The Rest Is Noise Series: "Grimes! Grimes!"

The Passion of Benjamin Britten

Alex Ross

• Publisher: Fourth Estate
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780007522132
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

This is a chapter from Alex Ross’s groundbreaking history of twentieth-century classical music, ‘The Rest is Noise’. Further extracts are available as digital shorts, accompanying the London Southbank festival programme.

12

“GRIMES! GRIMES!”

The Passion of Benjamin Britten

Aldeburgh is a windswept fishing town on the east coast of the British Isles. “A bleak little place; not beautiful,” the novelist E. M. Forster called it. He went on: “It huddles around a flint-towered church and sprawls down to the North Sea—and what a wallop the sea makes as it pounds at the shingle! Near by is a quay, at the side of an estuary, and here the scenery becomes melancholy and flat; expanses of mud, saltish commons, the marsh-birds crying.”

Some decades later, the great German writer W. G. Sebald fell even more deeply in love with the oblique charms of Aldeburgh and neighboring villages, and devoted his book The Rings of Saturn to the geography and history of the region. “I had not a single thought in my head,” Sebald wrote, describing one of his walks across the flats. “With each step that I took, the emptiness within and the emptiness without grew ever greater and the silence more profound .. . I imagined myself amidst the remains of our own civilization after its extinction in some future catastrophe.”

There are ruins all around Aldeburgh. At Dunwich, a few miles up the coast from Aldeburgh, an entire medieval town has slid into the sea. Around Orford, to the south, the landscape is dotted with relics of two world wars and the Cold War that followed—gun em-placements, designed to impede a Nazi invasion that never came; radar masts, employing the technology invented by researchers in nearby Bawdsey Manor; Atomic Weapons Establishment facilities, looking like skeletons of palaces. When the weather changes, these wide-open vistas of sea and sky, with their stone and metal memories of the past, can have a somewhat terrifying effect. A mass of black cloud rears up behind a sunlit scene; the sea turns a dull, menacing green; an abandoned house groans in the wind. Then, in the next second, the light changes. The water assumes an iridescent color, as if lit from within. Anonymous jewels sparkle in the beach. The sun appears under the ceiling of cloud and floods the world.

In the Aldeburgh churchyard lies Benjamin Britten. He was born thirty miles up the coast, in Lowestoft, in 1913. His childhood home looked over the beach to the North Sea, or the German Ocean, as it was called before the First World War.

Britten lived for most of his life in the Aldeburgh area, and he once stated that all his music came from there. “I believe in roots, in associations, in backgrounds, in personal relationships,” he said in a speech in Aspen, Colorado, in 1964. “I want my music to be of use to people, to please them .. . I do not write for posterity.” Britten designed many of his pieces for performance in Aldeburgh’s Jubilee Hall and in churches around the area. In 1948, with his companion, the tenor Peter Pears, and the writer-director Eric Crozier, he founded the Aldeburgh Festival, which featured his own music, contemporary works from Europe and America, and favorite repertory of the past; it was a kind of anti-Bayreuth, as intimate as Wagner’s festival was grandiose.

Above all, Britten wrote Peter Grimes, an opera of staggering dramatic force that is soaked in Aldeburgh to its bones. First heard in June 1945, one month after the end of the European war, it tells of a fisherman who causes the death of his apprentices and loses his mind from guilt. The story comes from the poet George Crabbe, who grew up in Aldeburgh in the later eighteenth century, and apparently based the character of Grimes on a real-life case. Crabbe described the estuaries thus:

The dark warm flood ran silently and slow;
There anchoring, Peter chose from man to hide,
There hang his head, and view the lazy tide
In its hot slimy channel slowly glide . . .
Here dull and hopeless he’d lie down and trace
How sidelong crabs had scrawl’d their crooked race;
Or sadly listen to the tuneless cry
Of fishing gull or clanging golden-eye . . .

The first orchestral interlude in Britten’s opera brings the coast to life. High grace notes mimic the cries of birds; rainbowlike arpeggios imitate the play of light on the water; booming brass chords approximate the thudding of the waves. It is rich, expansive music, recalling Debussy’s La Mer and Mahler’s more pantheistic moods. Yet it hardly ravishes the senses: the orchestration is spare, the melodic figures are sharply turned, the plain harmonies flecked with dissonance. The music is poised perfectly between the familiar and the strange, the pictorial and the psychological. Like the tone poems of Sibelius, it gives shape to what a wanderer feels as he walks alone.

In his Aspen speech Britten provocatively compared the regimentation of culture in totalitarian states to the self-imposed regimentation of the avant-garde in democratic countries. Any ideological organization of music, he said, distorts a composer’s natural voice, his “gift and personality.” Everything about Britten’s style—his deliberate parochialism, his tonal orientation, his preference for classical forms—went against the grain of the postwar era. Luminaries of the avant-garde made a point of snubbing him; at the Dartington Summer School in 1959, Luigi Nono refused to shake his hand. Much else about Britten was at odds with Cold War social norms: his pacifism, his leftism, and especially his homosexuality.

Nonetheless, Britten succeeded in becoming a respected national figure, a focus of British pride. He was a little like Sibelius, a lonely, troubled man who became a patriotic icon. Even closer in temperament was Dmitri Shostakovich, whom Britten got to know in the 1960s. Despite the language barrier, the two composers formed a lasting bond. What they had in common was the ability to write elusive emotions across the surface of their music. Britten made his inner landscape as vivid as the rumble of the sea, the cries of the gulls, and the scuttling of the crabs.

Young Britten

Homosexual men, who make up approximately 3 to 5 percent of the general population, have played a disproportionately large role in composition of the last hundred years. Somewhere around half of the major American composers of the twentieth century seem to have been homosexual or bisexual: Copland, Thomson, Bernstein, Barber, Blitzstein, Cage, Harry Partch, Henry Cowell, Lou Harrison, Gian Carlo Menotti, David Diamond, and Ned Rorem, among many others. In Britain, too, the art of composition skewed gay. The two young composers who seized the spotlight in the early postwar era were Britten and Michael Tippett, neither of whom made an effort to hide his homosexuality.

The nexus of classical music and gay culture goes back at least to the final years of the nineteenth century, when aesthetes of the Oscar Wilde type gathered at Wagner nights in London and wore green carnations in their lapels. “Is he musical?” gay men would ask of an unfamiliar newcomer. As the century went on, conservatories and concert halls filled up with introverted boys who had trouble fitting in with their fellows. Classical music appealed to some gay youngsters because of the free-floating power of its emotions: while most pop songs explicitly address love and/or sex between modern boys and girls, opera renders romance in an archaic, stylized way, and instrumental works give voice to unspoken passions. Already in the first years of the century, this music had the reputation of being a “sissy” culture—the association troubled Charles Ives, for one—and its cultural decline in the postwar era may have had something to do with the discomfort that the homosexual ambience caused in the general population.

Gay composers of the early twentieth century seldom hinted at their sexuality in their work, although Francis Poulenc, Henri Sauguet, and other composers associated with the Ballets Russes inhabited a recognizably gay subculture. One who trembled at the edge of disclosure was the Polish composer Karol Szymanowski, whose output included an unpublished, now mostly lost novel of pornographic tendencies, titled Ephebos. In the wake of sexually liberating travels to the south of Italy and North Africa between 1908 and 1914, Szymanowski fashioned a fiercely sensuous style that recalled Debussy at his most turbulent and Scriabin in his high mystic phase. His 1914 song cycle The Love Songs of Hafiz dives into the heady world of the fourteenth-century Persian poet Hafiz, who used the allure of young men’s bodies as a metaphor for religious ecstasy, or perhaps the other way around. Szymanowski’s Third Symphony (1914–16), based on a similarly charged text by Rumi (“Oh, do not sleep, friend, through this night .. .”), culminates in an orgasmic whole-tone chord for voices, orchestra, and organ. And in the daring and strange opera King Roger (1918–24), the royal hero struggles to resist the Dionysian magnetism of a young shepherd who proclaims, “My God is as beautiful as I am.” The ending is ambiguous: the audience is unsure whether Roger has succumbed to the shepherd or overcome him. In the wake of the shepherd’s final orgiastic ritual, Roger is left alone, holding his arms to the sun of Apollo, C-major harmony blazing around him.

The conflict between Dionysus and Apollo is a well-worn metaphor. Stravinsky often mused upon the divide; in the Rite he sided with the Dionysian, in Apollon musagète with the call to order. Britten understood the polarity much as Szymanowski did, not as an intellectual problem but as an acute personal dilemma, a choice between sexual exposure and sexual restraint. He ended his operatic career by setting to music Thomas Mann’s novella Death in Venice, in which Dionysus and Apollo battle for the soul of a middle-aged man looking at a boy on a beach. What perplexe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• “Grimes! Grimes!”
• Notes
• Suggested Listening and Reading
• Copyright
• About the Publisher