Outsider turned Insider

In life and work, Benjamin Britten often pondered or placed himself on the periphery. Choosing Suffolk rather than London as a home, pursuing pacifist convictions at potentially considerable cost, as well as maintaining an active gay life, despite the then illegality of homosexual acts, Britten could never have been said to have led an easy existence. His music often reflected these private concerns on the public stage, placing the seeming outsider right at the heart of British culture.

Peter Grimes (1945) had its premiere almost immediately after VE Day, popping the optimistic post-war balloon, while his decidedly ambiguous Billy Budd (1951) was first performed in the midst of the Festival of Britain. The success of these works meant that Britten himself was not left on the periphery for long. Commissions for an opera to mark the 1953 coronation soon followed, as did ballets for Covent Garden, a grand oratorio for the opening of Coventry Cathedral and, eventually, he was made Baron Britten of Aldeburgh. Almost in spite of his quest to give musical voice to the outsider, Britten became a member of the establishment.

Britten’s biography may not quite read as the rags to riches tale of musical yore, though his achievements were nonetheless considerable. Born in Lowestoft to mundane middle class Suffolk stock, he naturally gravitated towards the bright lights and cultural offerings of London during his teenage and student years. It was there that Britten was introduced to W.H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood and a whole host of predominantly homosexual but exclusively left wing writers, novelists, playwrights and artists. Proximity to such brilliant minds stoked Britten’s creative fire – Auden, Britten later said, ‘was such a large personality, a whirlwind one, if you like, and, of course, I was swept away by his poetry’ – but the late 1930s also proved trying.

Auden and Britten met through their work for the GPO film unit, where they created the famous Night Mail (1936) documentary. While those films had a certain Marxist tinge, the clique’s political edge was most patent in its work for the Group Theatre. Auden and Isherwood’s plays The Dog Beneath the Skin and The Ascent of F6, and Britten’s song cycle Our Hunting Fathers from 1936 collectively mock the bourgeois background from which all three public school boys had come.

For Britten, however, as Donald Mitchell explained, ‘épater les bourgeois was a temporary need’; he ‘would soon be glad to win the middle classes over to his side’. The forthright political opinions and even franker sexual behaviour of Auden’s coterie challenged Britten’s middle class and bashful sensibilities. Little wonder that he wrote in his diary in June 1936 that ‘life is a pretty hefty struggle these days – sexually as well’. He was effectively rendered an outsider in a group of outsiders.

Instead of settling in London, Britten decided to move back to Suffolk, buying an old post mill in Snape with the money left to him by his mother at her death. The property was extensively renovated and Britten made his home in the village, just outside Aldeburgh. Yet however physically and mentally rooted he felt, the threat of war in Europe drove Britten, along with many other young intellectuals, away from home. Britten and his new friend and eventual lover, the tenor Peter Pears, were, by definition, unknowns when they arrived in America, though were soon readily embraced by the cultured locals.

Taken under the wing of the beneficent Elizabeth Mayer on the East Coast as well as famous émigrés in Hollywood, Britten’s thoughts could easily have drifted away from the war, particularly given America’s lack of immediate focus on hostilities before the Attack on Pearl Harbor at the end of 1941. Back at home, however, things were different. Britten’s absence had been noted, not least by one Pilot Officer E.R. Lewis, who wrote to The Musical Times about the establishment’s clemency towards a nameless (but obvious) absentee composer. Were Britten to return home, he would have to face the music.

The eventual call back from America came not from those critics, though on returning Britten did have to face the conscientious objectors’ tribunal. Instead it was Suffolk itself that drew Britten back. E.M. Forster’s broadcast for The Listener about the Aldeburgh-born poet George Crabbe and his poem The Borough tapped a significant homesick nerve. The broadcast marked the beginning of work on Peter Grimes, Britten’s new opera about the ‘visionary and highly skilled fisherman, [who] is very unpopular with the community, just because he is different’. If one substituted composer for fisherman, Britten easily could have been talking about himself.

Composer Michael Tippett was among those who became wary of the piece, thinking that its representation of ‘the individual against a wicked society’ was somewhat problematic. For while the title character’s ‘Now the Great Bear and Pleiades’ and his final scene makes him seem like a visionary in otherwise desolate surroundings, Grimes is equally prone to disastrous violence. Yet despite these tensions and the opera’s potentially ill-timed appearance in June 1945, just as returning Britons were celebrating their hard earned if bloody victory, Peter Grimes catapulted its composer into the public eye. The pacifist homosexual outsider, who placed a violent but poetic fisherman at the heart of his first major opera, was soon British culture’s most vaunted product.

Britten’s fame brought others to the party, who were soon commissioning and performing new works. Premieres around the world confirmed the composer’s celebrity, though he steadfastly maintained his home in Suffolk, founding the English Opera Group on his own esoteric terms and, subsequently, the Aldeburgh Festival, which continues to this day. His ensuing stage works likewise continued to focus on those who are ostracised or are placed outside the norm. Albert Herring (1947) is in its own comic way a continued exploration of the themes presented in Peter Grimes. Despite the persistence of these fascinations and the composer’s choice of domicile, the establishment slowly embraced Britten. From his new position on the inside, Britten was further able to explore the idea of the outsider.

Even in notably ‘public’ works such as Billy Budd and the somewhat flaccid Gloriana (1953), Britten continued to pose significant questions. The seemingly ordered world of the Royal Navy in his, Eric Crozier and E.M. Forster’s adaptation of Henry Melville’s short story is turned upside down, leaving the pensive and intellectual Captain Vere ‘lost on the infinite sea’. Even Queen Elizabeth I in Gloriana, an opera composed for and premiered during the Coronation celebrations, appears more like an outsider than an insider within the realm she rules and surveys. She is isolated by her station and unable to temper the course of time. The Governess’s situation in The Turn of the Screw (1954) may be different, though she is similarly isolated. Although it is her story that is being told in Britten’s opera, we cannot help feel that she poses more questions than she answers.

Collectively these works ponder struggles of power and sexuality and, although they are less overt than the brutal Peter Grimes, there can no doubt that Britten felt great affinity with the characters at their core. But it was perhaps not until War Requiem in 1962, Owen Wingrave in 1971 and Death in Venice right at the end of his life that Britten returned to subjects that spoke most directly to his feelings, his difficulties and his character. War Requiem, he said, was ‘a kind of reparation’, both for the deaths of his friends to whom it is dedicated and an acknowledgement of his own conscientious objection to the hostilities between 1939 to 1945. Given the Cold War and its particularly hostile manifestations in South East Asia at the time of the work’s premiere, Britten’s conscience doubtless remained keen, as a preview in The Times described:

It is not a Requiem to console the living: sometimes it does not even help the dead to sleep soundly. It can only disturb every living soul, for it denounces the barbarism more or less awake in mankind with all the authority that a great composer can muster.

As in his operas – War Requiem has fittingly been described by Gilles Couderc as Britten’s ‘Wilfred Owen opera’ – Britten used his position to question the basic principles of our national and collective identity. He continued to probe that subject in the pacifist tracts of Owen Wingrave, before turning the focus on himself in Death in Venice.

When Britten began work on Death in Venice, as a composer of rank, renown and riches, any previous outsider status had dissolved, yet it had done so based on Britten’s own terms. He had avoided making a home in London and instead pulled part the country’s cultural gravity towards his native Suffolk. He maintained a loving, physical relationship with Peter Pears, despite the threat of imprisonment, eventually witnessing the decriminalisation of homosexual acts in 1967. And his pacifist principles had and continue to be vindicated by conflicts across the globe. And it is to Britten’s great credit that in his final opera he dared to ponder his own position. What is the role of the artist? How and where is he to find inspiration? Is it apposite? Is it suitable? These are the lasting questions of the former outsider who became an insider, albeit remaining one of the most determined and inquisitive composers of recent times.

This article was first published in the programme for Opera North's Festival of Britten.

Tweet