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b i o g r a p h y s i mon h e f f e r Settling Scores Benjamin Britten: A Life in the Twentieth Century By Paul Kildea (Allen Lane/The Penguin Press 666pp £30) Benjamin Britten’s centenary this year would not be complete without a new biography that its publishers are selling as the definitive life of the greatest British composer of the 20th century. Sadly, any reader who swallows either contention may be disappointed. Paul Kildea ought to have written a superb book. He has published two other admirable works on Britten, the first of which, Selling Britten, was expanded from the thesis for his Oxford doctorate. In this biography, he has discovered the shocking medical fact that Britten died partly as a result of tertiary syphilis, contracted it seems from his promiscuous partner Peter Pears. Yet for all that this supposedly comprehensive book falls short. A truly definitive biography would use a wider range of sources, display a more open mind, and demonstrate a stricter attention to the facts. And it is debatable, too, whether Britten is the greatest British composer of the 20th century. He was a great composer, even a genius. But, equally, a few of us have our blood chilled when we hear some of what he wrote after the age of forty, an age at which the two other modern British titans – Vaughan Williams and Elgar – had hardly got going. As this biography unfailingly shows, Britten in the last twenty or so years of his life became a rather nasty piece of work – traits all too evident to those with whom he collaborated – which found expression in a lack of warmth in the music of that period. The story is all here: the precocious talent in childhood in Lowestoft and at Gresham’s, the celebrity in 1930s London with Auden and Isherwood, the escape to America as war neared, and the success and fame in the postwar period. However, Kildea seems obsessed with Britten’s homosexuality, and obsessed too with settling scores against those who found the homocentric atmosphere of Aldeburgh too much. He brands the acclaimed Heldentenor Jon Vickers, whose role as Peter Grimes he manifestly dislikes, ‘grumpy and homophobic’ (a risk most of us would not take with the laws of libel). He relishes Britten telling off Charles Mackerras for making a mild joke about the number of boys at Aldeburgh, without questioning the reasons for Britten’s absurd overreaction, and forgetting that at the time homosexuality was, however iniquitous the law, illegal. He even kicks the vicar of Aldeburgh for some ‘fire and brimstone’ sermons against homosexuality, allegedly Britten photographed by Cecil Beaton, 1945 made at the time of the first festival in 1948, but of which he offers no examples. Of course Britten’s sexuality influenced his music, as is clear from the operas and their fixation with young men and boys. There is a danger – and the author succumbs to it – of allowing this powerful current to override everything else. Although Kildea imposes the values of the 21st century on the mid-20th, he also provides plenty of context. He wishes to emphasise the importance not just of Britten’s sexuality, but also of his pacifism. However, his grasp of history is not always strong. He writes of Britten’s distaste at the ‘retribution’ of Allied bomber raids on Essen and Hamburg in 1943; but these were strategic raids, designed to harm the German war effort, not simply an exercise in revenge. A proper evaluation of Britten’s pacifism would have been useful. The experience of the Great War was enough to turn all but the most psychopathic off the idea of conflict. It was a pointless atrocity. Its worst consequence, however, was the Second World War. Britten’s pacifism, which would have been justified in the slaughter of 1916, just looked gutless in 1940. What did he expect would have become of him, and other homosexuals and leftists, had everyone chosen not to put country first and let the Nazis invade Britain? What did he make of Hitler’s persecution of homosexuals on the Continent? Or of the murder of prominent Jewish musicians, who staffed orchestras and played his music? Kildea is too soft on this woolly, naive and cowardly thinking. The civilisation in which Britten relaunched his reputation with Peter Grimes in 1945 was one secured by the sacrifices of others. He retained this idiotic view right to the end, refusing to condemn the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, and believing the Americans were ‘occupying’ an airbase near Aldeburgh. He also relies too often on supposition – and sometimes this borders on the offensive. He guesses that the composer and future professor of music at Cambridge who branded Britten, wrongly and offensively, a ‘Jew boy’ was Patrick Hadley. He provides no evidence for this, and it is a slur on Hadley’s posthumous reputation. A failure by Arthur Bliss, when BBC Director of Music in 1943, to ask Britten to conduct some of his own music is described (with a sneer) as being the result of Britten’s pacifism. Again no proof is offered. And a ‘disgruntled elderly composer’ is said to have remarked after the war that if Britten blew his nose someone would make a record of it. Kildea puts ‘Vaughan Williams?’ in parentheses. How does he know? And if he doesn’t, why suggest it? Hadley, Bliss and Vaughan Williams were all looked down on by Britten and his circle. It seems that a new generation of the clique has picked up the baton. Kildea also allows himself the odd riot Literary Review | f e b r u a r y 2 0 1 3 12
page 15
b i o g r a p h y of imagination more appropriate to a work of fiction. When Britten and Peter Pears, his lover from 1939 until his death, enter a church in Madras, Kildea writes that ‘finally they sought out either ghosts or consolation in the church Pears’s father had been christened in’. How does he know? The speculation about the feelings and motivations of the characters becomes wearing, and one begins to suspect that the author wishes to invest each banal moment with some significance that, quite often, it does not have. Kildea also from time to time writes breathlessly about his subject, and too adjectivally – the book should have been better edited. There is, though, some good material beyond the discovery of Britten’s affliction by syphilis. Kildea is perceptive on the suffocating effect Pears had on the composer’s creativity (Pears also went to lengths to keep away from Aldeburgh, which he found dull and provincial). Kildea is a conductor and an artistic director (including at Aldeburgh), and he is suitably commanding when writing about Britten’s many stage works. Peter Grimes, regarded by many as Britten’s masterpiece, was only so good because its librettist, Montagu Slater, stood up to Britten and argued every point in the construction of the work. Britten, as Kildea is not shy to say, was impossibly thin-skinned – it got worse as he grew older – and so Slater was promptly booted off the Christmas card list. Later librettists, including E M Forster and Myfanwy Piper, did as they were told, which made for a quieter life but less successful operas. Kildea has been narrow in his sources – the library of the Britten-Pears Foundation at Aldeburgh and the six-volume series of letters, whose publication has just been completed, dominate his footnotes. His apparent acceptance of Britten’s own musical prejudices gives his book a sectarian smell. He describes Elgar and Vaughan Williams as ‘supposed’ giants of English music. Just because Britten disliked them – for reasons Kildea would have been well advised to analyse in great depth, since jealousy and resentment would seem to have something to do with it – does not mean that they were objectively poor. The reputations of Elgar and, even more, Vaughan Williams have risen during the last thirty years, while Britten’s has, at best, flatlined. This may not be to Kildea’s liking, but it has happened nonetheless. The clique of sycophants around Britten for the last thirty years of his life damaged him – that much, at least, becomes clear from Kildea’s book. The infantile narrowmindedness and crushing sense of superiority that took root before the war were grotesquely overindulged after it. Kildea hardly disputes this, as he catalogues one act of self-serving disloyalty by Britten after another. Friends and associates were dumped ruthlessly when of no further use. Critics who dared to criticise were banished. The clique had to make their worship apparent to remain in favour. The genius became a dictator. Kildea talks of Britten praising ‘the openness of Continental thought and the narrowness and lack of generosity in England and America’. Britten embodied the native spirit too well. Anyone who has read Humphrey Carpenter’s fine biography, and supplemented it with the six volumes of letters, will not learn too much from Kildea. He concentrates so much on the operas and says relatively little – and little original – about the works that really displayed Britten’s genius when he was in his twenties, such as the Violin and Piano Concertos, the Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge and his overwhelming Sinfonia da Requiem. It is time the Piano Concerto in particular was given the understanding and praise it deserves. And for all the emphasis on Britten’s leftwing politics, it would be good if the paradox about his ruthless social climbing had been better explored: his relationship with the Queen, his friendship with her cousin Lord Harewood, and his close relationship with Princess Margaret of Hesse. Kildea says Britten wasn’t an English gentleman – but he was. He was ever the betweeded public schoolboy, with a series of poses that might have made some think otherwise. Paul Kildea is critical, but not critical or objective enough. Britten overwhelmed others through a combination of genius and spiteful personality when alive. He still overwhelms when dead. His circle trod carefully then, and their successors tread carefully now. History has not finished with him, I suspect, nor with his reputation. To order this book for £24, see the Literary Review bookshop on page 45 f e b r u a r y 2 0 1 3 | Literary Review 13

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b i o g r a p h y s i mon h e f f e r

Settling Scores Benjamin Britten: A Life in the Twentieth Century

By Paul Kildea (Allen Lane/The Penguin Press 666pp £30)

Benjamin Britten’s centenary this year would not be complete without a new biography that its publishers are selling as the definitive life of the greatest British composer of the 20th century. Sadly, any reader who swallows either contention may be disappointed.

Paul Kildea ought to have written a superb book. He has published two other admirable works on Britten, the first of which, Selling Britten, was expanded from the thesis for his Oxford doctorate. In this biography, he has discovered the shocking medical fact that Britten died partly as a result of tertiary syphilis, contracted it seems from his promiscuous partner Peter Pears. Yet for all that this supposedly comprehensive book falls short. A truly definitive biography would use a wider range of sources, display a more open mind, and demonstrate a stricter attention to the facts. And it is debatable, too, whether Britten is the greatest British composer of the 20th century. He was a great composer, even a genius. But, equally, a few of us have our blood chilled when we hear some of what he wrote after the age of forty, an age at which the two other modern British titans – Vaughan Williams and Elgar – had hardly got going. As this biography unfailingly shows, Britten in the last twenty or so years of his life became a rather nasty piece of work – traits all too evident to those with whom he collaborated – which found expression in a lack of warmth in the music of that period.

The story is all here: the precocious talent in childhood in Lowestoft and at Gresham’s, the celebrity in 1930s London with Auden and Isherwood, the escape to America as war neared, and the success and fame in the postwar period. However, Kildea seems obsessed with Britten’s homosexuality, and obsessed too with settling scores against those who found the homocentric atmosphere of Aldeburgh too much. He brands the acclaimed Heldentenor Jon Vickers, whose role as Peter

Grimes he manifestly dislikes, ‘grumpy and homophobic’ (a risk most of us would not take with the laws of libel). He relishes Britten telling off Charles Mackerras for making a mild joke about the number of boys at Aldeburgh, without questioning the reasons for Britten’s absurd overreaction, and forgetting that at the time homosexuality was, however iniquitous the law, illegal. He even kicks the vicar of Aldeburgh for some ‘fire and brimstone’ sermons against homosexuality, allegedly

Britten photographed by Cecil Beaton, 1945

made at the time of the first festival in 1948, but of which he offers no examples. Of course Britten’s sexuality influenced his music, as is clear from the operas and their fixation with young men and boys. There is a danger – and the author succumbs to it – of allowing this powerful current to override everything else.

Although Kildea imposes the values of the 21st century on the mid-20th, he also provides plenty of context. He wishes to emphasise the importance not just of Britten’s sexuality, but also of his pacifism.

However, his grasp of history is not always strong. He writes of Britten’s distaste at the ‘retribution’ of Allied bomber raids on Essen and Hamburg in 1943; but these were strategic raids, designed to harm the German war effort, not simply an exercise in revenge.

A proper evaluation of Britten’s pacifism would have been useful. The experience of the Great War was enough to turn all but the most psychopathic off the idea of conflict. It was a pointless atrocity. Its worst consequence, however, was the Second World War. Britten’s pacifism, which would have been justified in the slaughter of 1916, just looked gutless in 1940. What did he expect would have become of him, and other homosexuals and leftists, had everyone chosen not to put country first and let the Nazis invade Britain? What did he make of Hitler’s persecution of homosexuals on the Continent? Or of the murder of prominent Jewish musicians, who staffed orchestras and played his music? Kildea is too soft on this woolly, naive and cowardly thinking. The civilisation in which Britten relaunched his reputation with Peter Grimes in 1945 was one secured by the sacrifices of others. He retained this idiotic view right to the end, refusing to condemn the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, and believing the Americans were ‘occupying’ an airbase near Aldeburgh.

He also relies too often on supposition – and sometimes this borders on the offensive. He guesses that the composer and future professor of music at Cambridge who branded Britten, wrongly and offensively, a ‘Jew boy’ was Patrick Hadley. He provides no evidence for this, and it is a slur on Hadley’s posthumous reputation. A failure by Arthur Bliss, when BBC Director of Music in 1943, to ask Britten to conduct some of his own music is described (with a sneer) as being the result of Britten’s pacifism. Again no proof is offered. And a ‘disgruntled elderly composer’ is said to have remarked after the war that if Britten blew his nose someone would make a record of it. Kildea puts ‘Vaughan Williams?’ in parentheses. How does he know? And if he doesn’t, why suggest it? Hadley, Bliss and Vaughan Williams were all looked down on by Britten and his circle. It seems that a new generation of the clique has picked up the baton.

Kildea also allows himself the odd riot

Literary Review | f e b r u a r y 2 0 1 3 12

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