Britten’s magic endures
In his time, some sneered, but the great composer has surpassed his critics
In his centenary year, the triumph of Benjamin Britten seems complete. It takes an effort of imagination to remember it wasn’t always so. During his lifetime there were always loud dissenting voices, from those who thought he was too clever, or too repressed.
Born 100 years ago on Nov. 22 — fittingly, St. Cecilia’s Day, the patron saint of music — Britten made a blazing beginning in the 1930s and ’40s, but then seemed to retreat in both senses: physically, to his Aldeburgh home, and musically, away from the exuberance of youth toward fastidious parsimony. He became the perfect establishment man, someone who could be called on to inaugurate a new cathedral with a Requiem, or write a Hymn of Praise for the United Nations, while the real cultural energies of the era were bubbling up elsewhere.
Meanwhile, a Europe in thrall to modernism found him unsympathetic. That arbiter of musical modernism Theodor Adorno sneered at Britten’s “musical cocktails” made from “an insipid mixture of elements from a dead tradition and a few unimportant modern ingredients.”
Well, we now know who had the last laugh. Few people read Adorno, apart from left-leaning musicologists. But everyone listens to Britten, and children the world over sing his songs. Even France, the country that resisted him most strongly, has become almost Britten-obsessed.
What has changed? Simply the passing of time, which can have two effects. It can show that a composer is great enough to rise beyond his or her era. Or it can show he or she really was limited to his time, and that listening to the works yields only the small pleasures of antiquarianism. Louis Spohr and Korngold are the latter kind of composer: They give off a nice “period flavour,” but you can’t take them altogether seriously.
Identifying Britten’s strengths brings us back to the passing of time, and how that makes us hear a composer’s work. When people want to elevate a composer, they always describe him (or her) as “timeless.” But the really great composers are great precisely because they are so rooted in their times. Unlike the minor talents such as Korngold, they don’t just reflect the times, they help to shape them.
That means the really significant composers may run counter to surface trends, because they’re tapping into deeper currents beneath. The musical language of Peter Grimes and Billy Budd was certainly far from up-to-date, according to the arbiters of musical modernism in the late ’ 40s and early ’50s. But in their focus on the lonely and confused individual, facing a closed authoritative society, they seem very contemporary. In Grimes’s sudden hallucinations and rages we see all the insecurities by which our sense of individuality is beset in modern times.
The modernist camp would probably retort: Yes, but what’s the point of dealing with contemporary issues in the language of Verdi? That misses the radical twist Britten gives to the apparently homey and hackneyed musical language he’d inherited.
In any case, the sneery references to the elements of Verdi or Purcell or Mahler in Britten are really a form of backhanded compliment. They point to the astonishing density of Britten’s language, its power to make multiple allusions in a short space of time. Think of the splendour of the fanfares in the Michelangelo sonnets, which carry us back to the Baroque splendours of Monteverdi. Or the pounding timpani strokes that begin the Sinfonia da Requiem, which import a Mahlerian weight and depth into that piece. Or the numerous pieces based on a repeating bass pattern, such as the stunning Chacony of the String Quartet No 2, which in many listeners will stir memories of Purcell’s stately pieces built on a ground bass.