A Singer’s Guide to the Great Composers: Britten

Benjamin Britten has been one of the most influential composers on my whole career. I never met him, as when I first arrived at the Britten-Pears School in Snape near Aldeburgh he had been dead for two or three years. However, his memory and spirit lingered over that magical place in Suffolk for many years to come, and I feel almost as if I had met him. The recent death of Steuart Bedford, who I did know quite well, and who was Britten’s favoured collaborator and conductor in the composer’s later ailing years has reminded me of what an immense debt we owe to Britten. For me, he was the outstanding British composer of the 20th Century, and perhaps one of the all-time greats. I appreciate that his music was difficult for some listeners, and that he will never be a popular favourite, but as both performer and audience member, his music has provided many of my life’s highlights, and I hope this article will be a revelation to some, and a good reflection on his contribution to music in general. 

He was born in Lowestoft in 1913. His father was a dentist and his mother a talented amateur musician. At the age of three months, he contracted pneumonia and nearly died, and was left with a chronically weak heart, which eventually killed him in 1976 at the age of 63. He showed early promise of talent as a composer, and took lessons in piano and viola, all of which pleased his mother and was a source of indifference to his father. An interesting fact about his childhood is that, due to his father’s dislike of music, the family did not possess either a radio or a gramophone! He attended South Lodge Prep School in Lowestoft, a strictly run school with copious corporal punishment, which may account for Britten’s lifelong pacifism. He then moved to Gresham’s School in Suffolk as a boarder, where he excelled at music, although disliking his music master, and began his compositional career there. He had met and admired the composer Frank Bridge earlier and had travelled to London during term time to study with the older composer. In 1930, he won a scholarship to the Royal College of Music in London to study composition, the scholarship being awarded by Vaughan Williams and John Ireland!  

Although indebted to Ireland for his scholarship, the young Britten learned little from his teaching, and continued with Frank Bridge privately. He spent much of his time in London attending concerts, and became fascinated by the music of Stravinsky, Shostakovich and, particularly, Mahler. In 1935, he was engaged on an ad hoc basis by the BBC, specifically its Film Unit, and there he first met W H Auden, a literary figure of substance. The same year, his mother died, an event which affected him deeply, and then he met Peter Pears, a young tenor, three years his elder, who having failed to last courses at both Oxford University and the Royal College of Music, was singing with the BBC Singers. Through a mutual friend, Peter Burra, they became friends, and in 1937, after Burra’s tragic death in an air crash, they found themselves spending time together tidying Burra’s cottage in Berkshire. A close but, at that stage, platonic friendship began there, and this was the beginning of one of the most important relationships in the history of music. 

It is difficult for us now to imagine what it was like to be homosexual in 1930s Britain, any overt relationship being illegal and liable to serious consequences. Our society has changed so much since those days, that the idea that the simple fear of discovery might destroy one’s life and reputation seems utterly preposterous. Even today, in parts of the world like some African and Middle Eastern countries, single sex relationships are still anathema, but for us in the West, such an attitude appears mediaeval and impossible to understand. It was very real then, and although there was a whole underworld of what we now call gay life, it took a while for Britten to come to terms with his own feelings. Auden and Pears were much more relaxed about their preferences, but, for Britten, it was all much more difficult, especially as he was drawn to young boys in their early teens. Fortunately for Britten and his reputation, and indeed for the sake of 20th century music, he kept these more dangerous feelings under control throughout his life, and those young boys in whom he took an interest (some who became very famous like David Hemmings and Michael Crawford) all attest to his scrupulous behaviour in their presence, although sharing a bed with them on occasions would have dire consequences nowadays. An interesting aside is that when I knew Peter Pears in the late 70s up until his death in 1986, he hated the word ‘gay’ in referring to homosexuality. “How I wish we could still use that word in its natural context”, he would say. “Life is gay, what a gay day and so forth. I always prefer being called queer!” 

Although platonic at first, Britten and Pears became firm friends, and eventually lovers, and the composer wrote for the tenor from a very early stage in their relationship. It is perhaps worth, at this point, looking at the unique sound that made Pears special. It was a truly individual voice, but became a target for parody later, which should probably be taken as a compliment. Dudley Moore’s version of Little Miss Muffet with Pears’ voice and Britten’s style is utterly brilliant. You can find it on YouTube. 

The first thing that surprised me about Peter was that he was a very big man, well over six feet and powerfully built, even as a comparatively old man. He spoke very precisely in that upper middle-class English accent of the mid-20th century which has largely died out nowadays and reminded me of a certain sort of country gentleman. One of the saddest things about his voice on record is that most recordings were made when he was past the age of 50. It still sounds marvellous, but the slightly reedy character which appeared with age was quite different from the rather virile tenor of his youth. There are recordings of him singing Peter Grimes shortly after it was premiered in 1945, and similarly we can hear him as the Male Chorus in ‘The Rape of Lucretia’ soon after its appearance in 1946, and his full throated singing is wonderful. He sang roles such as the Duke in Verdi’s ‘Rigoletto’, so we must remember this when we complain about some of the slightly mannered later recordings. Weedy and thin it wasn’t. The extraordinary juxtaposition of this big man singing easily very high was another feature of his musical appeal to Britten, as most operatic tenors tend (major generalisation!) to be on the short side, and this physical presence made his appearance on stage in such roles as Grimes, Captain Vere and Aschenbach in ‘Death in Venice’ enormously compelling.  

Britten wrote extensively in the song repertoire for Pears, and the world is indebted to their relationship for this. His voice lay naturally high, and it is said that his favourite note was E, and, indeed, it is noticeable that his great soliloquy in Grimes, ‘The Great Bear’, centres round this note (which is towards the upper limit of my voice!). I first heard Peter, before I met him, singing the Evangelist in the annual performances of Bach’s St Matthew Passion given by the Edinburgh University Singers under the magnificently named Herrick Bunney, and I was aware even then of the extraordinary flexibility of his voice and the mellifluous beauty of the instrument, along with the huge artistry he had at his disposal. I remember, in a masterclass at the Britten-Pears School at Snape in the late 70s, when, one day, Peter was trying to explain how to sing the equally difficult role of the Evangelist in the Matthew Passion by Heinrich Schütz. He became exasperated by his inability to explain what he wanted, and so he sang a good ten minutes of the part for us. As I wrote in my articles about Peter, he was not a great teacher (he didn’t really know how he sang himself!), but, when he demonstrated, one was aware of being in the presence of genius, particularly that day. 

There are so many songs that Britten wrote for Pears, and I don’t have time here to go into them in any depth, but I would point you in the direction of his great Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings, which he wrote in 1943 at the request of the horn player, Dennis Brain. This is a setting of six poems, which explores the limits of voice and horn, and which Britten wrote on his return from the USA, and while he was working on ‘Peter Grimes’. It remains, nearly 80 years later, one of the most extraordinary compositions of a remarkable career, and it never ceases to thrill me. For me, the most astonishing song is the Lyke Wake Dirge, a setting of a late mediaeval Yorkshire poem, describing the soul’s passage after death to Purgatory. At its peak, with full strings and the horn screaming out, it is one of the most frightening evocations of terror I can imagine. Pears sang it magnificently. 

The song cycles Britten wrote for Pears, along with those he wrote for Galina Vishnevskaya and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, would be testament to a great career, but it is the operas which remain the lynchpin of his oeuvre. However, before I look at the operas, I should mention the problem I have with Britten’s songs. As this series is entitled “A Singer’s Guide to the Great Composers”, I should here be explaining something about my relationship to Ben’s songs and hopefully giving some insight into how to interpret them. Alas, dear reader, I have no relationship, as I have never sung any of them. None at all, zero, zilch! The reason for this gap is that he wrote no songs at all for bass, and, unlike most other composers of songs, Britten’s defy transposition. As I have said, most were written specifically with Pears’ voice in mind, and although many tenors since have sung them, with varying degrees of success, they do work, in my opinion, only with tenor voice. ‘The Poet’s Echo’, which he wrote in 1965 for the great Russian singer, Galina Vishnevskaya, (see “A Singer’s Life”, Part 13 on the EMR for more details of my relationship with Galina), similarly is outwith my scope, and even the ‘Songs and Proverbs of William Blake’ which were premiered by Fischer-Dieskau with Britten as accompanist, also in 1965, are much too high for me, and need a different sound world to my own. Consequently, I can only point you in the direction of the various recordings of these wonderful songs, mostly accompanied with unobtrusive brilliance by the composer, either at the piano or as conductor. 

After his early attempt, ‘Paul Bunyan’, which he wrote during his stay in America at the beginning of World War II, Britten announced both his return to the UK and his arrival as a major composer with ‘Peter Grimes’ in 1945. This is the opera with which I have been most associated, either as the lawyer Swallow or the carter Hobson, and this is a good moment to bring this article to a close, with the promise of, I hope, more insights into the operas, the other semi-staged works, and the unforgettable War Requiem, in Parts 2 and 3.