1930

To the end of his days a framed photograph of Frank and Ethel Bridge had pride of place in Britten’s bedroom. Bridge was a mentor and parental figure for the young Britten and there is nothing else in the history of British music quite like this relationship between the generations. Mammoth lessons lasted for hours; Mrs Bridge would come into the room saying ‘Frank, the boy has had enough!’ Bridge’s teaching was characterised by lots of contrapuntal exercises, constructive criticism that pulled no punches, and detailed discussion of harmony, form, orchestration and so on. The older composer taught the boy to be technically ambitious and how to be nothing more, nor less, than himself. ‘You should try to find yourself and be true to what you found’, was how Britten later summed up what Bridge taught him.⁴ Although s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements and sources
• List of illustrations
• Introduction
• Lecture 1. The Young Britten 1913–35
• Lecture 2. Britten abroad: Italy, Poland, France and Germany
• Lecture 3. The British folksong settings
• Lecture 4. A miscellany of folksongs
• Lecture 5. Britten the Elizabethan, Britten and the Baroque
• Lecture 6. Beginnings (Auden) and ends (Eliot)
• Lecture 7. Britten and Russia
• Lecture 8. Britten and the English Landscape
• CD contents
• Index