Hinterland

Can a new book about Benjamin Britten’s teenage ‘muse’ shed light on the composer’s darker side?

The literature on Benjamin Britten is extensive, as befits a rare English bona fide musical genius. As well as several biographies of varying degrees of credibility, six volumes of letters and one of diaries, learned (and not so learned) articles about him and his music proliferate. The latest addition to Britten studies is a slim volume that contributes considerably to our understanding of the composer. Wulff: Britten’s Young Apollo, by Tony Scotland (Shelf Lives, £24), is the story of Wulff Scherchen, whom Britten met when he was 20 and Wulff just 13. The two met again when Wulff was 18, in 1938, and – until Britten fled to America in the late spring of 1939 to escape the war – they had an intimate relationship, with Scherchen becoming Britten’s muse. Their relationship has been the subject of much speculation, not all helpful to Britten’s personal reputation, and in 2004 it featured in John Bridcut’s documentary Britten’s Children, about the composer’s fascination with young boys.

Scotland’s achievement lies not just in the excellence of his book (which will surprise no one who has read his Lennox and Freda, about the marriage of Britten’s lover Lennox Berkeley) but also in having spotted in the first place what Scherchen’s story can tell us about Britten. His meticulous research adds to, or at the very least underlines, our understanding of the composer’s “darker side” – a side, as Scotland puts it, “that could be selfish, manipulative, boastful, childish, sometimes unkind, even dishonest”. On the specific matter of Britten’s conduct towards a younger boy, Scotland points out that some of it “might be seen as evidence of what is now called grooming and coercion”. Britten’s Children went to lengths to emphasise that Britten never actually did anything with the young boys to whom he became close. This book does not contradict that, but it is fair to say that among Britten’s circle at the time there was more than one school of thought on the question.

Scherchen’s father was the well-known German conductor Hermann Scherchen, whose interest in contemporary classical music led to Britten’s working with him, and meeting his son, in the early 1930s. By that stage, Hermann Scherchen, a ravenous womaniser, had left Wulff ’s mother. When Hitler came to power, the fractured family was heavily opposed to him and his policies; Wulff ’s mother took him to Switzerland, and thence to England, where they settled in Cambridge. That is where he met Britten again, in 1938, with great enthusiasm on both sides.

Donald Mitchell, the Britten scholar described after his death in 2017 as the composer’s “vicar on earth”, edited those six volumes of letters and, as Scotland observes, was highly protective of Britten. Mitchell had been a friend of the composer and was his last surviving executor: and his sanitising skills were applied to the correspondence with Scherchen. To be fair to Mitchell, when he eventually persuaded the elderly Wulff to let him have the letters Britten had sent him, Wulff – by that stage long a naturalised Briton who had adopted the name John Woolford – had some sanitising of his own to do, partly to protect his wife, who had always kept her distance from that part of her

Some of Britten’s conduct with young Wulff ‘might now be seen as grooming’

husband’s life. He agreed to allow Mitchell to publish the letters only if all endearments were removed.

Britten dumped Berkeley to pursue Wulff, and despite Britten’s extreme discretion in this, as in almost every other facet of his private life, it is quite clear from Scotland’s book that his relationship with the 18-year-old was a sexual one. Wulff was then dumped in favour of Peter Pears, and eventually joined the British Army, being as keen to fight Hitler as Britten was not to fight him. When the two men met again in 1942, after Britten had returned to England from America, Wulff had changed dramatically into a hardened soldier who would shortly marry. The reunion was not a success and the two men hardly met again. Scotland was lucky to meet the 91-year-old Woolford in 2011, on a rare visit from his adopted Australia. He has told his story with intelligence and sensitivity, reminding us that the process of re-evaluating Britten as man and musician can only now begin.