By JOHN WARRACK

JW: Louis MacNeice once quoted you, in 1940, as saying, “An artist ought either to live where he has live roots or no roots at all; in England today the artist feels essentially lonely, twisted in dying roots, always in opposition to a group.” Was this what was behind your going to America in 1939?

BB: That certainly describes my feelings at the time, but the phraseology sounds more like Louis than me! Or Wystan Auden—I was terrifically under Auden’s influence at the time. He preached that one’s roots should be in ideas and people, not places or environment. Also, I was immensely depressed about Europe. I’d been vaguely political, as we all were. The Hitler pressure was mounting, and the governments seemed to be encouraging him or not standing up to him; Europe looked finished. So when Auden went off to America, in late 1938 I think, I followed as soon as I could, in the spring of 1939. Another thing was that it had been very hard to get started as a composer in England. My works had made a small impact, but there were never any number of performances. There had been some in New York and there were plans for more. I wanted to go there, to see if this meant there was a chance of getting going properly. I’d met Aaron Copland when he was in England. He’d been very nice to me and encouraged me to go to see the United States. I think I just had to abandon my roots for a while, to find out if I’d really got any at all, or to find out where they really were.

JW: Apart from fears about Europe, did hope about America quickly get realized?

BB: We went to Canada first, Peter Pears and I; we went early in the spring of 1939 (I think we were in the first boat up the St. Lawrence that year after the ice had melted). But soon we came down to the United States and stayed with Aaron in New York State, where he’d taken a summer house for a couple of months. I did a lot of work at this time, going back to Canada for some jobs, but mostly staying around New York as well as with friends on Long Island until the war. As to performances—yes, I did get in the swim quite quickly. I felt encouraged, I met lots of composers, everyone was very kind; there were quite a few commissions. In fact, in most ways I seemed quite well settled, and felt a great sense of relief, until the war came.

JW: And then?

BB: Then there was a strong pull to the old country and one’s old friends, even though it was felt in the first days of the “phony war” that nothing much was going to happen. It seemed the best idea was to stay put, as we were all instructed (unless one was of some “military importance,” which, of course, we weren’t) and to get on with one’s work as best one could. Here again I was enormously influenced by Auden.

JW: What was this Auden in the thirties? Everyone, not only you, who’s known him seems to have found him a whirlwind influence.

BB: I think it was really that he was such a large personality, a whirlwind one, if you like, and, of course, I was swept away by his poetry. He was incredibly intelligent, very, very vocal; he talked marvelously well, he was very engaging and sympathetic and deeply interested in people. He’d grown entirely away from Europe by the end of the thirties, and for several years seemed to have broken his ties with England.

JW: Had you, too?

BB: Well, this was complicated. I went to the United States, I suppose to emigrate, but rather cautiously I had only taken a visitor’s visa. To take out naturalization papers then, you had to go out and come back again. I planned to do this, and every time I tried it I somehow got ill and was prevented. Then, when the war started in earnest, and France fell, I became really tangled up. All my thoughts and interests were in Europe, and yet to return into the maelstrom seemed madness—my views on pacifism still held, so I couldn’t do anything practical about the situation. At least in the States I could work, could be of some use to other people. I got extremely ill and was in and out of bed for a year. I couldn’t solve the situation for myself intellectually—as Auden didn’t fail to point out!

JW: This must also have been about the time of your first opera, “Paul Bunyan,” with Auden. I dare say you’re bored of being asked about a piece you’ve withdrawn, but what do you now feel about it? How did it affect later things, for instance?

BB: That was early in 1941 when I still hadn’t really got over that illness. Paul Bunyan was a famous American folk subject, and I suppose it was cheeky for us two Britishers to tackle it. Some of the text was preaching, but it had some wonderful poetry, and it gave me the chance to try to write music in an absolutely simple manner, making an effort to be popular and writing straight tunes. Also, it was scored for a chamber orchestra, about 20 more than I use now—which was interesting and useful experience when I came back to chamber opera after “Peter Grimes.” The music is not all good, but some is; perhaps we’ll revive it one day.

I spent the summer of 1941 in California recuperating; and as I got better, I began to see things more clearly. By chance I’d read an article by E. M. Forster about the Suffolk poet Crabbe, and this set me planning a libretto on his character Peter Grimes. Then, by another chance, the delay in getting home enabled me to meet Koussevitzky, who liked the idea of the opera, and decided to commission it. He nearly cancelled it when he heard I was determined to go home to England. It was a fearful job to get a boat. We put our names down for passage, and we had to wait on the east coast for six months, packed and ready to go at 24 hours’ notice. I couldn’t work at all—only some Purcell arrangements, some folksong bits. Then we got on the boat, and on the month’s journey I couldn’t stop the flow—the “Hymn to St. Cecilia,” the “Ceremony of Carols,” some settings of Beddoes that were not very good and which I withdrew, and other little things.

JW: All English verse settings, in fact, as you headed back to England. During the time in America the works seemed to have been either settings of foreign poetry” Les Illuminations” and the Michelangelo sonnets—or concert works; and in all cases, it seems, an expansion on what had gone immediately before. Do you feel this to have been an effect of America?

BB: I think the effect of America was to broaden one, encourage one and to shake one. I was in danger of becoming parochial, and this worried me. One reason I didn’t set English in America, though, was that I became discontented with the contemporary setting of English. It was necessary for me to get away from setting English for a time. I felt bolder with another language, or no language at all. So there was my first string quartet, which Mrs. Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge commissioned, the Sinfonia da Requiem, which the Japanese asked for and then rejected, the Violin Concerto for Antonio Brosa and two pieces for two pianos for Ethel Bartlett and Rae Robertson.

JW: Is it right to feel that you’re now coming into another patch of instrumental composition?

BB: This is really a question of opportunity. I’ve always had the advantage (or disadvantage, whichever it is) of needing occasions or performers to attract and inspire me—l mean inspire in the old sense; that is, the event or player blows enthusiasm into me. After Dennis Brain and Julian Bream, it’s been Rostropovich. Nowadays I don’t seem to lose confidence in writing vocal music, but I think I was getting a bit nervous about instrumental music. Rostropovich freed one of my inhibitions. He’s such a gloriously uninhibited musician himself, with this enormous feeling of generosity you get from the best Russian players, coming to meet you all the way. I’d heard about him, and rather unwillingly listened on the wireless. I immediately realized this was a new way of playing the cello, in fact almost a new, vital way of playing music. I made arrangements to come to London and heard him again, and found him in the flesh even more than I’d expected. He took the bull by the horns and asked me to write a piece for him, which, was my cello sonata written “on condition he came to Aldeburgh!” Then came the cello symphony.

JW: Yes, and I remember from the first performance of the symphony in Moscow last March how close the Russians seemed to feel you to be. Is this an old association?

BB: No, not at all: I first went to Russia in spring, 1963, but I’ve been back and have made some close friends—particularly Rostropovich and his wife Vishnevskaya, Sviatoslav Richter and his wife Nina Doliak, a singer too, and of course, Shostakovich.

JW: How do you get on with Shostakovich?

BB: I am closer to him now, and he seems completely relaxed with us. There was a touching occasion this autumn. I met him in Moscow, and he insisted on Peter and me having lunch with him (I’d only been to his flat once before): there were two new pieces he wanted to play us. These turned out to be his Ninth and Tenth string quartets written during the last months. His hands are rather arthritic now, but his piano playing still has great conviction. The Ninth was characteristic, formally very interesting, quite up to what one might expect. But the Tenth was a real knockout—very strange, mostly very quiet, muted in feeling, and very simple and bald. I think it’s a great new development for him. We were deeply impressed.

JW: How did your own pieces with the English Opera Group go over? I mean, “Herring” has so much local humor, and “The Rape of Lucretia” might have been attacked for being “decadent.”

BB: “Albert Herring” was a terrific success, and they really did seem to follow it all and find it amusing; though it was “Lucretia” that surprisingly had the greatest critical success.

JW: “Turn of the Screw?”

BB: Well, ideologically it did worry them, for being dark and pessimistic and so on; but musically it was the piece that seemed to appeal most—especially to the younger generation. Did you know that Shostakovich said publicly he liked it best of my operas? Of course, the Russians have this marvelous talent for the stage. They’re wonderful actors, with a born instinct for theater, and this gives them a quick understanding of operas a little more difficult musically than they are used to. There’s an immense amount of talent in Russia, but it may take a little while to break out. And there’s a terrific need for music which can be used by this vast, ravenously hungry audience. I was pleased that Mme. Furtseva, the Minister of Culture, was taken enough with the English Opera Group to want to form similar Russian groups for touring. Getting a large company around their gigantic country is a problem, and groups our size would suit them well. She felt that the audience’s reaction she witnessed in Moscow showed that the country could take this kind of operatic style.

JW: What about repertory? Do they have anything suitable?

BB: They’ll take some of our pieces, in fact they want all my operas, but they must write operas themselves, of course. Khatchaturian was very taken with the idea, and said in a speech that he now felt opera had a future after all.

JW: Will you go there again?

BB: I hope so, because I enjoy giving concerts there (besides, I should like to see “Midsummer Night’s Dream” at the Bolshoi, and “Peter Grimes” at the Kirov), and I enjoy getting to know the Russians more and more—they are such warm, friendly people. I feel, also, that our two parts of Europe have been separated too long, and we can learn so much from each other. They have missed so many later developments of the technique of the art, and we have lost so much of the immediate contact between the audience and contemporary art that they have.

JW: Will you write something for them?

BB: I’d like to write an opera for Vishnevskaya, but I can’t say what. There’s the language problem, for one thing. She’s the kind of artist I want to compose for—vocally very personal and accomplished, and a wonderfully gifted and subtle actress.

JW: How about your sabbatical year? I gather you and Pears are taking 1965 off from performing. What are the plans?

BB: To write a lot of music! But first a holiday. We’re going to India for six weeks in January and February, and. in the late summer there’s a very exciting plan to drive through Russia with the Rostropoviches. Then, apart from the Aldeburgh and Long Melford festivals, composing. I’m going to do a solo cello sonata for Rostropovich—nothing down yet, though. And there is to be a song-cycle for Fischer-Dieskau, in memory of his wife, for baritone and chamber group—English poetry, but it’s not even chosen yet. That’ll be for Aldeburgh.

JW: What about other opera subjects?

BB: I want to do another church parable kind of work, like “Curlew River.” A Christian subject—or rather, Old Testament, if you count that! And one day, something on a modern subject: we’ve thought of doing it on the theme of a young innocent for whom things in the modern world always go wrong—a bit “Dog Beneath the Skin” in idea. I’d like a scene in an airport (always waiting!) and I’d like to include a tennis party! But these are really no more than possible ideas for the future, like “King Lear.” I’m still hoping to do that, but I’ll need to be older and wiser. Certainly I’d like to come back to Shakespeare—John Gielgud wants me to do “The Tempest.” As I found with “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” Shakespeare is wonderful to set, and there is in him an absolutely unparalleled series of librettos.

JW: I wish you’d do another comedy some time.

BB: Yes, I’d like to fit that in—if only there were more time! It’s terribly difficult, this whole question of dividing one’s time between playing and writing, public and private. I haven’t solved it. If only we had the old, more flexible, even haphazard arrangements for concerts. I’ve got to decide now—exactly how to map out my 1966, what engagements to accept. What I’d like would be to look a month ahead—to be able to say, “Now, I’ve finished this piece, let’s do some concerts.” I can’t do that. All the same, I don’t want to give up performing, playing and conducting. I treasure this contact with live audiences too much.