The Rest Is Noise Series: “Grimes! Grimes!”: The Passion of Benjamin Britten. Alex Ross
or bisexual: Copland, Thomson, Bernstein, Barber, Blitzstein, Cage, Harry Partch, Henry Cowell, Lou Harrison, Gian Carlo Menotti, David Diamond, and Ned Rorem, among many others. In Britain, too, the art of composition skewed gay. The two young composers who seized the spotlight in the early postwar era were Britten and Michael Tippett, neither of whom made an effort to hide his homosexuality.
The nexus of classical music and gay culture goes back at least to the final years of the nineteenth century, when aesthetes of the Oscar Wilde type gathered at Wagner nights in London and wore green carnations in their lapels. “Is he musical?” gay men would ask of an unfamiliar newcomer. As the century went on, conservatories and concert halls filled up with introverted boys who had trouble fitting in with their fellows. Classical music appealed to some gay youngsters because of the free-floating power of its emotions: while most pop songs explicitly address love and/or sex between modern boys and girls, opera renders romance in an archaic, stylized way, and instrumental works give voice to unspoken passions. Already in the first years of the century, this music had the reputation of being a “sissy” culture—the association troubled Charles Ives, for one—and its cultural decline in the postwar era may have had something to do with the discomfort that the homosexual ambience caused in the general population.
Gay composers of the early twentieth century seldom hinted at their sexuality in their work, although Francis Poulenc, Henri Sauguet, and other composers associated with the Ballets Russes inhabited a recognizably gay subculture. One who trembled at the edge of disclosure was the Polish composer Karol Szymanowski, whose output included an unpublished, now mostly lost novel of pornographic tendencies, titled Ephebos. In the wake of sexually liberating travels to the south of Italy and North Africa between 1908 and 1914, Szymanowski fashioned a fiercely sensuous style that recalled Debussy at his most turbulent and Scriabin in his high mystic phase. His 1914 song cycle The Love Songs of Hafiz dives into the heady world of the fourteenth-century Persian poet Hafiz, who used the allure of young men’s bodies as a metaphor for religious ecstasy, or perhaps the other way around. Szymanowski’s Third Symphony (1914–16), based on a similarly charged text by Rumi (“Oh, do not sleep, friend, through this night .. .”), culminates in an orgasmic whole-tone chord for voices, orchestra, and organ. And in the daring and strange opera King Roger (1918–24), the royal hero struggles to resist the Dionysian magnetism of a young shepherd who proclaims, “My God is as beautiful as I am.” The ending is ambiguous: the audience is unsure whether Roger has succumbed to the shepherd or overcome him. In the wake of the shepherd’s final orgiastic ritual, Roger is left alone, holding his arms to the sun of Apollo, C-major harmony blazing around him.
The conflict between Dionysus and Apollo is a well-worn metaphor. Stravinsky often mused upon the divide; in the Rite he sided with the Dionysian, in Apollon musagète with the call to order. Britten understood the polarity much as Szymanowski did, not as an intellectual problem but as an acute personal dilemma, a choice between sexual exposure and sexual restraint. He ended his operatic career by setting to music Thomas Mann’s novella Death in Venice, in which Dionysus and Apollo battle for the soul of a middle-aged man looking at a boy on a beach. What perplexed Britten was not his sexuality per se—he never concealed himself in a sham marriage, and sustained a loving relationship with Pears for more than half his life—but his longing for the company of underage males. Although that predicament places him outside most people’s experience, the disordering power of desire is a universal theme, and Britten’s music is a searing diary of its repercussions.
Britten grew up in an ordinary middle-class home. His father made a good living as a dentist, although he worried about money and took refuge in a late-morning glass of whiskey. Mrs. Britten, a gifted singer and a host of musical soirees, nurtured her son to excess, predicting that he would become “the fourth B,” after Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. Benjamin needed little prompting in the direction of the Bs; music was his native tongue, and he could harmonize before he could spell.
At the age of fourteen Britten began studying with Frank Bridge, an imaginative composer of Debussyish tendencies who quickly perceived the boy’s potential. The first year of Britten’s studies yielded, among other things, the orchestral song cycle Quatre Chansons françaises, which was not only amazingly accomplished in technical terms but disconcertingly mature in theme. One setting is of a Victor Hugo poem that depicts a five-year-old who plays outside a window behind which his mother lies dying; the juxtaposition of a childlike melody with shadowy harmonies prefigures many Britten works to come.
By the age of sixteen he was writing thorny, quasi-atonal pieces. The turn toward Viennese expressionism may have had something to do with the alienation he felt while at boarding school, where, according to ageless routine, older boys bullied younger ones. Britten marked his departure from Gresham’s School with an Elegy for Viola that traces anguished nontonal circles around a tonal center of C.
Intellectual precocity often goes hand in hand with emotional immaturity. Into his twenties and beyond, Britten held on to an exaggerated boyishness, indulging in games, pranks, schoolboy slang, and baby talk. At age forty he was still writing in a School Boy’s Diary. Adult realities scared him, most of all sex. As John Bridcut observes, in a book about Britten’s relationships with children, the composer was in some ways emotionally frozen at the age of thirteen.
In 1930 Britten received a scholarship to study at the Royal College of Music in London. He also gained an informal education courtesy of the British Broadcasting Corporation, which, then as now, offered the finest classical radio programming in the world. At a time when David Sarnoff’s NBC was playing Beethoven and little else, the BBC gave generous attention to living composers. Taking a dislike to Elgar and other mainstays of English music, Britten preferred the sharp new sounds coming out of Paris, Vienna, and Berlin, all of which could be sampled on the BBC’s far-ranging programs. A radio broadcast in April 1930 prompted an interest in Schoenberg; he proceeded to program Schoenberg’s Six Little Pieces at a musical soiree at his parents’ home. A broadcast of Berg’s Wozzeck in 1934 had him glued to his set, despite bursts of static. (He hoped to study with Berg in Vienna, but the idea was quashed on the grounds that Berg was “immoral” and “not a good influence.”) That same year the BBC gave Britten his first national exposure by broadcasting his choral piece A Boy Was Born.
In the semi-socialistic spirit of the time, various divisions of the British government had their art and propaganda units, giving employment to artists who had lost work in the wake of the collapse of the consumerist twenties economy. The General Post Office had a film unit that was responsible for telling the public about the many uses of mail. In 1935 Britten went to work for the G.P.O. Film Unit as the house composer; his first assignment was to write music for a film about King George V’s Jubilee stamp. Later projects included Coal Face, Telegrams, Gas Abstract, Men Behind the Meters, How the Dial Works, Negroes, and Night Mail.
Such English-style exercises in “music for use” sharpened Britten’s ability to write on any subject and for any occasion, and they also brought him together with the young poet W. H. Auden, who was contributing witty texts to Post Office films. The two men went on to collaborate on a BBC feature, Hadrian’s Wall; two song cycles, On This Island and Our Hunting Fathers; and the experimental operetta Paul Bunyan. Auden made it his mission to bring Britten out of his shell, socially, sexually, and intellectually. “Stand up and fold / Your map of desolation,” he instructed, in a poem dedicated to the composer in 1936. “Strike and you shall conquer.” Britten’s literary taste moved into the twentieth century, and his political views veered toward socialism and pacifism (Bridge having already nudged him toward the latter). There was an obvious Popular Front flavor to such projects as the 1939 cantata Ballad of Heroes, dedicated to fallen British fighters in the Spanish Civil War; the texts were by Auden and by Randall Swingler, literary editor of the British Daily Worker. Auden had no stomach for agitprop, though, and his slogans fell short of Hanns Eisler’s standards for proletarian song: “I must take charge of the liquid fire, / And storm the cities of human desire.”
Young Britten assembled a personal language out of whatever pleased his uncommonly sharp ear. His harmonic vocabulary stemmed both from continental models such as Berg and Stravinsky and from