17 Feb 2013 22:00:53
A century after his birth in Lowestoft, the youngest of four children born to a dentist and his wife, Britten's life and work are being celebrated with a level of excitement no one can have imagined when he died in 1976. True, he was famous and had his array of honours and titles and his burgeoning festival in the Suffolk seaside town of Aldeburgh. He had, too, a large circle of devoted friends, and a far smaller knot of those he had cast aside, often in a silly fit of pique.
His death made the headlines in the broadsheets. Britten was spoken of as the greatest British composer since Purcell, whom he revered, and Elgar, whom he did not. Children may have been raised on his Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra, but most of his enormous output of operas (Billy Budd, The Turn of the Screw, Gloriana, Death in Venice among them), song cycles and choral works, string quartets and concertos was of interest chiefly to the serious music lover.
Today, for entirely nonmusical reasons, Britten has become the subject of excited gossip. Paul Kildea's book has caused titivation by suggesting that the composer's death was hastened by tertiary syphilis, a theory roundly denounced by medical experts and those surviving doctors who were there. Stories about the composer's taste for pretty boys have turned from tendency – which is certainly all it amounted to, even if the desire was real enough – to scandalous fact, without any foundation or new evidence.
These two new biographies, one by a Britten authority who was head of music at Aldeburgh from 1999 to 2002, one by a Suffolk local, the poet and biographer Neil Powell, do nothing to change that view, but assess the evidence dispassionately and mostly sensibly. Neither knew Britten. Both have waded through the acres of letters, diaries and interviews and crafted their own strong narratives.
Luckily the volumes are complementary. Kildea's, dense and annotated, delves deeper into the past, sifting over existing material with forensic attention as to how events relate to the music. Powell instead carries the torch into the present, naming those singers now performing the work anew, painting a portrait of the Aldeburgh festival as it is today. His account has more air and light, and brings alive the sense of landscape – the East Anglian coast, the marshes, the wind and waves – which have coloured so much of Britten's music.
Tweedy, public schoolish, formal in manner, Britten was no extrovert. A superb pianist, performing made him sick with nerves. There was nothing he liked more than to lock himself away in Suffolk and get on with writing music. By contrast, Pears liked the bright lights, dashing back to London when the rural pace became too slow for him. They were together for 35 years, somehow negotiating the illegality of their relationship without fuss. Powell writes with a particular passion and psychological insight, concluding: "[Britten] and Pears taught gay men of my generation the astonishing lesson that it was possible for a homosexual couple to live decently and unapologetically in provincial England."
Kildea is painstaking in providing sociopolitical background about Britain before, during and after the wartime years. The syphilis business takes up merely a few pages, which frankly is all it deserves, as no doubt Kildea would agree. He must be embarrassed by the quick collapse of his theory. From Powell we comprehend Britten's day-to-day existence. We know just how many minutes it took the prep-school boy to get home for his tea – about three – which may be a reason he didn't enjoy the behind-the-bike shed experiences of his more worldly fellow pupils.
Kildea tells us about the young Britten's distaste for his teacher, the composer John Ireland, who was often drunk and probably made a pass at his pupil. It falls to Powell, however, to mention that Ireland lived in Gunter Grove, Chelsea, and on one occasion urinated on the carpet. It depends what you are after. Each book deserves its readers.
