Benjamin Britten
The Britten Edition is an enormous venture–14 titles so far, and no end in sight. It will evidently preserve on CD every scrap of Benjamin Britten’s music all the way back to his first piano lessons. I didn’t think he was entitled to this kind of enshrinement. But that’s just me being old-fashioned, thinking back fondly to the days of my youth when all the really cool people wrote off Britten as an establishment hack. The line on him then was that he was a cowardly, bourgeois sellout to tonality in an era when the only worthwhile music sounded like a cross between a physics experiment and a traffic jam.
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The best I can do is pass on my compliments. I was surprised by The Folk Songs. It’s disconcerting at first that Britten had no interest in historical appropriateness, borrowing all sorts of styles–from vaudeville to the Mahler-esque art song–almost at random. But the results are unvaryingly luminous: every track demonstrates an ineffably delicate touch– the simplest and loveliest chord, the daring flourish that melts effortlessly into place. He could work up an elaborate and fanciful counterpoint for the gentle ballad “The Ash Grove” that suddenly seems to have been there all along, and then he could take a risk and leave the haunting carol “I Wonder As I Wander” entirely unaccompanied–except for a few curious bright spatters of piano melody in between the stanzas that miraculously transform it into a perfect recital piece.
Still, it’s not as though he was doing anything better with his time. When I went from this fluff to the major works, I found the exact same problem blown up to cosmic proportions. But I did learn why he has his admirers: the sheer talent on display is off the scale. There may not have been another composer since Mozart with such an absolute mastery of technique. Yet the actual work is so decorous and modest that it’s irrelevant. Piece after piece astonishes you, then bores you, then erases itself from your mind. I was eventually driven to the creepy conviction that Britten was doing it on purpose as a kind of nihilist hubris: if he really was so talented that he could do anything why not take on the impossible and write music that denied his talent existed?
What was he hiding? One answer is given in Humphrey Carpenter’s biography Benjamin Britten. Carpenter suggests that Britten spent his life hiding his homosexuality–but that there was a deeper closet inside that one. His lifelong love affair with singer Peter Pears was a way for him to hide his pedophilia. It must have been a torment to him that even a forbidden relationship was in effect nothing more than a cover of respectability for his real desires. His life was one prolonged act of concealments and thwarted self-revelation.
If he’d written music like this all the time even the cool tastemakers of my youth would have been in awe of him. It’s hard to believe that the composer of Curlew River could pass most of his time turning out lifeless operas and amiable orchestral arrangements of “The Bonny Earl o’ Moray.” But maybe that’s Britten’s real secret: that his most tedious music was as much an expression of his private world as Curlew River was. We don’t see it only because it’s a vision that doesn’t appeal to us: a utopia of propriety and reserve where he’d be nothing special, where even his worst sins would be regarded as dully ordinary. The sunny blandness of so much of his music may be a reflection of how conventional and benign Britten wanted the world to be–with all dark secrets shrunk to nothing.
