Download Britten and War essay

Britten and War
Benjamin Britten was born on St Cecilia’s Day, 22 November 1913 so the first years of his
life were dominated by First World War although father, a dentist, did not serve. Apart from
claiming he could remember being born Britten said his earliest memory was being woken in
his pram by a German bomb and woke up claiming that the Germans were trying to kill him.
He was the youngest of 4 children, but the only one to show musical talent and was pushed
by his mother who referred to him as the fourth B after Bach, Beethoven and Brahms. Aged
8 (1921) he went to South Lodge Preparatory School where he had his first music lessons.
He learnt the viola in 1923 with Audrey Alston. In 1924 he attended his first orchestral
concert and heard Bridge’s The Sea which had a huge effect on him. In 1927 he heard
Bridge’s Enter Spring and met Bridge showing him some compositions. Bridge agreed to
give him lessons in the Christmas holidays. In 1928 he left South Lodge as head boy and
victor ludorum (he loved cricket and tennis) but his last essay on Animals included an attack
on hunting and all forms of aggression including war which his teachers refused to mark. His
pacifism was largely influenced by Bridge’s stories of the First World War. He won a
scholarship to Gresham’s where he refused to join the Officers’ Training Corps. In 1930
Bridge wrote Oration for the victims of the First World War, a cello concerto which was to
influence Britten. In the same year Britten gained a scholarship to the Royal College of
Music being interviewed by Vaughan Williams and Ireland. The latter was one of his
teachers along with Arthur Benjamin.
In 1934 he graduated from the Royal College, his father died of cancer and he had his first
work broadcast, A Boy Was Born. In 1935, determined to make a career as a composer he
joined GPO film unit, which was mainly left wing. In 1936 a film called Peace for Britain
was commissioned by the League of Nations and supported by leading Labour MPs for which
Britten wrote the music. The Board of Film Censors tried to ban it but withdrew the ban after
the publicity. Also he wrote War and Death for wind band for a concert by the Labour
Choral Union, he later renamed it Russian funeral as he used a Russian revolutionary song
later used by Shostakovich in his 11th Symphony, the Year 1905. At the GPO film unit he met
W H Auden and joined his circle of intellectuals including William Coldstream, Stephen
Spender, Cecil Day Lewis and Christopher Isherwood. His diary entries for this period show
how Italy’s aggression in Abyssinia and the Spanish Civil War affected him.
In 1936 he wrote Our Hunting Fathers with Auden who adapted and wrote words about the
ill treatment of animals and also comment on human cruelty generally. In 1936-7 he wrote
his Pacifist March for the Peace Pledge Union, of which he was a lifelong member, with
Ronald Duncan, with words by Randall Swingler who died in the Spanish Civil War and
Montagu Slater. In 1937 his mother died and he met Peter Pears and started a relationship
both personal and professional that lasted the rest of his life.
In 1937 he wrote Mont Juic with Lennox Berkeley after they went to Spain, including
Lament Barcelona 1936 which was a reaction to Spanish Civil War. He also agreed to take
in a 12 year old Basque refugee boy, a victim of the Spanish Civil War, at his new home, The
Mill at Snape, but after 2 weeks his sister Beth had to take him back to London to be
reassigned. In 1938 he composed Ballad of Heroes with words by Swingler and Auden for
the British members of the International Brigade killed in the Spanish Civil War. Also,
Advance Democracy with words by Swingler which starts with searchlights looking for
bomber planes.
In 1939 he wrote his Violin concerto for the Spanish violinist Antonio Brosa (who had lived
in England since the age of 20 in 1914) who said “The events of the Spanish civil War cast a
dark shadow on the music.” It was written in Canada after his and Pears’s arrival on 9 May
1939, following Auden and Isherwood, to escape the coming war. Pears intended to return to
England but stayed and they moved to US where they were when war broke out. A.M.D.G.
was written to words by Gerald Manley Hopkins and includes a verse The Soldier about the
horrors of war. In January 1940 he was commissioned by the Japanese Government for an
orchestral work to commemorate the 2,600th anniversary of the Imperial dynasty. Britten
wrote his Sinfonia da Requiem which the Japanese rejected on the grounds that it was too
Christian but it contained “a new pitch of violence which was a clear response to the war in
Europe.” The first performance was in New York in March 1941 under Barbirolli.
On 16 March 1942 (4 months after the US joined the war) Britten and Pears left on a Swedish
cargo ship, the Axel Johnson, to return to Britain. Customs officials confiscated the
manuscripts of a Clarinet Concerto for Benny Goodman and the Hymn to St Cecilia
(words by Auden) as they thought they contained secret messages. He rewrote the Hymn to
St Cecilia on the crossing as well as A Ceremony of Carols. They arrived in Liverpool on
17 April 1942 and went before a tribunal the following month where he said he did not
believe in the divinity of Christ but followed his teachings. His testimony included the
following statement:
“Since I believe that there is in every man the spirit of God, I cannot destroy, and feel
it my duty to avoid helping to destroy as far as I am able, human life, however
strongly I may disapprove of the individual's actions or thoughts. The whole of my
life has been devoted to acts of creation (being by profession a composer) and I
cannot take part in acts of destruction. Moreover, I feel that the fascist attitude to life
can only be overcome by passive resistance... I believe sincerely that I can help my
fellow human beings best by continuing the work I am most qualified to do by the
nature of my gifts and training”
He was called up for non-combatant duties but objected and agreed to take part in concerts
such as those at the National Gallery where he performed his Michelangelo Sonnets in
October 1942. Michael Tippett was in the audience and soon became great friend. He
showed Britten A Child of Our Time and Britten agreed to help get it performed (Pears gave
first performance in March 1944). Tippett went to prison for his pacifist beliefs for 3 months
and Britten and Pears performed for the prisoners where Tippett turned the pages for them.
Britten and Pears performed in concerts all over the country including in 1942 the RAF
Orchestra with the 21 year old horn virtuoso Dennis Brain who inspired Britten to write his
Serenade for Tenor Horn and Strings. In 1943 he wrote the Ballad of Little Musgrave
and Lady Barnard for friend Richard Wood who was in prison in Germany where it was
sung by the prison-camp choir.
1944-5 was mostly spent on composing Peter Grimes. It was originally due to be premiered
at Tanglewood Massachusetts in 1944 by Koussevitsky but the festival was suspended during
the war. Instead it was performed at Sadler’s Wells as the first production after the war in
June 1945. The following month Britten toured Germany with Yehudi Menuhin to give
recitals to the survivors of concentration camps including Belsen. Britten never talked about
the experience except to say at the end of his life that it had coloured everything he wrote
subsequently. The first work on his return was The Holy Sonnets of John Donne which was
clearly affected by what he saw as was the String Quartet No. 2 written soon after.
In 1946 his second opera The Rape of Lucretia is set at the time of the Greek invasion of
Rome in C6th BC. The male characters are all soldiers. It was written for smaller forces so it
could be performed at Glyndebourne – their first production after the war. In 1947 Britten
and Pears moved to Aldeburgh and the first work composed there was Canticle I My
Beloved is Mine in memory of the Rev Dick Shepherd one of founders of the Peace Pledge
Union in 1934 on the 10th anniversary of his death. In 1949 he wrote the Spring Symphony
which included his last setting of an Auden poem Out on the lawn I lie in bed, from 1933
which prophesised war and Britten set to a muted fanfare.
His 1951 opera Billy Budd is set in 1797 during the French and Napoleonic Wars and Billy
is hanged under the articles of war. He was pressganged from a merchant ship called the
Rights o’ Man and this bears a double meaning in the libretto. Billy, like Lucretia is seen by
Britten as an innocent victim of the changed moral and ethical position in wartime. In 1952
his Canticle II Abraham and Isaac was later used in the War Requiem. After the premiere
of the Turn of the Screw in Venice Britten returned to England in 1954 and in the same vein
wrote Canticle III Still falls the rain with words by Edith Sitwell subtitled The Raids 1940
Night and Dawn. It refers directly to the Second World War imagining Christ hanging on
the cross in the Blitz. It includes variations for horn and piano specifically for Dennis Brain.
In 1958 he wrote Nocturne for Tenor and 7 instruments for Pears. The words are by 8
different poets from Shakespeare onwards including Wordsworth’s Prelude which looks
towards the French Revolution and Wilfred Owen’s The Kind Ghosts which both
foreshadow the War Requiem. Also in 1958 there was a commission for George Malcolm
and the choir at Westminster Cathedral for a Missa Brevis which was for the more robust
sound of the Catholic choir than the Anglican choristers he had written for previously and he
used it again in his War Requiem. He was also commissioned in 1958 to write a work for
the opening of the new Coventry Cathedral and he decided to combine the Latin Requiem
with poems of Wilfred Owen in a War Requiem. He wanted three soloists from the worst
affected countries in WWII so chose Pears from England, Dietrich Fischer Dieskau from
Germany and Galina Vishnevskaya from Russia. He had met Vishnevskaya, her husband
Rostropovich and Shostakovich in 1960. The Russians would not let her sing with a German
so Heather Harper took over for the premiere on 30th May 1962 but Vishnevskaya made the
recording which sold 200,000 copies in first year.
In 1965 on holiday he read Anna Karenina for Vishnevskaya and intended to set it as an
opera but he changed mind when Russia invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968. In 1966 The
Golden Vanity was composed for the Vienna Boys Choir about the sinking of a pirate ship
but also betrayal and death of an innocent like Billy Budd. In 1968 The Children’s Crusade
for commissioned for the Wandsworth School Choir and was performed in St Paul’s
Cathedral for the 50th anniversary of Save the Children. It is based on Berthold Brecht’s
Kinderkreuzzug which sympathised with the suffering of Polish children in WWII and
follows 50 of them trying to find a land of peace in 1939, published 1941. They are last seen
wandering off into a blizzard and are innocent victims of war again. Also in 1968 he wrote
Who are these Children? his last song cycle for Pears based on poems by William Soutar
including 4 on the subject of war such as The children about children killed in an aid raid.
In 1967 he had been approached by the BBC to write a television opera. In 1969-70 he wrote
Owen Wingrave based on a Henry James story with a libretto by Myfanwy Piper who had
supplied the libretto for James’s Turn of the Screw. It is about a man who refuses to fight in
a war despite the pressure of his military family and ancestors. It is also a ghost story and
although Owen overcomes his family’s pressures to stick to his pacifist principles but
nevertheless dies when his fiancé challenges him to sleep in the haunted room where an
ancestor killed his son who refused to fight. This was Britten’s final statement of his pacifist
beliefs.