Evans Journeying Boy

The Diaries of the Young Benjamin Britten 1928-1938
Main
ISBN: 978-0-571-27464-2
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 608 Seiten

Best remembered for his operas and his War Requiem, Benjamin Britten's radical politics and his sexuality have also ensured that he remains a controversial public figure. Journeying Boy is a selection of his diaries that offer the reader an unseen insight into this complex man. Encompassing the years 1928-1938, they explore some key periods of Britten's life - his early compositions, his education first under composer Frank Bridge and then at the Royal College of Music, an unhappy but productive period studying under John Ireland and Ralph Vaughan Williams, and his reluctant and often painful process of parting from the warm, safe environment of his family home and his beloved mother. The diaries cast light on an often misrepresented musician whose technique, originality and musical prowess have entranced audiences for generations and who continues to inspire composers and musicians around the world.

John Evans completed his doctoral studies on Benjamin Britten at the University of Wales in 1984. After five years as Research Scholar at the Britten-Pears Library and Archive he joined BBC Radio 3, becoming the network's Head of Music in 1993. His publications include Benjamin Britten: Pictures from a Life 1913-1976 and A Britten Source Book. He is currently President and Executive Director of the Oregon Bach Festival in the United States.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Evans, John

Leseproben

Lowestoft – Gresham’s

… everything seemed so simple when he was a boy … simple and delightful for the most part. But as he grew up, he began to be increasingly disillusioned – in man – I suppose.

Sir Peter Pears, interviewed in A Time There Was … (The South Bank Show)

Britten’s life has been so well documented, and his career so celebrated, that sometimes a true perspective on his early years is hard to achieve, clouded as it is by the public nature of almost everything he did after the now legendary premiere of Peter Grimes at Sadler’s Wells on 7 June 1945. It is very easy to forget that he was born shortly before the Great War and grew up in a very provincial fishing town on Suffolk’s east coast – a community populated by retired colonels, the widows and orphans of the war, and spinsters for whom marriage was now unlikely, as too many eligible young men did not return to their families and loved ones in 1918. At times, reading Britten’s own account of life in Lowestoft, one is reminded not so much of the characteristically East Anglian ‘Borough’ community of Peter Grimes, but rather the more quaint provincial society of the ‘Loxford’ of Albert Herring – full of charitable good causes and committee meetings, church fêtes and musical gatherings, with the ever-present town worthies in attendance: the vicar, church organist and schoolmistress. Indeed, Mrs Britten herself was at the heart of community life in Lowestoft, as a regular worshipper at St John’s Church, where all four of her children were baptised and confirmed. She seems, however, to have been less successful in persuading her husband of the virtues of regular prayer or church-going; his Sunday routine involved visiting patients in the morning, returning via a friend, Decar Blowers, landlord of a farmhouse pub in Sotterly; after the traditional family Sunday lunch and tea, Mr Britten’s early evening port-of-call was Lowestoft’s Royal Yacht Club. It would be safe to say that Mr and Mrs Britten made rather different interpretations of the day of rest.

Meanwhile Mrs Britten continued her charitable work as Secretary of the Lowestoft Musical Society, supporting the ‘Care of Girls’ charity, and running a soup kitchen for the Scottish Girls who worked at the fish-markets, whose job it was to gut and pack the herring catch from the Scottish boats during the season. Beth, meanwhile, ran the local lacrosse team and the Brownie troupe. The children were encouraged to take their social responsibilities and civic duties seriously, and despite a degree of snobbishness on Mrs Britten’s part the family was brought up to respect individuals from all walks of society. They were devoted, for instance, to Mr Britten’s secretary, Miss Hayes, and to the domestic staff, Rose, May and Phyllis; but highest in their affections were the two sisters from Farnham who managed Mrs Britten’s home from the polar extremes of the house. Annie Walker, the children’s nanny, joined the household in 1907, six months after Bobby was born, and remained with the family until 1932. Her empire was the nursery on the top floor. After Benjamin came along it was thought that Mrs Britten needed more help with running 21 Kirkley Cliff Road, so in May 1914 Annie’s sister, Alice, joined the household as cook and remained for almost twenty years, leaving only in January 1933 to marry a man to whom she had been betrothed for almost her entire time in Lowestoft.

In this extremely well-run establishment, education and general improvement were also taken very seriously. All four children began their education at Southolme, Miss Astle’s pre-preparatory school in Lowestoft, where her younger sister, Miss Ethel Astle, was the music teacher. Both Britten girls went to the Woodard School of St Mary and Anne, Abbots Bromley, in Staffordshire. Barbara became a health visitor in London (first in Peckham, then Hampstead) and during the Second World War became Assistant Superintendent of the Child Welfare Department of the Middlesex Hospital in London. Beth studied at the Paris Academy of Dressmaking in London’s Old Bond Street; during the 1930s, in partnership with a student friend, Lilian Wolff, she founded Elspeth Beide, a dress-making establishment at 559 Finchley Road in Hampstead, before marrying Christopher (Kit) Welford and starting a family of her own. After Southolme, Bobby went to preparatory school at Forncett in Norfolk during the First World War, then boarded at Oakham School, Rutland (1921–6) before going up to Cambridge. After graduating he became a schoolmaster at the Elms School in Colwall (near Malvern), and then headmaster of Clive House in Prestatyn, north Wales – the school for which Britten was later to write his Friday Afternoons children’s songs.

After Southolme, Benjamin went to South Lodge Preparatory School, just down the hill on Kirkley Cliff, where he was academically successful and, above all, happy. From the age of five he had been receiving piano lessons from his mother and started scribbling music of his own. Two years later he began music theory and piano lessons with Ethel Astle, and in 1923 Benjamin started viola lessons with one of the leading string teachers in East Anglia at the time, Mrs Audrey Alston in Norwich. By the time he heard Frank Bridge conduct his orchestral suite The Sea, at the 1924 Norfolk and Norwich Triennial Festival, Benjamin was pouring out his own musical thoughts on manuscript paper at an astonishing rate, but was still receiving no formal teaching in composition. Thanks to Audrey Alston all that changed. On 27 October 1927, at the next Norwich Festival, Alston introduced him to Bridge after a performance of Enter Spring, and on inspecting some of Benjamin’s compositions the following day, Bridge agreed to take the boy on as a private pupil the following year. Again through Alston, Britten also started piano lessons with Harold Samuel in London, later in 1928. So by the time Benjamin began keeping his daily journal in January of that year, he was about to enjoy some of the best private teaching available in the country. The lessons with Bridge, in particular, were long and arduous, and Bridge seems to have made no concessions to, and very little allowance for, the boy’s youth. He instilled in him a creative discipline, and a level of professional application, that was to stay with Benjamin for life.

Meanwhile, the Britten household regime was becoming increasingly complicated. Now exposed to this extraordinary level of professional tuition, and all the opportunities it afforded, Benjamin was eager, not to say impatient, to study full-time at a conservatoire. But his father, strongly supported (according to Beth) by Barbara and Bobby, insisted that he continue his formal education to secure his School Certificate. Concerned about the boy’s future, Mr Britten thought him too young and immature to live alone in London (even if chaperoned); and despite Benjamin’s obvious gifts, Mr Britten was yet to be convinced that the boy could make a good living as a musician. Beth Britten, in her lovingly personal profile of her brother, described her father as a cautious man, apparently always worrying about money. She even suggests that her mother’s constant entertaining of local friends and neighbours was encouraged by Mr Britten’s nervousness of losing valued patients. Surprisingly, the Britten home had neither a gramophone nor a wireless at this time; and though Beth attributes this to a concern on her parents’ part for the possible impact on the very healthy music-making within the family (Bobby was also a good pianist and violinist), it might also reflect Mr Britten’s anxiety about the family finances. As Beth recalled:

My father used to say things to us such as ‘Make money, honestly if you can’, or ‘Don’t marry money, but go where money is.’ My mother would be horrified and say ‘Robert, don’t say things like that to the children, you know you don’t mean it.’ He certainly was the most honest man, but overcome with the need to make ends meet.*

But if there was one thing Mr Britten was not prepared to scrimp on, it was his children’s education and welfare. By the time we enter Benjamin’s personal account of his life in January 1928, the decision had already been made that he was to board at Gresham’s School in Holt, Norfolk, and though the outcome was largely satisfactory (Benjamin certainly emerged stronger and better equipped for London as a result), the move also led to a great deal of turmoil and unhappiness, which manifested itself in constant and sometimes prolonged periods of sickness and depression that seriously impacted on the boy’s academic work. As soon as he arrived at Gresham’s on 20 September 1928, for the start of the Michaelmas term, he began a count-down in his diary to the end of term, labelling each successive week: ‘END OF WEEK …’ By the start of the 1929 Midsummer Term, from 19 May, this had become a daily obsession and remained so till he left school in August 1930, each entry headed with a boxed count-down to the end of term: 1–84 2–83 3–82 and so on.

Nonetheless, whatever Benjamin’s mental or physical state, he never stopped composing, even when in the school sanatorium. The diaries also speak of his obvious frustration with the quality of music teaching at Gresham’s, where he seemed merely to tolerate Miss Chapman (his viola teacher) and Hoult Taylor (the junior music master), while barely tolerating and at times actively despising Walter Greatorex, the Director of Music. Perhaps...