Britten, right, with Peter Pears
November 22, 1913- Benjamin Britten
“It is cruel that music should be so beautiful. It has the beauty of loneliness of pain: of strength & freedom. The beauty of disappointment & never satisfied love. The cruel beauty of nature & everlasting beauty of monotony.”
I do not have a driving passion for “serious” music, symphonic works, choral pieces, or what is blanketed as “classical” music. But, I am interested in Benjamin Britten, one of the greatest composers of the 20th century, because his is also one of the great loves stories, & because he was working during a Golden Age of Gay American & British composers who all knew & fed off of each other’s artistic energy: Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomas, Paul Bowles, Samuel Barber & Leonard Bernstein.
Britten composed a series of masterpieces, from works for solo piano, oboe & cello, to pieces for chamber ensembles, to concertos & compositions for orchestras both tiny & monumental, even a full length ballet. His vocal compositions include folk-song arrangements, song cycles setting music to words by Michelangelo, William Blake, W.H. Auden, plus his great masterpiece, War Requiem. But, the form for which he is best known is Opera. His Peter Grimes is considered by many of my opera loving friends to be one of the most powerful musical dramas of the last century, & he wrote at least 5 other landmark operas that are a part of our planet’s major opera companies’ repertory.
The extraordinary tenor, Peter Pears, was Britten’s musical partner, life partner & muse. Britten wrote many of his greatest vocal compositions specifically for Pears & his unique & expressive voice. Pears & Britten were understandably reticent to talk being gay. The couple lived in Britain when being a homo carried a career & life destroying prison sentence. It was an era where gays were forced to hide their love.
Britten visited the USA in the spring 1939 & found more than he hoped for. He had come to perform & present some of his compositions. It was supposed to be a short trip, but ended up lasting several years. War broke out in Europe while he was away & he did not return right away to England. Britten was 26 years old when war broke out, & he would have had to enlist in the military in some form.
During the visit, Britten & Pears began a love affair that lasted 40+ years. There is a hotel room in Grand Rapids where they supposedly consummated their union that is a place gay musicians still make a pilgrimage.
The Britten/Pears had a kind of “marriage” that gave life to some magnificent music. In a 1943 letter to Pears, who was traveling, Britten wrote:
“Think of all the other married couples who are separated for ever so much longer!”
When Britten left this world, a full decade after the repeal of England’s anti-gay laws, Queen Elizabeth I sent her barely disguised condolences to Pears as “a representative of all who had worked with Lord Britten”, not even acknowledging that they were a couple.
The British laws that prohibited homosexual acts were somewhat responsible for Britten’s opera Peter Grimes, which he had began composing 2 years into the Britten/Pears relationship. The libretto shows Grimes as an outsider, alienated from the life of his fishing village which rejects him, just as Britten’s own gayness had isolated him while growing up.
The pair had followed their friend Auden to the USA. It was in America that Britten composed his very first opera, Paul Bunyan, with a libretto by Auden.
Auden stayed, but The Britten/Pears returned to England in 1942, with Britten declaring conscientious objector status to avoid the army. His choral works were performed in concert halls & Peter Grimes had its premiere in 1945. This was his greatest success up to that point in his career. Britten began encountering opposition from the traditional British musical establishment & he withdrew from the London scene. In 1947, he founded the English Opera Group & the Aldeburgh Festival to showcase his own works.
Peter Grimes was the first in a series of operas, including Billy Budd (1951) & The Turn Of The Screw (1954) that share the theme of the ‘outsider’ in society. Most of his works feature a character that is excluded or misunderstood.
In the last decade of his life, Britten suffered from bad health & debilitating depression. His later compositions are progressively sparser in texture, including the overtly gay opera Death In Venice (1973), the only one of his operas that I have seen, albeit, on a TV broadcast.
I came to love the music of Britten because of the way it is featured in the plot & on the soundtrack to one of my favorite films, Moonrise Kingdom (2012), directed by Wes Anderson, with many of the composer’s selections that feature children’s voices. Anderson:
“The Britten music had a huge effect on the whole movie, I think. The movie is sort of set to it. The play, Noye’s Fludde, that is performed in it, my older brother & I were actually in a production when I was 10 or 11, & that music is something I’ve always remembered, & made a very strong impression on me. It is the color of the movie in a way.”
Many of the Britten tracks on the Moonrise Kingdom soundtrack were lifted from recordings supervised by the composer himself including the delightful, charming The Young Person’s Guide To The Orchestra conducted by Bernstein.
Britten had initially refused a knighthood, but he accepted a life peerage in 1976 when he was dubbed Baron Britten Of Aldeburgh In The County Of Suffolk. A few months later he took his final bows, gone from a heart attack at his house in Aldeburgh. He is buried in the churchyard there. Pears spent the rest of his life working to insure his lover’s legacy. Pears left this existence in 1986 at 75 years old. He was buried next to Britten.
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