Tempo 60:238 Book Review

Tempo 60 (238) 51–60 © 2006 Cambridge University Press 51 DOI: 10.1017/S0040298206000325 Printed in the United Kingdom Britten’s Children by John Bridcut. Faber & Faber, £18.99 Plato’s Symposium, from which the modern idea of ‘Platonic’ love derives. Socrates argues that Four decades ago, in his caustic little music survey when teacher and pupil are drawn to one another Brandy of the Damned, Colin Wilson pondered sexually, the sublimation of that feeling can itself Benjamin Britten’s obsession with childhood – lead to ever higher intellectual and imaginative and especially boyhood innocence. ‘There is no achievements – he compares the process to reason’, he wrote, ‘why innocence should not be a climbing a ‘ladder’ of creativity. But Socrates valid theme for music; but to dwell on it for thirty presupposes that the teacher is not only an adult, years argues a certain arrested development’. One but fully conscious of himself as adult. After can well imagine the surge of vindication Wilson reading this book one may find oneself might have felt on reading the first chapter of wondering if Britten ever truly saw himself as a Britten’s Children. On the first two pages, author grown man. In addition to those Letts diaries, we John Bridcut describes a series of Letts Schoolboy hear of his lifelong passion for what he called Diaries belonging to the composer. In one, ‘nursery food’, and the fascinating fact that his Britten’s entries in the ‘Personal Memorabilia’ initial attraction to Peter Pears might have been section include his height, weight, bicycle partly caused by a resemblance between Pears’s number, season ticket number, train and bus vocal tone and the ‘unusual sound’ of Britten’s times to and from school etc, then above the mother Edith’s singing voice. publisher’s name, altered to read ‘LET’S!’, he has It is also surely significant that, as Bridcut added ‘SHALL WE?’ All very typical public- points out, ‘Britten’s friendships were so often to schoolboy stuff, you might say; but then comes arise with boys who had physically or emotionally the punch: the year is 1954, and the Benjamin absent fathers.’ Even the hero of his own Saint Britten who wrote all this was 40. The chapter Nicolas appears – in part – to have attracted him concludes with Britten’s response to a remark for similar reasons: from his devoted assistant Imogen Holst. She has My parents died. just told Britten how impressed she was by his All too soon, I left the tranquil beauty of their home, writing for boys in the song ‘Now Rouse Up All And knew the wider world of man. the City’ from Act Three of Gloriana. Britten’s reply gives the chapter its title: ‘It’s because I’m Britten may have talked of playing the role of still thirteen’. ‘stepfather’ to these wholly or partially fatherless Wisely, perhaps, Bridcut does not elaborate on boys, but as Bridcut points out, the small age gap this. It is hard enough for professionals to between the young Britten and some of his diagnose a person’s psychological peculiarities protégés does not ‘lend credence’ to such an when that person is present, far harder when all interpretation. Inevitably Britten’s own shadowy, you have to go on – apart from the composer’s ambiguous, mostly distant relationship with his own correspondence, and (more problematically) own father springs to mind. Talk of the enigmatic his art – is someone else’s memories. One may feel Britten senior leads one inevitably to the that here is something very similar to the at times bafflingly hands-off ‘guardian’ in The Turn of the bizarrely childlike Anton Bruckner’s obsession Screw, just as the image in that opera of the boy with teenage girls. But then we know that Miles at the piano, surrounded by adoring Bruckner’s father died when he was 13 and just females, echoes uneasily some of the accounts we entering puberty, a trauma which could well have have of Britten in his own childhood home. It is at caused something in Bruckner’s development least legitimate to ask if Britten was ever really ‘in process to become ‘arrested’ at that point. With love’ with his ‘stepchildren’ in any objective sense Britten, a possible aetiology is much harder to at all, or whether what obsessed him was the identify. reflection they offered of himself on the brink of Comparison has been drawn between Britten’s adolescence – ‘still thirteen’? role as friend-mentor to so many teenage boys Bridcut may also have been wise – especially and the ideas about the erotics of education given the current moral climate – to chose the expressed in Socrates’s speech towards the end of non-gender-specific title Britten’s Children, but the 52 theme is unmistakably ‘Britten’s Boys’. Very latter’s internment as a ‘friendly enemy alien’ in occasionally, girls – like the three sisters of Canada during the Second World War, makes Humphrey Maud – may have managed to creep horrible reading, as does his repeated accusation under the barbed wire of Britten’s defences (all about Wulff’s behaviour – ‘vindictive’ is the four children were named dedicatees of the Young distinctly self-justifying word he clings to in his Person’s Guide to the Orchestra), but one also notes correspondence – when the two meet again after Britten’s readiness to cast adult women in his the war. female children’s roles (eg Flora in The Turn of the But the account of the dismissal of the original Screw), or written comments like the one to Miles, David Hemmings, is perhaps the most young James Bernard after the latter had begun disturbing moment of all in Britten’s Children. The his studies at the RCM: ‘I agree that the scruffy end, as Bridcut tells us, was ‘sudden’. He describes girls are a nightmare & a pest – it is maddening to how, at a key point in a 1956 Parisian performance have them around & I the way, but it’s possible to of The Turn of the Screw (Miles’s ‘Malo’ aria), ignore them’. Girls were certainly never invited to ‘David’s voice broke – just like that. A mortified join Britten on the tennis court, or to engage in Britten brought the orchestra off, waved his baton his equally popular sport of ‘skinny dipping’. at David in a fury, and put it down on his music One thing that does emerge with reassuring stand as the curtain was lowered.’ Hemmings was clarity from this book – as with the award- strong-armed off the stage, and never saw or winning BBC TV documentary Britten’s Children heard from Britten again. ‘When I asked’, says from which Bridcut’s book partially derives – is Bridcut, ‘whether this father-figure whom he so that there is barely any credible evidence that adored had said anything to him, he surprised me Britten attempted to express his feelings for his – and I think himself – by the answer that sprang adopted favourites in any overtly sexual way. The to his lips: “No. No, he didn’t. That was a bit sad, I only anomaly in this respect is the relatively early have to say, but from that moment forward, I was relationship with Harry Morris, whom Britten sort of history. Sad, isn’t it? The idyll was all over”.’ invited to join him and his family on holiday in ‘Sad’, one may conclude, is putting it mildly. Cornwall in 1936. Morris left suddenly and No happier is the lack of evidence to suggest that mysteriously (Britten’s diaries offer nothing by any of Britten’s adoring retinue did much to help way of explanation), and while he was clearly still smooth such abrupt transitions or in any other disturbed by what he interpreted as an ‘advance’ way console Britten’s ‘ex’s’. Perhaps that was too by Britten, Morris seems to have been unable to much to ask. Yet there is something unsettling be any more specific. In every other case about the way so many of the people quoted in discussed in this book (and there are plenty), this book – including some of the brutally Britten’s adoration seems to have progressed little dropped favourites themselves – continue to further in physical terms than that of Aschenbach speak of Britten in such rose-tinted, hagiographic for Tadzio in Death in Venice. There is some coat- language when it is clear that the man was both sharing in Sienna with Wulff Scherchen (son of damaged and damaging. Michael Berkeley – the conductor Hermann Scherchen), numerous Britten’s godson - recalls being invited to write a embraces and chaste kisses, and even chaster bed- song cycle for Pears and Ossian Ellis to play at sharing, but beyond that, nothing. Aldeburgh. Ellis tells the young Berkeley that he is However glad one may be for that, there delighted with the songs, and then – nothing. remain things in this book that leave an Absolute silence from the Red House, leaving unpleasant aftertaste – most of all, what happens Berkeley ‘utterly devastated’ at being ‘completely to Britten’s adopted boys when it is clear that cut off’, by Pears as much as by Britten himself. Britten is no longer able to recognize in them that Years later, fellow composer Nicholas Maw offers crucial reflection of his own idealized pubescent an explanation. Berkeley’s mistake was to set self. Humphrey Carpenter’s biography has poems by Thomas Hardy: ‘There you are, you already introduced us to the chilling notion of can’t set one of Ben’s favourite poets – moreover Britten and his ‘corpses’ – those friends who, for one that he’s set himself.’ When the Aldeburgh whatever reasons, suddenly found themselves Festival marked the 1957 bicentenary of William dropped by Britten, rarely with any word of Blake by inviting young composers to set one of explanation.

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