THE OPERAS OF BRITTEN

By Donald Mitchell

I am invited to write this article at the very moment when two major operas by Benjamin Britten are ringing fresh in my ears. Just a few days ago I was attending performances of “Albert Herring” and “The Turn of the Screw” at Southampton, the sea-port city whose university (one of our newer ones, with one of the most go-ahead music departments in the country) sports a new, elegant and acoustically admirable University Theatre, built out of Nuffield funds and designed by Sir Basil Spence, of Coventry Cathedral fame.

Don’t think that all this is beside the point or so much introductory padding. It isn’t. The spirited, eloquent performances I saw were given by the English Opera Group, the opera company (now administered by Covent Garden) that Britten and some of his friends founded in 1946, and for which he has continued to write a long chain of chamber operas, down to and including the most recent, “Curlew River,” presented at the Aldeburgh Festival this year, which is not really an opera at all but looks back (though in no archaistic spirit) to opera’s pre-history, i.e., medieval religious music drama. But more of that below.

Any discussion, indeed, of Britten’s operas must necessarily involve a discussion of the English Opera Group, because we meet here the singular case of a purposeful artistic and social policy and a creative instinct working hand in hand. Part of the exhilarating experience I had at Southampton was the feeling that these extraordinary operas of Britten’s were functioning there in the peculiar environment—a small, intimate theatre in a city that could never afford “grand” opera and for which chamber opera is the ideal solution—for which they were designed by their far-sighted composer and his colleagues. And yet, at the same time, it might be said the operas had created, or at least helped to create, the environment in which they were so obviously flourishing. It is my guess that in the future we shall see many more new theaters like Southampton’s, and that the English Opera Group, bravely and optimistically launched in the forties, will begin to reap its overdue rewards in the sixties.

It is tempting, of course, to ascribe the whole conception of Britten’s chamber operas to his intention to overcome the economic difficulties of presenting grand opera in a country where opera (grand or otherwise) has to struggle for its life outside London. As Britten himself said not long ago, when receiving the first Aspen Award, “I prefer to study the conditions of performance and shape my music to them.” Grand opera was out as a long-term policy, because the conditions for it in England did not—do not—exist. So Britten set about to create the conditions and shape his operas accordingly. Hence the formation of the English Opera Group and the composition of the chamber operas. But, of course, as one would expect where an artist as complex as Britten is concerned, this account of cause and effect is far too simple. The chamber operas, in fact, were not just a response to an economic situation but also an innovation conditioned by Britten’s own development. This is the interesting fact that a fresh look at his first operatic triumph, “Peter Grimes” (1945), reveals. A grand opera it undoubtedly is, but when one goes into the score, we find that much of the work anticipates the chamber-musical ideals and characteristic dramatic economy of “The Rape of Lucretia” (1946) or “Albert Herring” (1947), the two works that followed “Grimes” in swift succession.

In a sense, the very success of “Grimes,” the immediacy of its dramatic appeal and brilliance of its set pieces (the famous Sea Interludes, for example), have tended, quite wrongly in my opinion, to place it on an isolated pedestal in Britten’s output. But a careful reassessment of the work will show us, I suggest, that many of the later developments in Britten’s art were already latent in an opera that has been rightly applauded but perhaps too little studied. In principle, I would claim, many of the textures of “Grimes” are already chamber-musical: the ensuing chamber operas make explicit what was implicit in the earlier work.

What dramatic subtleties, too, abound in an opera that is notoriously rich in dramatic strokes of immense breadth and power! One of poor Grimes’ major problems is the problem of personal identity, and identity, as we know, is bound up with the recognition and assimilation—by ourselves—of our own name. Grimes becomes obsessed with his name—dramatically and musically it is a leading motive in the opera—and finally, in the great vocal cadenza in the last act, when he is half-crazed, he sings it to himself as if he were well-nigh divorced from it, as if “Peter Grimes!” were something separate from himself, alien to him: it is an unforgettable realization in terms of musical imagery of his fatally split personality, split within itself and in relation to the society that rejects him. It is this kind of inspiration in “Grimes” which should now claim our attention (not that one is not grateful for the magnificent dramatic fireworks elsewhere).

“Grimes” perhaps tended to overshadow “Lucretia” and “Herring” for a few years, partly because people stuck to the idea that chamber operas must be of a more diminutive stature than grand opera. But familiarity over the years has made people more and, more aware of the major status of “Lucretia” and “Herring,” the one offering an unrivalled concentration of reflective, nocturnal lyricism and high drama, the other a humane, wise and profound comedy, a compassionate irony that strikes extremely deep (those who think “Herring” is a jolly, romping farce have not even begun to understand the work or its composer).

From this fertile period, “The Beggar’s Opera” (1948) remains to be mentioned, a realization of the famous ballad opera which dazzlingly refurbishes the old tunes. The extraordinary thing is that Britten has not so much given a New Look to the music as mined its latent possibilities; as in his masterly folksong settings, he works outwards from the inside, not imposing on the given materials but releasing and revealing undreamed of characteristics.

If “Peter Grimes,” on examination, proves to yield many significant signposts toward Britten’s operatic future, it also equally faces us with the issue that is often of central relevance when discussing the nature of his plots. The onslaught of the world on innocence is a favorite Britten theme and it is there, of course, in “Grimes,” partly concealed in the rough but idealistic hero himself (or anti-hero, perhaps?), but explicit in the person of the boy apprentice, whose wretched fate, in a sense, is even lonelier than Grimes’. The role of the boy is a mute one (though the music speaks for him, and the composer is on his side), but in later operas, this central preoccupation is made wholly vocal, as in “The Turn of the Screw” (1954), for example, where the boy Miles, haunted and hunted, has his own music and his own voice, not the voice of the orchestra. We have here in this remarkable chamber work the plainest statement from Britten of the conflict between experience and innocence, good and evil, which engages the forefront of his attention as a musical dramatist, a conflict that looks bleak and rudimentary when put down in capsule verbal form but which contains, when all is said and done, most of the elating and despairing truth about the human condition.

“The Turn of the Screw” surely justifies the aesthetic premises of the chamber opera conception, because this is a work that simply could not exist, in all its wealth of refinement and intensity of detail, in any other guise whatsoever. The medium and the materials (dramatic and musical) are exactly matched—maximum integration is the result—and the opera inhabits a sound-world that is exclusively its own. We should also note what is a reflection of the tight dramatic structure: a phenomenally highly organized musical organism (the work can really be regarded as a huge set of variations on a theme for voices and orchestra). This is a watertight dramatic work which possesses to an unprecedented degree all the attributes of “absolute” music.

The “Screw,” of course, shows the dark side of Britten’s concern with innocence, as does an earlier opera, “Billy Budd” (1951), in which Britten returned for the first time since “Peter Grimes” to the realm of grand opera. But this was grand opera with a difference; the medium, as it were, was re-experienced by the composer in the light of the intervening chamber operas (“Lucretia,” “Herring,” “The Beggar’s Opera”). Although “Budd” is built, and successfully built, on a monumental, epic scale (in his recent revision [1960] Britten has reinstated the two-act plan that was his original idea), the use of his large-scale orchestra is amazingly spare and sectional; scene after scene is defined with a chamber-musical clarity, penetrating and diamond-sharp in sound for all its clarity, which perfectly serves the predominantly interior character of the drama. There are, naturally, moments of memorable power—Billy’s execution, for instance, or the pursuit at sea of the French man-o’-war—when Britten mobilizes all his resources (another marvelous moment is the instrumental interlude between scenes two and three of Act I, which develops into the full-throated singing of the sailors’ shanties below deck), but for the most part, a marked instrumental restraint (of volume, not color!) is typical of the score.

“Billy Budd” is an example of the complex treatment that Britten brings to his basic dramatic theme; because, though “Budd” might be summed up, tersely, as a battle between Good and Evil, it is by no means a straight fight between innocent Billy and corrupt Claggart. There is also the pervasive presence of Vere, the ship’s noble and super-civilized Captain, torn between the claims of duty and his humane inclination. From the interplay between the three main protagonists, the delicate and highly dramatic dilemmas and moral discriminations emerge, that are the opera’s substance. It is a singular work, far removed from the relative naturalism of “Peter Grimes,” which probes deep-seated, interior levels of human conduct. But the composer leaves us in no doubt that reconciliation is finally achieved, the conflict resolved. It is not so much the text that tells us this, as the music (scrutinize the music, not the libretto, should be the analyst’s golden rule) : the basic tonal conflict of the opera—B-flat major and B minor, a semi tonal friction that one meets again and again in Britten’s music—registers at the outset, in a compact musical image, the dramatic situation; and it is the stable, affirmative B-flat major of the closing pages that makes audible the ultimate conciliation.

Britten’s preoccupation with innocence has more than one side to it, not only the dark side of “Budd” and the “Screw” but the extraordinarily gay, fresh and elating side he shows in such works as “The Little Sweep” (the miniature opera from the entertainment “Let’s Make an Opera!” [1949]) and “Noye’s Fludde” (1957), a pageant opera for church performance based on the Chester Miracle Play. These two works, of course, are bound up with Britten’s interest in children and young people as performers: “It is futile,” he said at Aspen this year, “to offer children music by which they are bored, or which makes them feel inadequate or frustrated, which may set them against music forever.” Britten certainly succeeds in living up to his own admirable intentions; more than that, he writes a kind of “innocent” music which is quite specially stimulated by the technical capacities and spirit of young people, music which, in my view, is unique in the history of the art. His music for children, that is to say, does not represent a simplification of his customary practice but explores a region of feeling and exploits the specific potentialities of the medium in a wholly innovative way. No student of Britten’s operas can afford to neglect the “Sweep” or “Noye’s Fludde.” They are central to his vision and achievement as an artist and as original in conception, within their limits, as anything else in his operatic output.

If I keep on quoting Britten’s Aspen speech, it is because he set down on that memorable occasion (which gave untold pleasure to English musicians) so many of the things he believed in, among them this: “I believe, you see, in occasional music .... Almost every piece I have ever written has been composed with a certain occasion in mind, and usually for definite performers, and certainly always human ones.” This holds true of “Gloriana,” the opera Britten composed in 1953 for the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. If we compare the work with “Budd,” say, or the “Screw,” we realize how loosely built, relatively speaking, is the “occasional” opera. But what a wealth of invention Britten lavished on this unjustly neglected score, which contained not only some of the finest ensembles he had written since “Herring” (an opera immensely rich in big ensembles) but a positive superabundance of music of various kinds that has since become well-known outside the opera, e. g., the suite of brilliant Choral Dances which, in the opera, greet the Queen (Elizabeth I) “on progress,” or the no less brilliant suite of Courtly Dances for orchestra. But our recognition of the skillful way in which Britten has provided the amplitude of color and exciting spectacle proper to a Coronation occasion should not obscure the solid basis of masterly characterization on which the opera as a whole rests. The tragic relationship between the Queen and the impetuous Earl of Essex is the musical heart of the work, and it beats most impressively and convincingly in the two great duets which stand like supporting columns in Acts I and III. That Britten’s creativity was engaged in this work as powerfully as in any other, is surely proved by these duets, by countless ensembles, and by Essex’ Lute Song in Act I, which is one of the composer’s most ravishing inspirations.

A great operatic composer, of course, has to unfold a gallery of great operatic portraits, a test that Britten passes with flying colors. His successes here are too numerous to mention individually. The chamber operas are fantastically rich in this respect—there, even the smallest roles are rounded out in the fullest musical detail. In “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” however, composed in 1960, Britten made a new departure in the sphere of characterization, or, rather, was faced by a different problem. What we encounter here is less the interplay between contrasting human personalities and more the discrimination between contrasting levels of action and types of human (and non-human) being. On the one hand, there is the world of the Fairies, the world of the sleeping, ensnaring Wood; on the other, the world of the humans, both the impassioned, frenzied quartet of lovers and the team of simple-hearted, simple-minded rustics. For each of these levels Britten has found a characterizing music, a world of sound within which the dramatic characters move and have their musical life. The Wood, appropriately enough, has its own music too, unforgettably so in Act II, where four chords, uniquely spaced and imagined, symbolize the power of sleep, of dreams. This act, symbolically and musically, runs very deep, and it reminds us that it is not only innocence that is one of Britten’s major preoccupations: sleep, also. He has written a whole song-cycle about it, the “Nocturne” (1958), and connoisseurs of his art will recall that the final song of the earlier “Serenade” (1943) takes Keats’ “Sonnet to Sleep” as its text. More telling still, as one astute commentator has pointed out (Eric Roseberry), there is a patent relationship between this song and the sequence of chords in the opera. (Like all great composers, Britten is consistent in his musical imagery.)

It is through the healing mediation of sleep and the dream world—”sleep on it” is still the best of therapeutic advice—that the exhausted lovers (not to speak of the confused and translated Bottom) are restored to their senses. The last act, which opens with a radiant dawn, confirms the promise made at the end of Act II in the sublime lullaby—“All shall be well.”

Britten’s “Midsummer Night’s Dream”) which, among many other unexpected things, throws fresh light on Shakespeare’s play) must count as one of his very finest works. We leave the theater refreshed by our encounter with a musical sensibility of such rare quality.

“Dream” (if one may so conveniently abbreviate it) is certainly closer to chamber opera than “grand” opera; it “works” equally well, however, in both small and large theaters, though in the latter case there is much to be said for using the composer’s alternative choice for the role of Oberon—contralto instead of counter-tenor. The instrumental dispositions of the work, at least at the time it was written, seemed to sum up or synthesize what one imagined to be the composer’s experience in the musical theater: the score represented a balance of forces, a sound-ideal, that one thought was likely to remain typical, though doubtless modified in particular instances.

But a composer of genius always shows a gift for the unpredictable, and Britten’s next—and most recent” opera” struck out on quite a new path (although it was one that he had had in mind, I believe, for some long period, possibly even preceding the composition of “Dream"). “Curlew River (1964) is not an opera in the strict sense at all. Britten describes it as a “Parable for Church Performance,” and it is certainly hard to imagine this extraordinary piece staged in the opera house or theater. The text is based on a medieval Japanese Noh play, skillfully transplanted by William Plomer to an English setting, a Church in the Fens; and though the work had its origins in the impact made on Britten by his witnessing the Noh drama on a visit to Tokyo in 1956, the score is rooted in the English medieval religious drama. There is no conductor, the cast is an all-male one, with the central role of the Madwoman sung by the tenor, and only a handful of instrumentalists. But what colors Britten achieves! He had already proved in “Budd,” of course, that the restriction of all male voices was no restriction at all, and in “Curlew River,” it is amazing how soon one simply ceases to notice the limitation, so inventively and variously are the voices deployed. As for the orchestral part, in which every participant is virtually a soloist, the sound is once again entirely fresh and without precedent. The virtuoso treatment of the percussion is in itself deserving of close study.

“Curlew River” is a ritual. The drama rests in the intensity and rigorous stylization of the stage gestures, which adorn the plainest of stories: a demented mother seeks her lost son and finds his grave by the river bank. Musically speaking, it is one of the sparest of Britten’s scores, and yet one of the most strikingly and immediately imaginative; one of the simplest in effect, and yet one of the most freely elaborate in rhythmic asymmetry; one of the least dense in harmonic texture, and yet full of harmonic events. It celebrates a rite, a “mystery,” and comes very close indeed to baring the heart of the mystery—the magical combination of drama and music—that we know, inadequately, as “opera.” I know of no other work in which the infinite gradations between heightened speech and exalted song are travelled with such effortless mastery. Benjamin Britten, in the 20th century, surely stands pre-eminent among composers of his generation for his unrivalled contributions to, and extensions of, the musical theater.