Download report case study 25 - Arts Council England

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
1.
Brief Description of item(s)
This manuscript is a complete draft score of The Young Person’s Guide to the
Orchestra, one of the most famous compositions of Benjamin Britten (19131976). Written in pencil on 15 leaves of paper measuring 37 x 27 cm, the draft
score is the earlier of two manuscripts of this work and was completed on 31
December 1945. The composer subsequently wrote out a full orchestral
score, after which no further use was made of the draft, which remains in
good condition.
2.
Context
This manuscript was given by the composer to Enid Vandyk, who worked for
Britten’s publisher Boosey & Hawkes and later became the composer’s
secretary. It remained completely unknown until the catalogue of Sotheby’s
sale of 30 November 2011. The manuscript full score of this work was sold at
a charity auction in 1961 to Mrs Marie-Louise Osborn, and is now Osborn
Music MS 509 in the Beinecke Rare Book Library, Yale University. The
educational film for which the music was written was released in November
1946 and the full score was published in 1947.
3.
Waverley criteria
I consider that this score may satisfy the first and third Waverley criteria.
This piece is probably Britten’s most widely known composition, whether
through the film Instruments of the Orchestra for which it was originally
commissioned or through the concert piece which remains very frequently
performed to this day. It could reasonably be argued that The Young Person’s
Guide is the principal means by which many generations of British
schoolchildren in the last 65 years have learned about the instruments of the
orchestra. The composition is therefore so closely connected with our history
and national life that the departure of this, the only primary source material for
the work to remain in the UK, would be a misfortune.
Under the third criterion, I consider that this draft manuscript is of outstanding
significance for the study of music, since it provides a great deal of
information about the process of composition of one of the most famous and
familiar pieces of music to have been written by a British composer since the
Second World War.
DETAILED CASE
1.
Detailed description of item(s) if more than in Executive summary,
and any comments.
In February 1945 Britten was commissioned by the Crown Film Unit to write
the score for a short film with spoken commentary about the orchestra and its
instruments, as part of a series made by the Central Office of Information for
the Ministry of Education. Britten answered the request for a simple didactic
piece with a highly sophisticated set of variations and fugue on a theme by his
great English precursor Henry Purcell. This manuscript is undated, but it
would appear that he did not begin to compose the piece until the end of the
year. He played it through on the piano to the producer Basil Wright on New
Year’s Day 1946, presumably from this draft manuscript score, which is
mainly written in a condensed scoring to enable piano performance. The
orchestration of the full score was completed shortly thereafter, the film and
music were recorded separately between March and June 1946, and the film
was released in November. It was distributed to schools from December
1946, accompanied by an explanatory guide for teachers, but soon its
reputation spread and it was released by MGM nationally and internationally.
Meanwhile, the music quickly became a popular concert piece, at first with a
new commentary text by Eric Crozier, later with other commentaries, the most
recent of them by Wendy Cope for the Last Night of the Proms in 2011.
Together with Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf, Britten’s work must surely be
the most successful and widely known introduction to the orchestra. The
phrase ‘young person’s guide’ which he coined has entered common parlance
in a wide variety of contexts. The piece also played an important part in the
efforts of Britten and others to reacquaint the British public with the music of
Henry Purcell.
2.
Detailed explanation of the outstanding significance of the
item(s).
Almost all of Britten’s music manuscripts are housed at the Britten-Pears
Library in his house in Aldeburgh. Scholarly research on the composer’s
methods of composition began in his lifetime and has continued unabated in
recent years: the discovery of an unknown draft of a major work is therefore of
considerable interest to a large number of researchers. No earlier sketches for
the ‘Young Person’s Guide’ are known to survive, and it would appear that
Britten composed this piece directly into the present draft score. This
manuscript reveals very directly the astonishing fluency with which Britten was
able to construct a large-scale work. Almost every aspect of the piece is
already worked out in detail in this first draft, including comprehensive
explanations of instrumentation and articulation. The fugue which ends the
piece is a work of considerable complexity, but shows no struggle in its
creation. Many of Britten’s draft scores give similar evidence of his
consummate genius, but this is a particularly fine example. It is remarkable
that there is no evidence of planning of the larger structure, such as
numbering of the variations: this information was added only later, in the full
orchestral score. The only substantial erasures are revisions to the passages
accompanying the commentary text. These are of particular interest because
the draft text which Britten wrote in this score differs substantially from that in
the manuscript full score now in Yale, as well as the spoken text in the
soundtrack to the film (credited to Montagu Slater) and the text printed in the
published score (credited to Eric Crozier). The manuscript therefore displays a
vivid contrast between Britten’s fluency as a composer and his struggle to
formulate suitable phrases for the narrator. There are therefore many new
avenues of research which the discovery of this important manuscript will
enable to be explored.