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WORK TITLE: Chopin’s Piano
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1950
WEBSITE:
CITY: Berlin
STATE:
COUNTRY: Germany
NATIONALITY: Australian
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: n 2001082685
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/n2001082685
HEADING: Kildea, Paul Francis
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PERSONAL
Born 1950, in Canberra, Australian Capital Territory, Australia.
EDUCATION:Attended St. Edmund’s College; University of Melbourne, M.A.; Oxford University, Ph.D., 1997.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Conductor and writer. Opera Australia, member of the Young Artist Programme, 1997; Aldeburgh Festival, England, head of music, 1999-2002; Wigmore Hall, England, artisitic director, 2003-05. Has conducted worldwide and is a frequent commentator on television and radio.
AWARDS:Honorary Principal Fellow, University of Melbourne.
WRITINGS
Contributor of chapters to scholarly works on music.
SIDELIGHTS
Australian conductor and author Paul Kildea has conducted in concert and opera houses around the world and is considered an expert on British composer Benjamin Britten, about whom he has written or edited several works. After writing his first publication, Selling Britten: Music and the Market Place, an adaptation of his doctoral thesis, Kildea edited Britten on Music, a collection of the composer’s published articles, unpublished speeches, and transcriptions of radio interviews.
In 2013, Kildea published a major biography of the composer, called Benjamin Britten: A Life in the Twentieth Century. Kildea focuses on another famous composer in his 2018 work Chopin’s Piano: In Search of the Instrument That Transformed Music, published in England as Chopin’s Piano: A Journey through Romanticism.
Benjamin Britten
Touted as the definitive account of Britten’s life, Kildea’s Benjamin Britten is enhanced by the fact that Kildea has conducted many of the Britten works he writes about. The author focuses on placing Britten among other composers and artists of the twentieth century; the biography was published in Britten’s centenary year. Kildea follows Britten’s life from his early years in Suffolk, born the son of a dentist, to his study at the Royal College of Music and also with the composer Frank Bridge. His 1945 opera, Peter Grimes, propelled him to international renown. Over the next three decades, Britten wrote a further fourteen operas, becoming one of the twentieth-century masters in the form. One of the best known of these later operas is The Turn of the Screw from 1954. Britten also composed orchestral works, instrumental and vocal works, and even music for films. Much of his vocal work was composed for his partner, Peter Pears, a tenor. Britten was also an accomplished pianist, performing and recording his own work as well as that of Bach, Mozart, and Schubert, among others. Britten helped found the Aldeburgh Festival of music and was honored with a life peerage. Kildea’s book broke new ground on Britten research with its assertion that the composer’s death in 1973 from heart failure was due to syphilis that had gone undetected. However, this contention was disputed by a cardiologist who consulted Britten.
Reviewing Benjamin Britten in the American Spectator, R.J. Stove, wondering about the author’s objectivity, noted: “Paul Kildea used to administer … Britten’s own Aldeburgh Festival in Suffolk, so his preparedness to criticize his subject is broadly comparable with Arthur Schlesinger’s inclination to rebuke Camelot. If Britten is the Master, Kildea is His Master’s Voice.” However, Stove further commented: “But being a true believer possesses some advantages. … Kildea seems conversant with every surviving Britten manuscript—by his 15th year Britten had reached Opus 534, though he subsequently suppressed most juvenilia—and analyzes even Britten’s least recalled works with an unusually telling prose style that helps outweigh the volume’s absence of printed musical extracts.” Higher praise came from New Statesman contributor Alexandra Harris, who observed: “Kildea … is well placed to offer a reassessment. His wise, cautious, challenging book takes issue with the version of Britten in which the composer storms darkly on the margins of the world ‘at odds with the society in which he finds himself’, as Peter Pears once said of Britten’s best known operatic creation, Peter Grimes.” Harris added: “Part of Kildea’s move away from the mythologised man of corrosive secrets is his emphasis on the practicalities of Britten’s working life—his routines, his methods of collaboration, his dealings with recording studios, his finances.”
Writing in the Spectator, Rupert Christiansen compared Kildea’s biography to Humphrey Carpenter’s 1992 first major biography of Britten, noting that Kildea’s work “emerges as the long-meditated and authoritative corrective.” Christiansen went on to comment: “Somewhat shorter than Carpenter’s, it is cleanly shaped and moves as swiftly and surely as the music it honours. … Kildea is more deeply and thoughtfully immersed in the subject than Carpenter was, but he has a fine sense of social and cultural context too. Writing with crisp urbane elegance, he displays an acute sense of his subject’s convoluted psychology, and although he seems to become increasingly hostile to Britten as he gets older and more tetchily autocratic, he has no impulse either to debunk or sensationalise him.” Online Noted critic Philp Norman also had a high assessment, writing: “Coupled with [Kildea’s] depth of knowledge of the subject and his understanding of Britten’s music and the business of making music in general, the polished prose makes for compelling reading. Simply put, Benjamin Britten … is one of the most interesting composer biographies I have encountered.”
Chopin's Piano
Chopin’s Piano is a meditation on romanticism and on the role of pianos in music. The work begins with the year 1838, the year that composer Frederic Chopin spent on Majorca together with his mistress, the writer George Sand, and her children. There, with only a simple piano built by a local artisan, Chopin composed most of his beloved preludes. Kildea writes of other pianos that Chopin composed on and also focuses on the musician and collector Wanda Landowska, who purchased Chopin’s Majorcan piano for her collection of original instruments, only to have it stolen by the Nazis.
“This is a wonderful, melodic take on Chopin’s genius,” noted a Publishers Weekly reviewer of Chopin’s Piano. Similarly, a Kirkus Reviews critic termed it a “deeply researched, gracefully told music history.” Likewise, Spectator contributor Alan Rusbridger commented: “Chopin’s Piano is, in the end, an episodic, picaresque tale, woven confidently—at times even pacily—by Kildea. He writes knowledgeably and approachably about music and sympathetically about his cast of characters. It is the story of an obsession, but it manages not to feel obsessional. Even though—or perhaps because—I had no idea where it was going, I enjoyed it very much.” New York Journal of Books website writer Michael Thomas Barry offered further praise for the book, observing: “The author’s enthusiasm for the subject is very apparent and he expertly and effortlessly illustrates how Landowska’s trials and tribulations relates to Chopin’s, a saga which redefined portions of the cultural and political history of mid-20th century. Captivating and intriguing, Chopin’s Piano will most certainly entertain both novice and hardcore music historians.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
American Spectator, April, 2013, R.J. Stove, “What Did You Do in the War, Benjy?,” review of Benjamin Britten: A Life in the Twentieth Century, p. 52.
Kirkus Reviews, June 1, 2018, review of Chopin’s Piano: In Search of the Instrument That Transformed Music.
New Statesman, February 1, 2013, Alexandra Harris, “Cruel Intentions,” review of Benjamin Britten, p. 46.
Publishers Weekly, June 11, 2018, review of Chopin’s Piano, p. 57.
Spectator, June 21, 2003, Fiona Maddocks, review of Britten on Music, p. 54; February 9, 2013, Rupert Christiansen, review of Benjamin Britten, p. 32; July 14, 2018, Alan Rusbridger, “Enjoy the Ride,” review of Chopin’s Piano: A Journey through Romanticism, p. 30.
ONLINE
Australian Book Review, https://www.australianbookreview.com.au/ (June 1, 2013), Jeffrey Tate, review of Benjamin Britten.
Financial Times Online, https://www.ft.com/ (June 22, 2018), Jonathan McAloon, review of Chopin’s Piano.
Guardian Online, https://www.theguardian.com/ (February 7, 2013), Philip Hensher, review of Benjamin Britten.
Independent Online, https://www.independent.co.uk/ (February 8, 2013), Frances Spalding, review of Benjamin Britten.
New York Journal of Books, https://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/ (August 14, 2018), Michael Thomas Barry, review of Chopin’s Piano.
Noted, https://www.noted.co.nz/(November 7, 2013), Philip Norman, review of Benjamin Britten.
Telegraph Online, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/ (August 25, 2003), Michael White, review of Britten on Music; (February 11, 2013), Igor Toronyi-Lalic, review of Benjamin Britten.
Paul Kildea
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Paul Francis Kildea is an Australian conductor and author, considered an expert on Benjamin Britten.[1][2][3]
He was born and raised in Narrabundah, Canberra,[4][5] and attended St Edmund's College, Narrabundah, where his piano teacher was Keith Radford. He studied piano and musicology at the University of Melbourne, where he met the musicologist Malcolm Gillies. Benjamin Britten: A Life in the Twentieth Century is dedicated "For two teachers, Malcolm and Keith", a nod to Gillies and Radford.[6] He also gained a doctorate from the University of Oxford. His doctoral thesis was published as Selling Britten (2002).[7]
He was associated with Opera Australia, becoming assistant conductor to Simone Young after his 1997 conducting debut with Leoš Janáček's The Cunning Little Vixen.
Kildea was head of music for the Aldeburgh Festival 1999–2002, and artistic director of Wigmore Hall 2003–05.[2]
In 2014 he was appointed Director of the biennial Four Winds Festival on the New South Wales South Coast.[5] He resides in Berlin, Germany.[7]
Writing
Britten: Selling Britten (2002)
Britten on Music (2003)
Benjamin Britten: A Life in the Twentieth Century (2013)
References
Higham, Nick (8 February 2013). "Meet the Author: Paul Kildea". BBC News. Retrieved 10 November 2014.
Harris, Alexandra (7 February 2013). "Reviewed: Benjamin Britten: a Life in the 20th Century by Paul Kildea". New Statesman. Retrieved 10 November 2014.
"Dr Paul Kildea". Gresham College. Retrieved 10 November 2014.
Musa, Helen (16 March 2012). "Former Canberran to head Four Winds Festival". citynews.com.au. Retrieved 3 December 2014.
"Four Winds new Director". Narooma News. 26 February 2014. Retrieved 11 November 2014.
Wilson, Janet (22 March 2014). "Child of destiny pulls off a coup". Canberra Times. Retrieved 11 November 2014.
Apthorp, Shirley (19 June 2010). "Conduct becoming". The Australian. Retrieved 11 November 2014.
Paul Kildea is a writer and conductor who has performed many of the Britten works he writes about, in opera houses and concert halls from Sydney to Hamburg. His previous books include Selling Britten (2002) and (as editor) Britten on Music (2003). He was Head of Music at the Aldeburgh Festival between 1999 and 2002 and subsequently Artistic Director of the Wigmore Hall in London, and lives in Berlin.
QUOTE:
Chopin's Piano is, in the end, an episodic, picaresque tale, woven confidently--at times even pacily--by
Kildea. He writes knowledgeably and approachably about music and sympathetically about his cast of
characters.
It is the story of an obsession, but it manages not to feel obsessional. Even though--or perhaps because--I
had no idea where it was going, I enjoyed it very much.
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Print Marked Items
Enjoy the ride
Alan Rusbridger
Spectator.
337.9907 (July 14, 2018): p30+.
COPYRIGHT 2018 The Spectator Ltd. (UK)
http://www.spectator.co.uk
Full Text:
Chopin's Piano: A Journey through Romanticism
by Paul Kildea
Allen Lane, 20 [pounds sterling], pp. 368
It is easier to say what this book is not than to describe what it is. It is not a biography, nor a work of
musicology. As an extended historical essay it is patchy and selective. It is partly about pianos and pianism,
but would disappoint serious students of that genre. It is not quite a detective story--though there are,
towards the end, elements of a hunter on the track of his prey.
It is probably best to begin the book with no expectations of where it will lead. It starts in the Palma
workshop of one Juan Bauza in the 1830s as he fashioned an upright piano--crude, even by the standards of
the day--from local softwood, felt, pig iron and copper. This, it transpires, was to be the instrument Frederic
Chopin would be forced to use in the brief stay he and Amantine Dudevant (aka George Sand) enjoyed--or
endured --on Majorca in the winter of 1838-39.
Chopin had arranged for a more sophisticated Pleyel piano to be shipped out to the 13th-century abandoned
Carthusian monastery in Valldemossa, but it arrived a few days before Chopin and Sand moved on. It was
on Bauza's instrument that Chopin was forced to compose some of his most beautiful masterpieces,
including as many as ten of the Preludes. 'It gives him more vexation than consolation,' Sand wrote of the
Bauza piano. 'All the same he is working.'
So far, so good. The winter sojourn has been much trawled over before by previous biographers of both
figures. Kildea notes elements of misogyny in the treatment --both contemporary and subsequent --of Sand.
He muses on the French piano-building experiments of both Pleyel and Erard. He explores in some depth
the structure and character of those Preludes thought to have been composed during this period and
doubtless influenced by the one volume of sheet music--Bach's 48 Preludes and Fugues--Chopin had taken
with him. Kildea finds Chopin's works enchanting and revolutionary: 'In this collection of miniatures there
is no throat clearing, no padding, no waste, no time to spare: the entire genetic make-up of each Prelude is
present in the opening bars.'
We follow Chopin back to Paris. He splits with Sand, travels to England and back to Paris. By page 117 we
have arrived in 1849 and Chopin is dead, yet we are barely a third of the way through the book. This, we are
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beginning to understand, is not a conventional biography.
Kildea's focus now fans out in a number of directions. There is the subsequent history of the Preludes as
compositions--did they lead directly to Debussy's own works of the same name?--and in a tradition of
performance (how much rubato?). There is the perennial question about whether Chopin is more French,
more German or more Polish. We move on from Pleyel and Erard to the revolutionary innovations of Henry
Steinway in devising an entirely new way of stringing a grand piano in the second half of the 19th century.
The new pianos led to a different style of pianism. How, today, are we supposed to hear or perform Chopin
on instruments so far removed from the more delicate and rudimentary instrument on which they were
composed?
The pianism thread traces a line from Anton Rubinstein through Alfred Cortot to Alfred Rubinstein and
Sviatoslav Richter. But Kildea takes a very large detour indeed to dwell on the Polish-French harpsichordist
and pianist, Wanda Landowska (1879-1959). This is understandable, given her own parallel obsession with
Kildea's own quest. In her early thirties she retraces Chopin's journey to Valldemossa to find--and purchase
--Bauza's piano which has sat, barely touched, for 70 years. The piano follows her back to Paris: we have a
photograph of it sitting in her apartment, alongside her many other instruments.
Then, war.
Cortot--a mean, self-absorbed collaborator --comes to rule the artistic life of the French capital. Landowska
flees to Spain and then New York. She makes a new life, beginning with the first dirty, battered upright
piano she can lay her hands on. Meanwhile the Nazis helpfully catalogue, and then callously requisition, her
own instruments and papers. The question of whether Chopin is more German, more French or more Polish
becomes a more acute one.
After the war Landowska stays in New York, from where she launches a quest--it will take the rest of her
life--to trace and recover her belongings. Kildea takes up the mission to track down the Bauza piano which
had spent part of the war in Leipzig before being moved to Raitenhaslach in Upper Silesia. Kildea traces
every rumour about the piano's travels--including reported sightings in Munich and Florida. 'There are long
passages in Moby-Dick when we're never quite sure Ahab will find the damn whale,' he writes candidly at
one stage of this prolonged search. 'Hunting the Bauza piano feels a little like this.'
'Perhaps the piano will one day show up; it seems impossible that an instrument of such hardiness and
cultural potency should have been destroyed. Yet its disappearance is symbolic of a Chopin performance
tradition that has vanished alongside it and which thoughtful musicians today attempt to track down. We
must be patient on both counts--like Landowska in those final years, confidently anticipating Romanticism's
return.'
Chopin's Piano is, in the end, an episodic, picaresque tale, woven confidently--at times even pacily--by
Kildea. He writes knowledgeably and approachably about music and sympathetically about his cast of
characters.
It is the story of an obsession, but it manages not to feel obsessional. Even though--or perhaps because--I
had no idea where it was going, I enjoyed it very much.
Caption: George Sand listening to Chopin play the piano (Adolf Karpellus, private collection)
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Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Rusbridger, Alan. "Enjoy the ride." Spectator, 14 July 2018, p. 30+. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A549485557/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=1d1908e4.
Accessed 24 Sept. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A549485557
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QUOTE:
deeply researched, gracefully told music history.
Kildea, Paul: CHOPIN'S PIANO
Kirkus Reviews.
(June 1, 2018):
COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Kildea, Paul CHOPIN'S PIANO Norton (Adult Nonfiction) $26.95 8, 14 ISBN: 978-0-393-65222-2
The destiny of one piano reveals changing attitudes about romantic music.
Composer, pianist, and music historian Kildea (Benjamin Britten: A Life in the Twentieth Century, 2013,
etc.), former artistic director of London's Wigmore Hall, crafts an engrossing narrative focused on a singular
piano on which, in 1838, Frederic Chopin (1810-1849) composed 24 astonishing preludes. Living in
Majorca with his lover, George Sand, Chopin found a piano made from local woods by artisan Juan Bauza.
"Bauza's instrument was out of date before it was completed," writes the author, technologically more
primitive than pianos constructed by the respected company Pleyel, in Paris, Chopin's subsequent
instrument of choice. The Bauza piano, Kildea asserts, contributed significantly to the unconventional
sound of the Preludes, which garnered little attention when they were published in 1839. Robert Schumann
was among the few who noticed, writing a "perplexed though ultimately admiring" review, calling them
"ruins, eagle wings, a wild motley of pieces," poetic, passionate, yet also containing "the morbid, the
feverish, the repellent." Chopin performed selections at private gatherings, eliciting similarly puzzled
responses. Kildea offers a close technical and formal analysis of the pieces, concluding that "Chopin really
did invent a new genre," constructing patchworks "from the most brilliant but unexpected juxtapositions."
Suffering from stage fright, Chopin reluctantly gave public concerts; with the Bauza piano left behind in
Majorca, he preferred "the soft attack, the hazy harmonics, the fine gradations between dynamics," and the
varying tones in different registers of the Pleyel instruments. Kildea also examines the evolution of piano
construction in the 1830s and '40s, "a Wild West" of experimentation and innovation. By the late 19th
century, powerful new pianos, such as those made by the American firm Steinway, proved irresistible to
pianists aiming for drama rather than the "thoughtful, intimate communications between composer,
performer, and listener initiated by Chopin." As the author chronicles many pianists' interpretations of
Chopin, Wanda Landowska emerges as an important champion. Besides performing and writing about
Chopin's works, she acquired the Bauza piano, whose later provenance Kildea carefully traces.
A deeply researched, gracefully told music history.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Kildea, Paul: CHOPIN'S PIANO." Kirkus Reviews, 1 June 2018. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A540723457/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=fd425a38.
Accessed 24 Sept. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A540723457
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QUOTE:
This is a wonderful, melodic take on
Chopin's genius.
Chopin's Piano: In Search of the
Instrument That Transformed Music
Publishers Weekly.
265.24 (June 11, 2018): p57+.
COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* Chopin's Piano: In Search of the Instrument That Transformed Music
Paul Kildea. Norton, $26.95 (288p) ISBN 9780-393-65222-2
A humble piano that birthed some of composer Frederic Chopin's greatest pieces is the peg for a meditation
on romanticism in this beguiling study. Composer and pianist Kildea (Benjamin Britten) recounts Chopin's
1838-1839 sojourn on the Spanish island of Majorca where, confined in a gloomy monastery with his
mistress, the novelist George Sand, and her children, he composed several of his most well-known preludes
on a mediocre piano made by a local artisan, Juan Bauza. After that atmospheric introduction, the Bauza
instrument recedes as Kildea's biographical sketch of Chopin visits other pianos, including his beloved
Pleyels and the innovative Steinways that now define his sound. The book's second half centers on
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harpsichordist Wanda Landowska, who bought Bauza's piano for her collection and lost it when Nazis
pillaged her Paris home; Kildea's account of her championship of historically accurate instruments and
performance alongside late-romantic melodramatics anchors his insightful exploration of shifting styles of
piano-playing and interpretations of Chopin. Kildea's loose-limbed narrative includes wonderful evocations
of the music (Prelude 18 "is like someone arguing with himself--interrupting, stuttering, slowly gaining in
confidence and fluency, prone to wild coloratura declamations") and luxuriant digressions on everything
from piano-tuning tastes to the 19th-century rebuilding of Paris. This is a wonderful, melodic take on
Chopin's genius. (Aug.)
Caption: From an 1879 edition of Chopin's 24 Preludes, as seen in Chopin's Piano by Paul Kildea (reviewed
on p. 57).
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Chopin's Piano: In Search of the Instrument That Transformed Music." Publishers Weekly, 11 June 2018,
p. 57+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A542967352/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=ddfedf18. Accessed 24 Sept. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A542967352
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QUOTE:
Australian conductor and scholar Paul Kildea, who has served as head of music for the
Aldeburgh Festival and as artistic director of Wigmore Hall, is well placed to offer a reassessment. His
wise, cautious, challenging book takes issue with the version of Britten in which the composer storms
darkly on the margins of the world "at odds with the society in which he finds himself", as Peter Pears once
said of Britten's best known operatic creation, Peter Grimes.
Part of Kildea's move away from the mythologised man of corrosive secrets is his emphasis on the
practicalities of Britten's working life--his routines, his methods of collaboration, his dealings with
recording studios, his finances.
Cruel intentions: the ruthlessness of a
visionary composer
Alexandra Harris
New Statesman.
142.5143 (Feb. 1, 2013): p46+.
COPYRIGHT 2013 New Statesman, Ltd.
http://www.newstatesman.com/
Full Text:
Benjamin Britten: a Life in the 20th Century
Paul Kildea
Allen Lane, 688pp, [pounds sterling]30
Biography, at the moment, is the new history. A series of biographies in the past few years has viewed the
20th century through the lives and through the eyes of their subjects. Susie Harries justified the sheer
enormousness of her life of Nikolaus Pevsner by couching her book as a cultural and political history of
modern Britain (and Germany), seen through the prism of one man. Ray Monk did something similar with J
Robert Oppenheimer, who had a knack of being "inside the centre" of the century's great events.
It's not surprising that Benjamin Britten's new biographer should want to present his life of Britten as a
portrait of a great historical figure intricately connected to his times. Britten's stock has never been higher,
and now, in his centenary year, he is being hailed as a kind of national hero. The Brittenioo website lists no
fewer than 1,304 events being staged in celebration; that the fanfares are sounding from Asia to South
America establishes Britten as a major international export. He has become a phenomenon almost on the
scale of Dickens. As we put concert dates in the diary with relish, many will also want to think carefully
about who Britten was, what he has come to stand for and why he matters so much.
There have been calls for a new biography for some time. Britten asked his friend and publisher Donald
Mitchell to write a life but Mitchell threw his efforts into the meticulous editing of the diaries and letters.
Humphrey Carpenter took over the biographical brief and published his energetic, compellingly readable
book in 1992. Soon, however, critics were pointing to errors and omissions or simply asking for another
version of the Britten story to weigh against Carpenter's.
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Twenty years on, the Australian conductor and scholar Paul Kildea, who has served as head of music for the
Aldeburgh Festival and as artistic director of Wigmore Hall, is well placed to offer a reassessment. His
wise, cautious, challenging book takes issue with the version of Britten in which the composer storms
darkly on the margins of the world "at odds with the society in which he finds himself", as Peter Pears once
said of Britten's best known operatic creation, Peter Grimes.
Undoubtedly, Britten was partly Grimes, conscious of being ostracised for both his pacifism and
homosexuality. Yet Kildea takes care to show how far Britten's "art of dissent" came from inside the
Establishment. Here was a man who wanted a good seat in the abbey for the coronation, had tea with the
royals and appointed himself composer laureate by writing birthday tributes for the Queen Mum. Those
who described him in Aldeburgh as a king at his own court used a waspish turn of phrase but Britten liked
the analogy, affirming that in former times he would have been a court musician. Not that he confined
himself to court. Britten despaired of British musical life as he found it in the 1930s and wanted to change
the cultural make-up of a nation. Kildea shows how he achieved that feat.
Part of Kildea's move away from the mythologised man of corrosive secrets is his emphasis on the
practicalities of Britten's working life--his routines, his methods of collaboration, his dealings with
recording studios, his finances. The finances are much in evidence, with regular income summaries
provided. At times, it feels as if this biography leaves one better equipped to fill out a retrospective tax
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return for Britten than to discuss his inner life. It is hard not to skip through the long paragraphs giving
breakdowns for his gross earnings, details of agents' commissions on recital fees, expenses offsetting profit.
And yet it matters that, as a young man living off meagre fees, Britten never asked for help from his welloff
mother. He needed to work and to be independent, taking whatever commissions came his way. Later, he
could pick and choose but his work ethic remained fierce and there was no relaxing into prosperity. He ran
his life, says Kildea, "as he would have run a farm or small business". Retaining his "impecunious
mentality", Britten chose to live with polished austerity to the end of his life. The wealth he accumulated
did not much change his material circumstances but it gave him confidence. Money was an affirmation that
in some way he was right.
Britten's journey to the centre of British public life was amazingly rapid and does not seem to have been
much hampered by the chattering prejudice that followed wherever he went. He was the favourite composer
of the nascent BBC, which aired his work so often that people started to complain. Treating his public role
with utmost seriousness, Britten worked avidly to increase professionalism in the industry, to bring highquality
performances to wide audiences and particularly to involve children in music-making of
unprecedented ambition. Who else would have scored major works involving mugs slung on a piece of
string as an exciting new kind of child-friendly percussion?
Britten valued chamber opera, a form he pretty much invented, for practical as well as aesthetic reasons:
these smaller productions could be toured to venues that could never have hosted a full-scale orchestra. His
gift, writes Kildea, "was to change the way music is thought about and presented in the country of his
birth". This work started early, in the wartime tours he and Pears organised for the Committee for the
Encouragement of Music and the Arts; and later, as his fame grew, it was never sidelined.
Work is the great story of Britten's life. While other artists were investigating the subcultures of 1940s
London, Britten was in Suffolk, composing. During his few months living in the now legendary Brooklyn
house shared by W H Auden, Carson McCullers and the stripper Gypsy Rose Lee (who was busy with her
book The G-String Murders), Britten despaired at the chaos. That one dabbling with bohemian life was
enough to put him off for ever.
His sister Beth remembered the well-ordered intensity with which he worked on Grimes in Snape. He was
"at his studio desk by 9am at the latest, remaining until 9am; a walk after lunch, during which more of the
music was mapped in his head and sometimes sung, to the amusement of passing villagers; three more
hours at his desk". Coming home from a trip to Australia, Britten prepared to get back to his strictly
organised life: "My destiny is to be in harness and to die in harness."
Kildea gets as close as he can to the genesis of the operas: the painstaking work on Grimes, the rapid
drafting of Billy Budd, the audacious pencil notes in a Penguin copy of A Midsummer Night's Dream, the
manuscript for Gustav von Aschenbach's recitative "like plainsong notation in a medieval psalter". It's clear
that Britten was ruthless in the cause of his work. His biographers have long addressed the dismaying
subject of his "corpses"--Britten's word (according to the vengefully embittered Eric Crozier) for the series
of people with whom he collaborated and then unceremoniously rejected. Montagu Slater was dropped; E
M Forster was told he didn't understand music; Auden had a letter returned to him in shreds. Myfanwy
Piper must have been fearless: by the time she was asked to write the libretto for Owen Win-grave, she
might justifiably have felt like Anne of Cleves, wondering how violently she would meet her end. There
was to be no rift in this case but Britten's friends knew about his capacity for cruelty and Britten himselfinsistently
exploring the workings of cruelty in his operas--knew most of all.
It is probably not the corpses that will trouble readers most in this centenary year. In these times of deep
anxiety about paedophilia, people will ask inevitably--and rightly--"What about the boys?" Fortunately, the
public inquiry into Britten's past has already taken place. Carpenter was assiduous in tracking down the
ageing men who had once been admired by Britten and questioning them about their experience. There was
no suggestion from any quarter that Britten had ever interfered physically with a boy. John Bridcut's superb
2006 book Britten's Children considered the more troubling aspects alongside the brilliance of Britten's
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work with children and the inspiration he provided for thousands. Kildea does not have much to add but, in
helping us towards more nuanced understandings of Britten's infinitely subtle, questing, questioning operas,
he helps us to think again about Tadzio and Aschenbach, Miles and Quint, Grimes and the nameless
apprentice.
Kildea's verbal explorations of the music are done with level-headed sensitivity leavened by a quirky
lightness of touch and he knows that criticism can give meaning to the overall applause. Shifts are caught
with nice economy, such as the move from the "plump" Gloriana to the "fine-featured" Winter Words;
musical essays appear on Britten's use of fugue, his responses to Purcell, his "night works" in the 1960S.
For all his careful analyses, Kildea is not above calling the vocal solos in Cantata Academica simply
"scrumptious".
As you might expect from a practising conductor, Kildea writes a good deal about performance. The
idiosyncrasies of particular recitals and stagings, the electric mood in a concert hall, the kind of clapping at
the end-all get high billing here. What was it like to hear Britten's first public performance with Pears at
Wigmore Hall in 1942 or to walk into a rehearsal just before the opening of Peter Grimes? Testing
acoustics, we go from the "glossy yet precise" sound of Snape Maltings to the "boomy splendour" of Long
Melford Church where Britten recorded Bach's Christmas Oratorio for the BBC.
Conductors, naturally, come in for scrutiny, with Kildea lamenting the move away from the style Britten
represented towards "monumental, hawkish, superhuman" music-making in an age of stereophonic sound.
Gradually, he builds a picture of what Britten most valued in performance: "There had to be space around a
chord, and harmony had to be allowed to speak with its own rhetoric. He appreciated an almost feminine
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sensibility in performance, in which even the smallest detail was attended to, the architecture of any piece
underlined cumulatively, not through grand and empty gestures."
Britten worked obsessively right to the end. Told that he needed urgent heart surgery, he waved the doctors
away and told them he must finish Death in Venice first. Frail, exhausted, driven by imperative, he wrote
the death songs of Aschenbach. According to Kildea, when at last his heart was opened up, it was found to
be ravaged by syphilis, a disease he had probably been carrying since1940. (The cardiologist who cared for
Britten during this period has recently cast doubt on this revelation.) Wondering how far we can talk about
"late style" in Britten and how far his situation was comparable with that of the syphilitic Schubert writing
his extraordinary late sonatas, Kildea poses the unanswerable question: "Would he have gone on composing
for years with the skill, vision and youthfulness exhibited in these late works, or was it only his clattery old
heart and the portents of mortality that so focused his mind?" Britten's days were numbered but, as we
approach his moth birthday in November, he looks likely to become one of art's immortals. There is nothing
simple about the legacy of this troubled, touchy, nervy, visionary man but that is precisely why it will
endure.
Alexandra Harris is the author of "Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from
Virginia Woolfto John Piper" (Thames. & Hudson, [pounds sterling]19.95) and "Virginia Woolf' (Thames &
Hudson, [pounds sterling]14.95)
newstatesman.com/writers/alexandra_harris
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Harris, Alexandra. "Cruel intentions: the ruthlessness of a visionary composer." New Statesman, 1 Feb.
2013, p. 46+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A319804950/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=f5ba7c3d. Accessed 24 Sept. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A319804950
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QUOTE:
Paul Kildea used to administer (19992002) Britten's own Aldeburgh Festival in Suffolk, so his preparedness
to criticize his subject is broadly comparable with Arthur Schlesinger's inclination to rebuke Camelot. If
Britten is the Master, Kildea is His Master's Voice
But being a true believer possesses some advantages
Kildea seems conversant with every
surviving Britten manuscript--by his 15th year Britten had reached Opus 534, though he subsequently
suppressed most juvenilia--and analyzes even Britten's least recalled works with an unusually telling prose
style that helps outweigh the volume's absence of printed musical extracts
What Did You Do in the War, Benjy?
R.J. Stove
The American Spectator.
46.3 (Apr. 2013): p52+.
COPYRIGHT 2013 The American Spectator
http://spectator.org/
Full Text:
Benjamin Britten: A Life in the 20th Century
By Paul Kildea
(ALLEN LANE, 665 PAGES, $45)
THANKS TO the centenary of his birth this year, Benjamin Britten--related books are truly gushing from
English publishers, what with Neil Powell's Benjamin Britten: A Lift for Music, Lucy Walker's Britten in
Pictures, and volume six (!) of the man's correspondence all emerging within weeks of the present
biography. It has become a cliche among such books' reviewers to observe that Britten is as popular now as
when he died in 1976. He is certainly as much talked about as he was then. How much this verbiage
concerns his music is another issue. (After the nauseating revelations of earlier biographers, John Bridcut
and the late Humphrey Carpenter, no newspaper in 2013 would dare use the headline with which London's
Sunday Times flagged the composer's obituary: "Britten: a man with purity of vision.")
We need not adopt the indefensibly extreme stance of dismissing Britten as a Harvey Milk with brains to
point out that his initial cheer squad drew disproportionately upon musical semi-literates. Tributes to him as
"English music's savior" or "the first major English composer since Purcell" were always absurd. The truth
is, artistic criteria play a smaller role in Britten's current repute than in that of any other important modern
creative musician, Shostakovich excepted. For most present-day pundits, Britten and Shosta-kovich matter
primarily as dissidents, sexual dissidence assuming the same inspirational role with the Englishman that
political dissidence has with the Russian. Both men accordingly generate innumerable column inches from
a commentariat largely uninterested in musical considerations.
Paul Kildea used to administer (19992002) Britten's own Aldeburgh Festival in Suffolk, so his preparedness
to criticize his subject is broadly comparable with Arthur Schlesinger's inclination to rebuke Camelot. If
Britten is the Master, Kildea is His Master's Voice, a parallel rendered doubly relevant by the H.M.V.
recording empire's recent collapse. But being a true believer possesses some advantages, despite Kildea's
periodic determination to imitate Britten's musical tics, however unconvincing (why does he call the
influence of Britten's conducting bite noire Sir Adrian Boult "treacly"?), and to find examples of
"homophobic" malevolence almost everywhere this side of Jupiter. Kildea seems conversant with every
surviving Britten manuscript--by his 15th year Britten had reached Opus 534, though he subsequently
suppressed most juvenilia--and analyzes even Britten's least recalled works with an unusually telling prose
style that helps outweigh the volume's absence of printed musical extracts. Likening Britten's early opera
Paul Bunyan to "a magic-lantern show ... with an improvised narrative" proves genuinely helpful, as does
Kildea's account of the heavily Indonesian-influenced 1957 ballet The Prince of the Pagodas: "gamelan
takes hold of the texture, almost throttling it with clanking percussion writing."
To read Kildea is to recollect how openly people discussed Britten's "private orientation well before this
orientation became legal," discussed it, furthermore, not only in his homeland but in 1960s Australia, a land
if anything still more sexually conservative than Wolfenden Report--preoccupied England. Even there,
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admittedly, prudence dictated the habitual description of Britten's longtime lover Peter Pears as his "friend."
One country unaware of Britten's proclivity was Soviet Russia; in 1971 the KGB naively tried to entrap the
visiting composer with a woman.
Well might Kildea feel unease when recounting Britten the apparatchik. Britten's political vaporizing--it
seldom deserves so pugnacious a term as "thinking"--was exacerbated, but not caused, by membership in
W.H. Auden's personality cult. (One movie-directing buddy of Auden's flatly asked Christopher Isherwood:
"Well, have we convinced Ben he's queer, or haven't we?") This vaporizing made Britten an overt commiesymp
throughout Stalin's show trials and the Spanish Red terror (though innate canniness prevented him
from acquiring a Party card); a stooge of Japanese militarists as late as 1940; pro-Communist again during
Tito's, Khrushchev's and Brezhnev's reigns (even Kildea cannot defend Britten's 1968 refusal to protest
against the invasion of Prague); and, most notoriously--for all his purported anti-Nazism--a leather-lunged
pacifist before, during, and after Auschwitz. Unlike Robert Lowell, he could invoke neither bipolar illness
nor anti-FDR scruples to extenuate conscientious objection. His catalogue of heroic idiocy included
untroubled stateside civilian comfort from 1939 to 1942, though his domestic arrangements precluded filial
reproaches on "What did you do in the war, Daddy?" lines.
Altogether, Britten makes the young Auden look intelligent. Auden actually visited martyred Spain, and
there discerned not just the horrors of Red handiwork, but (far more upsetting for him) such handiwork's
inevitability whenever genteel pagans like himself applauded radical chic from the sidelines. No such
appointment in Marxist-Leninism's Samarra deflated Britten's insular self-assurance: Why fret if bolshies
smacked around a few papists? That outlook duly guaranteed Britten's military non-achievement even
without Auden's pressure. An upper-middle-class Englishman is inherently cosseted in any epoch; but
seldom has cosseting been more manifest than in the period of Britten's most puerile activism.
BY SOME MIRACLE, Britten long managed to protect his muse from his political malignity. Even the
Sinfonia da Requiem, intended to appease Hirohito, remains art, not agitprop. Thus his youthful composing
technique--formidable enough to warrant analogies with Mendelssohn--exhibited an inventive success
largely lost to him thereafter. Had Britten died aged 38, as Mendelssohn did, we would still have had his
Frank Bridge Variations, Peter Grimes, The Rape of Lucretia, Billy Budd, A Ceremony of Carols, Rejoice
in the Lamb, Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra, Les Illuminations, and the supremely dazzling
Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings. We would also have been spared his 1962 War Requiem, as
predominantly tasteless a spectacle as could be predicted from one whose own qualifications for discoursing
on arma virumque are about as impressive as Jimmy Savile's qualifications for running a convent school.
(Few in 1962 remembered Evelyn Waugh's admonition about artists: "If they want to write about the war,
the way is clear for them. They must be, or have been, part of it.") Poor Wilfred Owen: demise in battle
constituting insufficient penance, he had to have his verses set to music by a draft dodger.
At this point, censuring Britten had become (for most Englishmen, anyhow; Stravinsky showed no qualms)
a gesture too obviously transgressive to gain even the most outre among intellectual rewards. Unlike
Wagner, compelled to wait till his last decade for his Bayreuth shrine, Britten had his own festival at
Aldeburgh from his mid-30s onward. Over this he presided in a fashion less blatantly despotic than
Wagner's, but fully conscious of Numero Uno's prerogatives. Kildea does not make it clear whether Britten's
output benefited from his cultivation (encouraged by Aldeburgh) of what Dwight Macdonald called "the
genius act."
Britten's latter-day "woe is me" protestations make bizarre reading from an Order of Merit member who
hobnobbed with royals and eventually acquired a peerage. Kildea stresses that Britten "remained thrifty in
his tastes," but the sheer scale of Britten's earnings (before pre-Thatcher taxation bureaucracies gobbled up
most of them) is surprising. He never needed to live by his pen. His parents fairly rolled in money, and as a
mature craftsman he eschewed antipathetic commissions. Greater willingness to undertake honest billpaying
hackwork might have deterred Britten from indulging his last years' embarrassing homoerotic
obsessions: notably Death in Venice, so skin-crawlingly amateurish as to instill in most listeners the desire
to assassinate every gondolier on sight.
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Back in 1949, a critic named Becket Williams (unmentioned by Kildea) described every significant
composer as evolving in four stages: "student, prig, virtuoso, and artist." "Mr. Britten," he added, "is still in
the third, the virtuoso stage. Most of his admirers are still in the second." The artistic misfires of Britten
after 1960 bespeak less virtuosity unfocused than virtuosity downright enfeebled. If Peter Grimes ranks as
English operatic history's chief monument, then Death in Venice has claims to be such history's chief typo.
It may yet reach the same camp status currently occupied by the poetasting of Stephen Spender, at whose
pretensions the very walls of San Francisco's bathhouses must today echo with emphatic ridicule. At least
Kildea's accounts of specific late Britten pieces--including the Racine-inspired cantata Phaedra--suggest
transcendence of Death in Venice's doldrums, a transcendence aborted by Britten's own end. (Incidentally,
Kildea's insistence that tertiary syphilis carried away Britten has been discounted by surviving physicians
involved with Britten's care, who identify the killer as humdrum cardiac disease.)
Notwithstanding Kildeis exegetic punctilio regarding Britten's idiom, mysteries annoyingly endure. We may
wonder, for instance, why Kildea mostly snubs Britten's tireless female advocate Jennifer Vyvyan. And how
much Christian belief--as opposed to what Kildea calls "sentimental or cultural attachment to Christianity"--
did the adult Britten preserve? Whilst never explicitly avowing atheism, he devoted part of one pacifist
diatribe to denying Christ's divinity. If he really viewed religion as a mere aesthetic mud bath (useful, amid
the Hitler war, for evading conscription), what are the implications for his Missa Brevis and Church
Parables, let alone Lucretia's defiantly Christocentric epilogue? This question needs authoritative scrutiny,
but of course peddling identity politics is where the journalistic glamor lies.
REVIEWED BY R.F. STOVE
R.J. Stove lives in Melbourne, Australia, and is the author of Cesar Franck: His Life and Times (Scarecrow
Press, 2012).
Stove, R.J.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Stove, R.J. "What Did You Do in the War, Benjy?" The American Spectator, Apr. 2013, p. 52+. General
OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A324982987/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=ee67cb84. Accessed 24 Sept. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A324982987
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A reluctant critic
Fiona Maddocks
Spectator.
292.9124 (June 21, 2003): p54+.
COPYRIGHT 2003 The Spectator Ltd. (UK)
http://www.spectator.co.uk
Full Text:
BRITTEN ON MUSIC edited by Paul Kildea OUP, 30 [pounds sterling], pp. 456, ISBN 0198167148
Were this book a piece of music, it would have one of those mysterious non-specific titles--Phantasy or
Quodlibet or Serenata--which permits the stringing together of motley musical items, witty, weighty, long or
short, into a diverting entity. The structure may be holey or six-toed, some of the material repetitive or
borrowed, yet the result manages to be fresh and spontaneous. The aim of this volume is to unite Benjamin
Britten's occasional writings, programme notes, transcripts, spanning 40 years from 1936 until his death.
The editor Paul Kildea (who recently took over running Wigmore Hall) has annotated carefully and
provided a useful chronology for each section.
Oddly, he devotes much of his introduction to speculating on Britten's artistic reputation, within and beyond
our shores, in the light of a hot-air item on Radio 4's Today programme in which someone dared suggest
Britten's War Requiem 'isn't much chop' (sic). (Am I alone in wishing someone would ban these false 8.37
am 'arts' controversies in which microwaveable issues--was Bach gay? Does a dose of Mozart cure malaria?
--get heated for 30 seconds?) As Britten observes, crisply, in an interview quoted here:
All of us--public, critics and composers
themselves--spend far too much time wondering
about whether a work is a shattering
masterpiece. Maybe in 30 years' time very few
works that are well known today will be
played, but does that matter so much?
If anything, the desire to squeeze dry every juvenile jotting Britten ever wrote is getting out of hand.
Scarcely a year passes without a posthumous premiere of some yet slighter or even earlier work. Reading
this collection, one cannot think Britten would have approved. Ever modest, though prickly too, he would
have been amazed at the lively state of Britten studies with a new biography, by the composer David
Matthews, due out next month. The annual Aldeburgh festival Britten founded (with his partner Peter Pears)
in 1948 remains one of our more eccentric June fixtures, ever reinventing itself yet still a homage to its first
composer-director. Is there not a danger, a worried interviewer asked Britten in 1968, that this windswept
Suffolk fishing village might become 'fashionable, like Glyndebourne'? Thankfully no place so awkwardly
far from London, where the dress code is, of necessity, wind-cheater or head-to-toe coloured rubberised
nylon, is in danger of catching glamour. Cliquey, yes. Serious, yes. Full of beau monde? Never.
Kildea's miscellany gives us the voice of the composer himself, with minimal mediation. A lucky-dip
approach is recommended, since variety is provided by subject matter rather than literary distinction, which
is not a strong point. Britten's prose is plain, four-square and correct. Always a reluctant and selfdenigrating
writer, he neither strives for, nor stumbles upon, verbal arabesque or flight of fancy.
Inevitably his mode of expression is more relaxed in the radio transcripts. A chief pleasure is the manner in
which these transient pieces give a snapshot of an England all but gone. The politeness is touching, stuffy,
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redolent of a postwar world of grey beef and gravy out of which Britten's music sprung, gleaming,
inventive, invigorating. Had he only written Peter Grimes, we would still be marvelling. 'Was your private
school in view of the sea?' asks one interviewer. Another wonders whether Britten has a favourite
instrument. 'I notice, for example, that you employ the whip more frequently than other composers ...' 'I
wasn't aware of any predilection for the whip,' Britten replies.
His comments on great works of the repertoire are revealing. How worthwhile to read his thoughts on
Purcell's Dido and Aeneas, Schubert's great String Quintet in C or Mahler's Fourth Symphony, to be
reminded of his somewhat bad-tempered attitude towards Brahms or his incomprehensible resistence to
Beethoven, notably the miraculous Piano Sonata Op. 111. 'The sound of the variations was so grotesque,' he
observes, 'I just couldn't see what they were all about.' Even this most astute musical thinker, it appears,
does not always get it right.
Some contributions are slim indeed. So on the death of Schoenberg in 1951 he dutifully comments:
I mourn the death of Schoenberg. Every serious
composer today has felt the effect of his
courage, single-mindedness, and determination,
and has profited by the clarity of his
teaching. The world is a poorer place now this
giant is no more.
What did Britten, finally cool, elusive, enigmatic to outsiders, really think of Schoenberg? As so often in
this book, we can entertain ourselves by reading between the breezy, widely spaced lines.
Maddocks, Fiona
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Maddocks, Fiona. "A reluctant critic." Spectator, 21 June 2003, p. 54+. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A104682286/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=1410a821.
Accessed 24 Sept. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A104682286
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QUOTE:
biography emerges as the long-meditated and authoritative corrective. Somewhat shorter
than Carpenter's, it is cleanly shaped and moves as swiftly and surely as the music it honours.
Kildea is more deeply and thoughtfully immersed in the subject than Carpenter
was, but he has a fine sense of social and cultural context too. Writing with crisp urbane elegance, he
displays an acute sense of his subject's convoluted psychology, and although he seems to become
increasingly hostile to Britten as he gets older and more tetchily autocratic, he has no impulse either to
debunk or sensationalise him.
The music man: Rupert Christiansen
welcomes a new biography of Benjamin
Britten--marking his centenary--which
brings all his many complexities
satisfyingly and vividly to life
Spectator.
321.9623 (Feb. 9, 2013): p32+.
COPYRIGHT 2013 The Spectator Ltd. (UK)
http://www.spectator.co.uk
Full Text:
Benjamin Britten: A Life in the Twentieth Century
by Paul Kildea
Allen Lane, 30 [pounds sterling], pp. 688, ISBN 9781846142321
Letters from a Life: The Selected Letters of Benjamin Britten, Volume VI,
1966-1976
edited by Philip Reed and Mervyn Cook
Boydell Press, 45 [pounds sterling], pp. 880, ISBN 9781843837251
When Humphrey Carpenter published the first major biography of Benjamin Britten in 1992, many of the
composer's associates were still alive and breathing down his neck. Carpenter's knowledge of the music
wasn't intimate, nor did he have available to him the primary source of the superb edition of Britten's
correspondence, now completed with a sixth 800-page volume covering the decade before his death in
1976: deadly dull though these letters intrinsically are, the magnificent accompanying annotation and
detailed apparatus make them richly revealing.
Thus hobbled, Carpenter's effort amounts to a broad-brush portrait and a gripping narrative, but also
something of a rushed and unpolished job--unbalanced and half-digested, peppered with small errors and
marred by a rather crude psychological portrait of a man obsessed with his mother and bewitched by
pubescent boys.
This second major biography emerges as the long-meditated and authoritative corrective. Somewhat shorter
than Carpenter's, it is cleanly shaped and moves as swiftly and surely as the music it honours. As a
conductor of Britten's operas, a former head of music at Aldeburgh, and the author of several Brittenfocused
academic studies, Kildea is more deeply and thoughtfully immersed in the subject than Carpenter
was, but he has a fine sense of social and cultural context too. Writing with crisp urbane elegance, he
displays an acute sense of his subject's convoluted psychology, and although he seems to become
increasingly hostile to Britten as he gets older and more tetchily autocratic, he has no impulse either to
debunk or sensationalise him.
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Kildea addresses the headline subject of the composer's paedophilia soberly and sensitively, downplaying
the sexual motive and characterising Britten more as the pseudo-paternal school captain taking the fledgling
fourth-former under his wing than as a predatory molester or abuser.
Kildea appears convinced that in 1938 the 24-year-old Britten did bed the willing 18-year-old Wulff
Scherchen (still alive today and reticent on the subject), but the implication is that this was the only
physically consummated relationship he had with anyone except the tenor Peter Pears, his partner from
1939 until his death and the inspiration for some of his greatest work. The terrible irony, as Kildea explains
in his one startling speculation, is that through Pears's casual promiscuity (or so one supposes) Britten might
have been infected with a type of syphilis which exacerbated the cardiac weakness that prematurely killed
him.
Kildea wisely refrains from reading too much into this, not least as Britten was totally unaware of his
condition. He also resists the temptation to present the couple as poster boys for gay liberation avant la
lettre . Britten and Pears were neither militant in their stance, nor bohemian in their habits. In their time,
they looked to most of the world like a couple of confirmed bachelor chums, sleeping in separate bedrooms
and respecting the conventions. That's how they wanted it, in any case: the patina of middle-class
respectability--crowned by the friendly attentions of royalty--mattered to them.
Privately, they could be scratchy with each other. Britten loved Aldeburgh and a quiet life, Pears had more
taste for the bright lights and a party. When Pears was away singing, Britten felt antsy and there would be
rows down the telephone followed by mawkish penitence. But as Kildea puts it, 'shared instinctive response
to music was their pact'.
And that is the heart of the matter: the music always came over-ridingly first for someone who claimed that
he 'found reading music easier than reading books', someone hailed by Michael Tippett as 'the most purely
musical person I have ever met'. Kildea gives a most touching and astute account of this phenomenon's
early development, casting a wry eye over the juvenilia (for all its fecundity, displaying no signs of genius)
and making it clear why Britten was so lucky at the age of 12 to find in Frank Bridge a teacher who could
crank up his talent and skill by introducing him to the vocabulary of European modernism.
Contemptuous of the sloppiness and complacence of the British musical scene, the tyro Britten emigrated to
the more open-minded America in 1938, only to find that he needed his roots more than he needed his
freedom; back in Aldeburgh, where he remained based for the rest of his life, he developed a new model of
flexible, intimate and light-footed music-making which circumvented the cumbersome machinery of
symphony orchestras and opera houses. Today what one might call the example of Aldeburgh remains a
major aspect of his legacy, as profoundly influential as his composition.
However, this retreat into a parochial environment also exacerbated his neurotic self-protection and
paranoia. 'People walked on eggshells around him,' Kildea says, and the list of colleagues (rather than
friends, it should be emphasised) he ruthlessly cold-shouldered when they were no longer of direct use is
disconcerting if not deplorable. 'Britten's corpses', they called them. Whether his need to command
untrammelled space in which to create and function can serve as an excuse for such murders is a moot
point. In his defence, one could claim that they weren't whimsical. They were made in the name of the
music; the music came first.
Ironically, Kildea believes that Britten would have considered 'betrayal' to be his obsessive moral theme.
I'm not sure that he did--or if he did, he was deceived. Much more pressing in the great operas is the idea of
the forbidden love object, so disconcertingly alluring that it must be destroyed.
9/24/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1537841360286 19/19
Britten was never smugly comfortable about his sexuality--it was a barbed-wire zone, marked 'Danger: do
not enter'.
Indignant at the sniggering Charles Mackerras, Britten furiously confronted him: 'Because I like to be with
boys and because I appreciate young people, am I therefore a lecher?' Britten didn't know how to answer
this himself, and the question haunts Peter Grimes, Billy Budd, The Turn of the Screw, Death in Venice and
even Gloriana . Isn't its absence the reason why the 'War Requiem' seems so windily theatrical and Owen
Wingrave so weak and jejune?
Most readers will find something to argue with in Kildea's reckoning. I'm sceptical of his high ranking of
the Nocturne and Phaedra , for example. The comparison of the Britten family (his gruff ascetic father a
dentist in Lowestoft) to the Schlegels in E.M. Forster's Howards End seems to me misplaced--surely they
would have had much more in common with the earthbound Wilcoxes?
I'm also puzzled that he thinks Britten lacked 'empathy' with women. It's certainly hard to think of two
stronger female characters in postwar opera than Elizabeth or the Governess in The Turn of the Screw , and
his warmly affectionate relationships with Peg Hesse, Marion Thorpe, Kathleen Mitchell and Imogen Holst
scarcely bear out any charge of misogyny.
But any such reservations about specific judgments are only to be expected: Kildea is nobody's patsy,
towing an accepted line or bowing infatuated before an idol. His bracingly opinionated and beautifully
articulated book brings all Britten's complexities vividly to life.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"The music man: Rupert Christiansen welcomes a new biography of Benjamin Britten--marking his
centenary--which brings all his many complexities satisfyingly and vividly to life." Spectator, 9 Feb.
2013, p. 32+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A334846448/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=1e3f321b. Accessed 24 Sept. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A334846448
QUOTE:
The author’s enthusiasm for the subject is very apparent and he expertly and effortlessly illustrates how Landowska’s trials and tribulations relates to Chopin’s, a saga which redefined portions of the cultural and political history of mid-20th century. Captivating and intriguing, Chopin’s Piano will most certainly entertain both novice and hardcore music historians.
Chopin's Piano: In Search of the Instrument that Transformed Music
Image of Chopin's Piano: In Search of the Instrument that Transformed Music
Author(s):
Paul Kildea
Release Date:
August 14, 2018
Publisher/Imprint:
W. W. Norton & Company
Pages:
288
Buy on Amazon
Reviewed by:
Michael Thomas Barry
“Captivating and intriguing, Chopin’s Piano will most certainly entertain both novice and hardcore music historians.”
In November 1838, composer Frédéric Chopin, French novelist George Sand (Amantine Lucile Dupin), and her two children sailed to the Spanish Island of Majorca to escape the cold damp Parisian winter. They settled in an abandoned monastery at Valldemossa in the mountains above Palma where Chopin finished what would eventually be recognized as one of the great and revolutionary works of musical Romanticism: his 24 Preludes. There was scarcely a decent piano on the island, so Chopin worked on a small pianino made by a local craftsman, which remained in its monastic chamber for the next 70 years.
Chopin’s Piano: In Search of the Instrument That Transformed Music by Paul Kildea traces the history of Chopin’s compositions through the instruments on which they were written, the musical historians who interpreted them, and the traditions they have come to represent. Kildea is a composer, pianist and the author of Benjamin Britten: A Life in the Twentieth Century (2013, Penguin Global). He was formerly the head of music at the Aldeburgh Festival and artistic director of the Wigmore Hall in London.
Chopin’s Piano begins and ends with the Majorcan pianino, and is organized in two parts, the first examines Chopin's 24 Preludes; the studies the critical responses to this composition, the composer himself and the history of the diminutive piano on which it was written.
Most of the second portion concentrates on Wanda Landowska, a legendary harpsichordist, who in 1913 rescued Chopin’s pianino from its monastic cell. After she fled France for the United States in late 1941, all of her possessions—including rare music manuscripts and beloved instruments—were confiscated by the Nazis. Only a small portion of her possessions managed to survive the war and were eventually returned. The pianino would attain an astonishing level of cultural symbolism during the Second World War as a representation of Chopin and his music of which the Nazi regime was determined to use for propaganda and ideological purposes.
“The looting never seemed to stop. In the summer months of 1943 two freight trains containing 120 upright and several grand pianos left France for Germany . . . Some of the most notorious instances of plunder and redistribution of instruments . . . were carried out on behalf of the Reich’s Bruckner-Orchester, which was dreamed up by Hitler . . .”
While it is assumed that most readers are aware that the Nazi’s looted art, what isn’t as well known is the theft of other cultural symbols such as musical instruments. Kildea does an excellent job of tracing and attempting to solve the mysteries of what happened to one of these iconic symbols.
The author’s enthusiasm for the subject is very apparent and he expertly and effortlessly illustrates how Landowska’s trials and tribulations relates to Chopin’s, a saga which redefined portions of the cultural and political history of mid-20th century. Captivating and intriguing, Chopin’s Piano will most certainly entertain both novice and hardcore music historians.
Michael Thomas Barry is a staff reviewer at New York Journal of Books.
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Chopin’s Piano by Paul Kildea — prelude of a piano
The history of a shoddy musical instrument reveals much about the composer’s legacy
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Jonathan McAloon JUNE 22, 2018 Print this page1
In 1838, the French writer George Sand took her lover Frédéric Chopin to Mallorca. Escaping the Paris winter, they would both work in peace. The reality wasn’t so rosy. Chopin caught a cold and there were no good pianos to be had on the island. The composer made do with a “local one which [gave] him more vexation than consolation,” said Sand. This shoddy instrument would later fall into the hands of one of the 20th century’s most important performers, and then Nazi looters. It would also allow Chopin to compose some of his 24 Preludes: arguably the most tantalising, mysterious and strangely modern pieces of his oeuvre.
Paul Kildea’s bulging book Chopin’s Piano takes the motif of this piano — “Out of date before it was completed”; its maker Juan Bauza unknown and possibly an amateur — and uses it to tie together various narrative strands in an original, constantly interesting format. As it does it tells the story of Chopin’s work, the development of piano making, and how music became inextricably linked to atrocities in the 20th century.
The first half alone covers Sand’s misogynist reception at the hands of male writers, the civic regeneration of Paris in the middle of the 19th century, and schools of Chopin performance. There are cameos from Baudelaire, Delacroix, Robert Graves, André Gide and Tolstoy. Along with this more popular fare, Kildea — a musician and conductor himself — writes fluently about Chopin’s work, illustrating it nicely without sounding too technical. Chopin’s melodies often seemed to move independently of underlying harmonic progressions; or, in Kildea’s words, he “loosed his music from its vertical alignment”. “The best rubato,” he says of the performance direction in which a player might momentarily slow down before catching up with themselves, “is like a golf ball hovering on the lip of a hole for that interminable moment before it tips in.” This is excellent.
Audiences have always found in Chopin a confidential and subjective quality that chimes with feelings specific to their own experience. The composer’s contemporary, Joseph Filtsch, talked about its ability to “throw us into the darkest recesses of our own thoughts”. The Preludes show this in microcosm. Playing them as a cycle, a practice familiar to listeners now, was inaugurated by performers who wanted Chopin to fit the grand narratives of high Romanticism and do away with his “sickly” and “febrile” image. Kildea wants us to appreciate how radical they might have been considered as separate pieces. Each barely over a minute long, these “ruins”, as Robert Schumann described them, reject form even as they display a crystallised understanding of it. “Music in its purest expression”, says Kildea. But the Preludes, the piano — even Chopin himself — are not the stars of the show here.
Halfway through Chopin’s Piano, the story makes room for Wanda Landowska, a Jewish-Polish pioneer of harpsichord performance, Chopin devotee, and compulsive journal keeper. Like her idol she is both classical and modern. “She was unflinching in recording [her] experiences and transgressions,” Kildea says. In 1911 she went on a pilgrimage to Chopin’s retreat in Mallorca and found the Bauza piano, so far safe from Mainland relic hunters. But, living just north of Paris, she was forced to leave it behind when the Nazis invaded in 1940.
The piano itself features little in Landowska’s fascinating story of brilliance, persecution and restitution. Neither does it do much once it has been looted by the Nazis. There is no evidence to suggest they ever played it or displayed it. And when it is recovered with the help of the son of a musician who played Chopin with Landowska, who died in 1959, then lost again once it is safe, it doesn’t much matter to the story. It is a blow that, having survived such a serendipitous yet tragic history, it should be lost after its rescue. But it is enough that the instrument has prompted this rich, winding double portrait of two musical heroes. Chopin may indeed have intended his Preludes to be miniature: “tiny-great monuments of Western art music,” Kildea calls them. But this book shows us that the story of their legacy, along with their composer’s, is unequivocally rangy and huge.
Chopin’s Piano: A Journey Through Romanticism, by Paul Kildea, Allen Lane, RRP£25, 331 pages
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Biography books
Benjamin Britten: A Life in the Twentieth Century by Paul Kildea – review
Britten's work contains flashes of genius, but these cannot compensate for a lack of invention and a questionable character
Philip Hensher
Thu 7 Feb 2013 03.00 EST First published on Thu 7 Feb 2013 03.00 EST
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Constant demonstrations of incompatibility ... Benjamin Britten (right) with WH Auden. Photograph: Britten-Pears library
A terminal illness two weeks ago proved perhaps the most rapidly mutating medical condition of recent times. On Friday, it was a heart condition. On Sunday, it had surprisingly turned into tertiary syphilis. By Wednesday, however, it had reverted to the original heart condition. What is most surprising is that the patient died over three decades ago, and the diagnosis was nothing more than a curiosity in the first place.
Paul Kildea's biography of the composer Benjamin Britten got off to a bad start by promising startling new revelations. The major one was the claim that Britten had, long ago, contracted syphilis that had stayed dormant for years, only to be discovered at the end of his life by surgeons operating on his heart. Britten revelations tend to be about specially favoured boys, and this biographer's diagnosis raised a certain amount of interest through its novelty. Kildea speculated that though Britten was monogamous throughout his long relationship with the tenor Peter Pears, Pears was less so. Britten contracted the disease from Pears, and both remained ignorant of it, even when it was too late to do anything about its effects.
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Alas, the case fell apart within about four days. A doctor who cared for Britten in his final illness went public to say that the biographer's diagnosis "does not fit with everything else … there is no serological, bacteriological, pathological or histological support for the diagnosis." Still more telling was his point, as Charlotte Higgins reported, that "the notion that Ross could have covered up his suspicions of syphilis in the operating theatre was 'rubbish': 'It takes 14 people to do a heart operation. It would have been impossible to have kept it secret.'" Kildea responded, bravely, saying that his conclusions had been dismissed without the book having been read, but it is hard to dismiss this last point.
There is a school of posthumous diagnosis of the great, more biographical than medical in expertise. It is generally rather rancorous in tone, drawn strongly to sexually transmitted diseases, and subject to abrupt reversals. Before Britten joined Schubert and Beethoven in being identified as a sufferer from syphilis, however, many musicians were quick to say that it hardly mattered. The music, after all, was what was important. Who cared about these irrelevant details? Britten died too young, of a disease that affected his physical abilities but not his mental or creative capacities. When we think about the work of someone in this abstract art, the intrusions of speculative biography can seem quite out of place.
The trouble is that Britten's career, as widely perceived, does rest on the external consideration and the extra-musical fact. The two high points of his career, in many accounts, are the War Requiem of 1962, written for the consecration of Coventry Cathedral, and the opera Peter Grimes of 1945. The War Requiem is by no means among his best pieces. It is disastrously episodic for long stretches, especially in the Dies Irae. Its single strategy grows tiresome – one type of music followed by another, quite different type, then the two combined. Its music is often worryingly thin in resource and invention, openly derivative of Verdi; place it next to the two great Requiems of the 1960s, those by Ligeti and Stravinsky, and its contribution is fairly negligible. Stravinsky said he couldn't hear the music for all the "Battle of Britten" sentiment. The piece got Britten a peerage. The remark, cruel and disrespectful as it is, still stands.
Peter Grimes is obviously a much better and more important piece. But Britain, in 1945, was waiting for it, or for something of its sort. The renaissance in English music from the turn of the century onwards had produced marvellous composers – Elgar, Vaughan Williams, Holst, Walton – but ones who had worked best in the concert hall. None had produced a really impressive opera. The days after VE Day were perfect for a tragic English opera with an English setting, and its musical excellences were supplemented by a sense of its national significance. Britten's timing was good, and his luck even better. When his luck failed, as with the disastrous Gloriana for the Queen's coronation, his work is despatched to suffer the praise of specialists.
None of Britten's operas is as interesting musically as Michael Tippett's The Midsummer Marriage or Harrison Birtwistle's Punch and Judy, neither of which are mentioned in Kildea's biography, though Britten and Peter Pears walked out of the Aldeburgh premiere of the Birtwistle. (The key postwar English composer of operas? Birtwistle. By a mile.) The excellence and interest of Britten lies not in those huge public pieces, usually safe adaptations of literary works, but in the beautiful and jewel-like fantasies for small orchestra or chamber forces. Not "important" in an obvious way, but Britten's best pieces are surely Our Hunting Fathers, the Serenade, the second string quartet, the Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge and Curlew River. The witty finale of the Bridge variations, a fugue whose exposition contains absolutely no counterpoint at all, still manages to deceive listeners, including Kildea, who includes it in a list of examples of "strict fugal writing" in Britten.
Britten's story is a curious and ambivalent one, and at its centre, despite everything, is his sexuality. He grew up an ugly, talented child in East Anglia. His musical gifts became apparent early on and, after testing the limits of English musical education, he faced the choice of studying with Frank Bridge or with Alban Berg. Circumstances led him away from Berg and the European avant garde – he was amazed, years later, to hear Stravinsky's Agon and discover what beautiful music could be composed using the 12‑tone method. Bridge gave him an impregnable technical command, and remaining in Britain introduced him to a startling band of homosexual men, led by WH Auden. Auden's group were fascinated by Britten, and made rather a project of him. "Well," the film director Basil Wright asked Christopher Isherwood after a visit to a London bath house, "have we convinced Ben he's queer, or haven't we?" They had misread him. His interests were not quite theirs. Of that same visit, Britten wrote in his diary that it was a "Very pleasant sensation … Completely sensuous, but very healthy." It is fair to say that not many patrons of gay bath houses in the 1930s sought them out because they were "healthy", or needed to reassure themselves on that score afterwards.
Britten's sort of tennis-playing, English provinces, not-us-we're-normal, prep-school cold-shower brand of homosexuality was, in the end, at odds with Auden's deep-thinking, sophisticated, cosmopolitan brand. The brief period of cohabitation in Brooklyn of Britten, Pears, Auden and his boyfriend Chester Kallman and, for some reason, Gypsy Rose Lee was one of constant demonstrations of incompatibility. The association produced a number of interesting works before Auden put an end to their friendship by writing a long and bossy letter to Britten explaining how he should improve himself. Auden moved on to much better things, and wrote the incomparable libretto to Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress. Britten remained unimproved by Auden's slights. Reading Kildea and other of Britten's biographers, one does start to think that Britten's brand of healthy outdoor homosexuality contained its own neuroses. Auden's happy life of old friends, Austrian rentboys, promiscuity, flaming queens and rancorous, quickly forgiven arguments over the dinner table seems much "healthier", in the long term, than Britten's.
Britten's sexuality, as has been much remarked on, was tied up with the boys. Kildea makes much less of this than previous biographers, notably Humphrey Carpenter, but there is no doubt that, despite his long relationship with Pears, his main attraction was to what Auden referred to in that fatal letter as "thin-as-a-board juveniles". Most of Britten's observed objects of sexual fascination were aged between eight or nine and 16 or so. Oddly enough, Britten regarded himself as roughly that age. John Bridcut, in an interesting book about Britten's relationship to children, cites a 1954 pocket diary of Britten's where he has entered his personal details as they were when he was 13, including his bicycle number and his National Savings registration number. Britten was 40. His fantasy of being a boy among boys is clear enough from the work, which dwells repeatedly on the tough little boy half-singing, half-shouting the lines. At the same time, he retains, as paedophiles or conductors do, the reality of power exerted, through the fantasy of musical or sexual equality.
What can, just about, be said in Britten's favour is that though his fascinations often threatened to create a scandal, there are very few, if any, instances where a child was actually molested. He kept his desires as desires, hopelessly mooning from the podium at an 11-year-old. Mostly, the 11-year-olds were flattered by the attention and the treats, and hurt and upset when affection was withdrawn. Often this happened when the project was over, or when the boy's voice broke, as in the case of the most intense of these infatuations, David Hemmings, who played Miles in The Turn of the Screw. Or when they merely became decrepit, sagging ancients of 17 or so. It gets into the work, but sometimes in rewarding and beautiful ways. God knows what Britten thought about individual members of the children's chorus or Noye's sons at the first performance of Noye's Fludde in 1958. But the piece is simply sublime, one of Britten's most wonderful: a glimpse of the transcendent in the ramshackle, as school recorder players, handbell ringers, violinists and congregational singing create a vision of the life to come. There may be something dark in the origins of this, and other of Britten's pieces involving children – Charles Mackerras was banished from Aldeburgh for making a remark about the number of boys hanging around at rehearsals. But the final product is radiant, and worth 10 War Requiems.
Kildea's life acknowledges, as every Britten biography must, that his sexuality was at the centre of his life and his work in a way that it simply wasn't for Auden – that's what denial and an insistence on healthiness does for you. Though Britten didn't talk about it, Kildea leaves us in no doubt that others had no such restraint. It's amazing that Britten and Pears escaped prosecution, given their social prominence during the "Evil Men" tabloid campaigns of the 1950s – the years around the Woolfenden report, which recommended the decriminalisation of homosexuality, were some of the most active for police prosecutions. Kildea makes the point that the musical establishment was constantly on the lookout for "manly" alternatives to what was perceived as the homosexual culture of Aldeburgh, and quotes a review of William Glock of Walton's Troilus and Cressida in 1955: "an example … of sheer masculine vigour that is very welcome in English opera just now". Kildea goes on to suggest that Glock's championing of the European avant garde was a sort of heterosexist reaction, rather forgetting that Hans Werner Henze, Pierre Boulez, Jean Barraqué, Peter Maxwell Davies and others also benefited from Glock's revolution.
He is on firmer ground on Britten's finances, as the author of a previous book entitled Selling Britten, and seems to understands how absurd it is to present this commanding figure as a victim in any way. (It's worth mentioning, in passing, that though Britten's income was enormous by the early 1960s, he never seems to have contemplated moving abroad again after the 1940s American adventure, even though much of his income must have been taxed at 95% – put it down to a social conscience.) Rather than a victim, he ran the Aldeburgh festival as a figure of great, wilful power. Britten and Aldeburgh transformed much of English musical life: it moved on a high level of professionalism, and handed out commissions to a broader range of composers than Britten's sympathy alone might have allowed. (Britten's supporters and acolytes will tell you that he walked out of Birtwistle's Punch and Judy for very good reasons, none of which had anything to do with the piece's exhilarating assault on the ears – still, I'm not convinced.) His exertion of power at Aldeburgh might be seen to echo the power intrinsic in a relationship with a boy: jolly japes among chums for months, and then someone being suddenly placed out in the cold for no very obvious reason. The first administrator of the Aldeburgh festival, Steven Reiss, was sacked abruptly after 16 years – in part because, he claimed, he himself had sacked a caretaker whose teenage son Britten used to moon after.
Was he altogether good for British music? Well yes, of course. But the culture was definitely waiting for someone of Britten's professional standards. A different figure might have forged stronger links with the developing musical argument, and British music needed a Glock as well as a Britten. He was a good composer with flashes of greatness, whose qualities go on being somewhat overstated. Kildea's taste in music could be improved on, notably preferring that dull and mechanical Nocturne to the great Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings; but perhaps a certain restriction in taste is a necessary qualification in this field. Biographers of Britten go on comparing him favourably with Stravinsky, even in the period of Agon and the Requiem Canticles. I can't think of a biographer of Stravinsky who troubles to return the favour. We can go on talking about the greatness of the War Requiem, but how many composers has it influenced in the last fifty years? Oh yes, Andrew Lloyd Webber. As for English music, he is certainly one of Isaiah Berlin's foxes, who know many things, rather than a hedgehog like Elgar or Birtwistle, who knows one big thing. His elusive, not very attractive and rather problematic character makes for a compelling though sometimes faintly misguided biography.
• Philip Hensher's Scenes from Early Life is published by Fourth Estate.
• This article was amended on 11 February 2013. In the original Birtwistle was misspelled. This has been corrected.
HOME»CULTURE»BOOKS»BIOGRAPHY AND MEMOIR REVIEWS
Benjamin Britten by Paul Kildea: review
Paul Kildea's erudite biography underplays Benjamin Britten's dark side
Benjamin Britten, subject of a new biography by Paul Kildea
Benjamin Britten, subject of a new biography by Paul Kildea Photo: Erich Auerbach/Getty Images/Hulton Archive
By Igor Toronyi-Lalic7:00AM GMT 11 Feb 2013
The hagiographic, the psychosexual, the paedocentric, the epistolary, the political, the musical: biographers have over the decades angled Benjamin Britten every which way for their portraits. Understandably so. Not only because he was the most original musical mind to be born in England since Purcell – and the last born anywhere to have an operatic oeuvre that remains in the repertory. But also because he was a genuinely perplexing creature: a cold, touchy, childish genius, who was simultaneously a great collector, and even greater dropper, of friends.
The question is where do biographers go now? What is there left to unearth in this anniversary year? The first and most substantial new archaeological dig of 2013 is from the former head of the Aldeburgh Festival and the Wigmore Hall, Paul Kildea. Considering the years of research that have gone into this tome and his sober approach (which seeks to unravel some of the more sensational hyperbole of past biographies), Kildea probably has the best chance of saying something fresh. And musically at least, he does. Lovingly but not uncritically re-examining every one of Britten’s compositions in a way that enlightens but never overloads, Kildea gets closer than most to the nub of why Britten’s music endures. New light is shone on the masterpieces. New cases are made for the neglected. Everywhere are subtle reconfigurations: Paul Bunyan as a “magic lantern show” and the Nocturnes as full of “the short-breathed panic of sleep”.
But this is a biography that aims at much more than musicology. Subtitled "A Life in the Twentieth Century", Kildea’s contribution attempts nothing less than a history of 20th-century Britain, contextualising Britten’s life to better understand the man beyond the music. A valiant endeavour, for it is here that the real questions about Britten lie. That Britten was a great composer is beyond doubt. That he was also a decent human being is much less clear. It is at this junction that Kildea’s judgment fails him and us.
In seeking freshness – and, one suspects, valuing loyalty – over truth, Kildea underplays what has traditionally been overplayed (namely Britten’s meanness) and overplays what has traditionally been underplayed (everyone else’s meanness). A whitewash of Britten results – one full of special-pleading. Librettist Eric Crozier’s memories of Britten are accepted when affirming Kildea’s thesis (namely that Britten was surrounded by nasty, prejudiced people) and dismissed as the ravings “of a spurned lover” when they suggest Britten was indeed as malicious as everyone said he was. His pursuit of an agenda leads to inconsistencies. Crozier’s suggestion that Britten was raped at school is rejected on the grounds that there is no corroborative evidence. But the same vetting procedure doesn’t stop Kildea from pronouncing that Britten died of syphilis on the basis of one second-hand source (the two doctors still alive who operated on Britten have dismissed the claim as “ludicrous”).
Kildea’s overprotective defence of Britten’s behaviour becomes especially invidious when he gets onto Britten’s paedophilia. Deploying fellow biographer John Bridcut’s flimsy logic, he casts doubt on the testimony of a vulnerable under-age boy who claimed that Britten tried it on with him, describing it as a “clumsy attempt at seduction” rather than the attempted sexual assault it clearly was.
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Equally ill-judged absolution and justification attends to every one of Britten’s political opinions. It’s surprising that someone who got it so right musically (Britten was 30 years or so ahead in his championing of Mahler, Purcell and Buxtehude) could get it so very wrong politically. But boy did Britten get it wrong. A Communist at the time of the gulags, an appeaser on the eve of the Second World War, a pacifist during the Holocaust, a willing recipient of a Japanese commission in 1941 after they had mutilated China, tight-lipped over the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, anti-Churchill, pro-Edward VIII, Britten had a tin ear for politics.
In 1965, while travelling through Russia, Britten brushed away concerns about the dangers of Communist totalitarianism, writing that they were “so small” compared with the perils “worrying artists” faced in the capitalist West. None of this political illiteracy earns a rebuke.
It may seem unconnected to the central issues of Britten’s life, this wayward politicking, but in Kildea’s thesis it is key. Kildea’s argument is that Britten’s coldness was a defensive mechanism against a society that loathed him for his pacifism and homosexuality. But for Kildea to claim Britten – a man who had the late Queen Mother as a patron of his music festival – was a hounded outsider is laughable. As are the Britten-esque levels of sensitivity Kildea adopts when uncovering evidence for homophobia in every innocuous joke. Besides, it wasn’t Britten’s pacifism per se that so infuriated. It was his cowardice and hypocrisy: the way he insisted people take the fight to Fascism during the Thirties when he had nothing to lose and then wriggled out of conscription (conveniently rediscovering God to expedite this) when he did.
One cannot gainsay Kildea’s writing. The prose is engaging and erudite. But sound judgment is lacking from this biography. Britten was clearly a great and curious musical explorer. But, for many, he was also a monster who on just about every non-musical subject was happy to absorb the laziest clichés of his milieu. His musical activity may give the impression of a radical, as might superficially his political outlook, but, as WH Auden would note and deride, his every other move and thought – prudish, parochial, country-loving and toff-accommodating – was as English and conservative as you could get.
Benjamin Britten: A Life in the Twentieth Century
Paul Kildea
Allen Lane, £30, 688pp
Culture › Books › Reviews
Benjamin Britten: A Life in the Twentieth Century, By Paul Kildea
No other book has harmonised man and music better than this life of a quiet revolutionary
Frances Spalding
Friday 8 February 2013 20:00
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Confronting inconsistencies: Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears in Venice ( Getty Images )
Benjamin Britten is the greatest British composer of the 20th century. Yet there is no snug fit between him and any obvious form of national identity. "I am absolutely incapable of enjoying Elgar for more than two minutes," he admitted. He also slammed Elgar's first symphony: "I swear that only in Imperialist England would such a work be tolerated." When he wrote a War Requiem, combining poems by Wilfred Owen with a traditional mass to express the anguish of war, the work ends with the words "Let us sleep now". But the sweeping line of this soothing phrase is interrupted. It starts up again, only to dissolve and fade away. The possibility of resolution is denied. Britten received the Order of Merit, of which only 24 recipients exist at any one time, but was never a mouthpiece for the British establishment.
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Much has been published on Britten: six volumes of his letters, five biographical studies, including Humphrey Carpenter's popular account, and a mass of erudite scholarship. But if you have ever been touched by the magic of Britten's music, and want to perceive its alchemy, then don't miss this book. Paul Kildea, writer and conductor, introduces briskness, gravitas and wide knowledge to his study of the man, his music and its context. In this critical biography, Britten's inconsistencies are confronted, received opinions overturned, and complexity is explored. His musical development is very much to the fore, neatly tracked and authoritatively assessed.
Britten was born on the feast day of St Cecilia in 1913. This patron saint of music overrode the difficulties that troubled Britten's friendship with WH Auden: musician and poet collaborated on "Hymn to St Cecilia", a small choral gem. But a still greater blessing arose, not from the time of his birth, but its place, Lowestoft. Britten spent his childhood in a house that overlooked the North Sea.
The herring fishing industry had not yet begun its decline. During the herring season, the drifters arrived and were followed by Scottish fisher-girls who gutted, cleaned and packed the fish. Here was material which later emerged in the form of grand opera, in Peter Grimes, while its famous "Sea Interludes" convey Britten's deep familiarity with the sea, in all its moods and lights.
The dominating presence in his early life was his mother. Edith Britten was an amateur musician and active in Lowestoft's Musical Society. She famously pronounced that "Benjie" would become the fourth "B" – joining Bach, Beethoven and Brahms. Kildea, following a comment made by the composer's sister Beth, sees more game-playing in this than vaulting ambition. He also has very little truck with clumsy explanations of Britten's homosexuality; with those who argue that the mother's coddling of her son was to the detriment of his latent masculinity. Instead, Edith Britten took her son seriously, he argues, and allowed him to think of himself as a composer.
This still leaves the issue of Britten and boys. Examined at length by Carpenter and sensitively dealt with by John Bridcut in Britten's Children, Kildea is justified in travelling lightly over such well-trodden ground. He argues that Britten's early pursuit of friendships with schoolboys may initially reflect his inability to open himself to the potential and dangers of an adult sexual relationship. From the evidence available, his conclusion seems apt – that the line Britten trod in later life was clear, "propriety mostly trumping sexual desire".
Kildea excels all Britten's previous commentators in his grasp of performance history. Musical standards were low when Britten's career began. Henry Wood slogged away at the Proms, night and after night, delivering a broad notion of the piece rather that an interpretation, meticulously calibrated, as it would be today, against hundreds of other performances. Britten complained of the bumbling amateurism in English music-making, and though his own performances, both as a pianist and conductor, helped bring about a sea change.
The colours he could draw out through his piano playing astonished his partner, the tenor Peter Pears. And there are some heart-stopping accounts in this book of Britten accompanying the cellist Rostropovich or playing four-handed duets with Richter.
But the real drama is Britten's unremitting creativity. It is no surprise that he had a great love of Charles Dickens. His own sense of the dramatic pushed him in the direction of opera. He served his apprenticeship under John Grierson in the GPO Film Unit, working with Auden on Night Mail. But his first major breakthrough, in the eyes of the public, was Peter Grimes (1945). It rehabilitated his reputation, removing the opprobrium he had attracted by disappearing to America soon after the start of the Second World War.
Now, with renewed confidence, he began work on The Rape of Lucretia, founded the English Opera Group, and before long the Aldeburgh Festival. Through Albert Herring, Billy Budd, Gloriana, The Turn of the Screw, Owen Wingrave and Death in Venice, he looked back to Purcell in order to renew opera in his native language.
Of critical importance to all these operas was Britten's emphasis on collaboration, especially between librettist and composer. Economy of words was essential. Aschenbach's opening words in Death in Venice, which sum up a lengthy, wandering interior monologue, are: "My minds beats on, my mind beats on, and no words come." Kildea argues: "Never before had Britten packed so much narrative weight into the opening line of an opera." But the words, as her notebooks reveal, are those of the librettist Myfanwy Piper. There are other places, too, where her contribution – to The Turn of the Screw, Owen Wingrave and Death in Venice - is understated.
Kildea's insights into the difficulties in the relationship between Britten and Pears are convincing. So too is his account of the cause of Britten's botched heart operation toward the end of his life, even though the revelation of tertiary syphilis in his aorta has been publicly challenged. More questionable, perhaps, is the over-heavy emphasis on Britten's bad behaviour in later life. Having poured so much of himself into the making of music, into high standards, and the yearly complications surrounding the Aldeburgh Festival, is it surprising that the behaviour of others sometimes caused Britten to burst with unalloyed rudeness and fierce irritation? Time was, after all, running out.
Frances Spalding's 'John Piper, Myfanwy Piper: lives in art' is published by Oxford
QUOTE:
oupled with his depth of knowledge of the subject and his understanding of Britten’s music and the business of making music in general, the polished prose makes for compelling reading. Simply put, Benjamin Britten: A Life in the Twentieth Century is one of the most interesting composer biographies I have encountered.
Book review: Benjamin Britten: A Life in the 20th Century, by Paul Kildea
by Philip Norman / 07 November, 2013
Paul Kildea’s biography of Benjamin Britten is compelling reading.
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In a crowded field of publications marking the November 22 centenary of Benjamin Britten, Paul Kildea’s biography stands tall, despite his much-publicised error, now corrected, of declaring that Britten died of syphilis.
The quality of Kildea’s writing transcends this nightmarish gaffe. Coupled with his depth of knowledge of the subject and his understanding of Britten’s music and the business of making music in general, the polished prose makes for compelling reading. Simply put, Benjamin Britten: A Life in the Twentieth Century is one of the most interesting composer biographies I have encountered.
Benjamin Britten in 1968. Photo/Hans Wild
Part of the interest lies in Kildea’s detailed contextualising of Britten’s life and work. From the Great War to the Cold War, the Roaring 20s to the Swinging 60s, the rapid shifts of mid-century politics provide a swirling backdrop to the story of the man Kildea considers Britain’s greatest 20th-century composer.
As a conductor, Kildea has a personal perspective, including time spent as head of music at the Aldeburgh Festival – the festival Britten founded that became synonymous with his work. This enables the writer to make informed comments and elaborate effortlessly upon Britten’s disdain for the performance practices of the English conducting knights – Thomas Beecham, Adrian Boult, Malcolm Sargent and Henry Wood.
Further to this, Kildea is willing to discuss Britten’s music, and cleverly manages to do so without becoming bogged down in technicalities. This is the product of his genuine skill as a communicator, facilitated by the fact the majority of Britten’s compositions employ text in some form. Kildea thus draws meaning from sounds, and links biography to music in a way that would not have been possible had Britten been primarily a composer of instrumental music.
Piquancy is added to the 600-page text by frank but not overplayed appraisals of the darker sides of Britten’s personality – his passive-aggressive skewering of friends (discarding those who fell from favour and referring to them as “corpses”) and predilection for the company of pre-adolescent boys. Kildea suggests Britten was not a paedophile, but rather someone who enjoyed the company of youngsters because he was still at heart a schoolboy, although he does cite one verified “clumsy attempt” at seduction.
The man who emerges from Kildea’s portrayal is not likeable. Britten was insecure about his talents, waspish in his assessment of those who displeased him and obsessional in his need to be king of his own castle – Aldeburgh and the English Opera Group – rather than a servant in the wider musical world.
Kildea, who never met his subject, concludes: “I don’t think we would have been friends. There’s something so ruthlessly driven about Britten’s ambitions, in contrast to his generous and outgoing music-making. I came out of the book doubly passionate about him and admiring of his achievement. But that’s not the same as liking him.”
Surprises for me in the biography include Britten’s wealth, probated at almost NZ$20 million in today’s money, and the extremely high regard in which he was held as a conductor and piano recitalist. Fellow composer Sir Michael Tippett is quoted as declaring Britten to be “the most purely musical person I have ever met and I have ever known”.
BENJAMIN BRITTEN: A LIFE IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, by Paul Kildea (Allen Lane, $55).
Philip Norman is a composer and author of Douglas Lilburn: His Life and Music.
Rediscovering Britten
A nuanced biography with a sensational coda
font sizedecrease font sizeincrease font size Print EmailCommentJEFFREY TATEPublished in June 2013 no. 352
Rediscovering Britten
BENJAMIN BRITTEN: A LIFE IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
by Paul Kildea
Allen Lane, $45 hb, 682 pp, 9781846142321
Jeffrey Tate
Jeffrey Tate
Jeffrey Tate has conducted in most of the world's great opera houses since the 1970s. He is a former principal conductor of the Royal...
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It would be a pity if this well-researched and nuanced biography of the greatest English composer of the second half of the twentieth century became known for the rather sensational medical revelations contained in the last chapter. Certainly, they gave me pause before I began reading the book.
Benjamin Britten (1913–76) was the towering musical figure of my childhood. One of my most treasured possessions is a small photograph showing me at the age of twelve with other boys from my school, our music master, Alan Fluck, the handsome Peter Pears, and the shyly sympathetic Britten, who is holding a plate with a piece of sponge cake. Britten had just heard our school orchestra and choir, myself as one of three ‘picked boys’ and Pears as the tenor soloist in a performance of Britten’s cantata Saint Nicolas, written seven years previously for Pears’s public school, Lancing College in Sussex. How our music master had lured these two stars to our humble grammar school I will never know: maybe it was because Pears was born in the same town. But the warmth and sympathy shown to us schoolboys overwhelmed me, as did the music. Before the concert I knew of Britten, already the white hope of English music, and I had probably heard The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra and the Serenade for Strings, Voice and Horn; but to have been involved in, and met the creator of, this irresistibly immediate and moving work, now somewhat of a rarity, launched an adolescent hero-worship of the man and the music, which, nearly sixty years later, has not vanished.
For the next decade, Britten produced a series of major works. I attended some of the premières via the generosity of the Prince and Princess of Hesse, who founded a scholarship grant for a group of young people to attend the Aldeburgh Festival, then at its zenith. Tickets were free or subsidised in return for program-selling, chair-stacking, or other simple chores. I had the privilege of attending a cocktail party given by ‘Ben’ in the Red House, where I had the temerity to ask him why he allowed Sviatoslav Richter and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau to perform Brahms, a known pet hate of his. Britten’s response was characteristic: Die Schöne Magelone was one of the few great song cycles written for a baritone, and one couldn’t allow Die Schöne Müllerin, Winterreise, or Dichterliebe to be sung in anything but their original keys (that is, by a tenor). Britten openly discussed new operatic subjects, including Anna Karenina and King Lear. He showed the same warmth and empathy that had so touched me ten years previously. By this time I was also aware of my own homosexuality and was deeply sympathetic to Britten’s own sexual nature and his left-wing pacifist tendencies. Kildea explores the latter with precision, plus Britten’s need to belong to the cultural English élite. He offers a more detailed account of Britten’s complex attitude toward homosexuality than was the case in previous biographies.
Britten 3E.M. Forster (left) and Benjamin Britten (second from right), 1949
Britten’s contribution to the transformation of musical life in England after World War II is chronicled in detail. Kildea cites not only his compositional mastery but also his own exacting standards as a performer. I can bear witness to the extraordinary nature of Britten’s pianism and his unobtrusive but deeply sensitive conducting, including an unforgettable L’enfance du Christ in a wintery-cold Southwark Cathedral, a joyous Spring Symphony with the Philharmonic Orchestra and Chorus in the Festival Hall, and, strangely given little mention by Kildea, the season of Bach weekends in Long Melford Church, where the absence of gut strings, the presence, when needed, of vibrato, and a totally personal undogmatic sense of tempi created the most ‘authentic’ Bach I can remember.
How our music master had lured these two stars to our humble grammar school I will never know
The presence of Pears at all of these occasions, and what has been revealed in their published correspondence, attest to the depth of their musical and emotional relationship. The colour of Pears’s voice, his particular feeling for words, his highly personal technique (other tenors have complained that the position of the transition from chest and head voice gives rise to considerable difficulties in, say, the Pleiades monologue in Peter Grimes or the ‘Dirge’ in the Serenade): all these factors were a direct inspiration for Britten’s vocal writing. Kildea is sensitive to this. But there are strong hints of major conflicts between Pears’s independent life as a singer – with long periods away and possible fleeting liaisons – and Britten’s need for companionship and reassurance. Some of this is conjecture on Kildea’s part, but he creates a mood that undermines the more traditional view of the relationship as one of harmony and fruitfulness.
All this leads to the great shock of this book: the revelation that during the aortic valve replacement surgery that ultimately led to Britten’s early death in 1976, tertiary syphilis was discovered as the underlying cause of cardiac insufficiency, syphilis that Kildea presumes to have been transmitted by Pears, though he displayed no symptoms of the disease as far as we know. That Britten had had a severe bout of sub-acute bacterial endocarditis at the end of the 1960s is not in dispute, but it is strange that no evidence of the syphilis surfaced during the tests undertaken at that time: we have only the word of the surgeon to give us the diagnosis. On one level, the discussion is academic, as the complications of replacement surgery could easily have followed without the ‘adrenal spirochaete’. But Kildea seems to put in doubt the image of Pears, and throws a shadow over one of the great partnerships in European arts. As an ex-medical practitioner, I would like to see some more concrete evidence. Here I note that Britten’s cardiologist, Michael Petch, in a letter to Opera magazine (April 2013), has disputed the claim and stated that ‘Britten’s heart problem was degenerative, not syphilitic’.
This episode leaves a slightly bitter aftertaste, but it should not deter one from enjoying and respecting Kildea’s detailed and refreshing assessment of Britten’s output, including much-needed reappraisals of the Spring Symphony, Cantata academica, Children’s Crusade, the late song cycles, and Owen Wingrave, which I now feel compelled to re-examine: I worked on it as répétiteur when Covent Garden performed it in the early 1970s and found it difficult to like as much as the previous operas. The other important revaluation is that of Gloriana, which is finally being accorded the same importance as Peter Grimes and Billy Budd: the initial impulse behind its inception and the subsequent effects of its failure are treated most sympathetically.
As a listener, I was aware of a change in Britten’s style during the late 1960s and attributed this to his encroaching illness – the music losing its drive, becoming static and austere, less ‘spontaneous’. Kildea regards this as a process of deliberate change. He sees in the last works a re-blossoming, a return to the rich early palette, notably in Death in Venice and Phaedra, a work which belies its apparent economy of means and succeeds in creating a sensuous world worthy of the greatest vocal output. Indeed, this is one of the achievements of the book: Kildea makes us realise that Britten’s creative mind did not succumb to the debilitating physical illness that so distressed him. Kilda describes the music in terms both precise in technical details and totally accessible to non-musicians.
Britten’s life covered the transition from empire to postwar austerity and restructuring. Kildea conveys the non-musical context with an admirable lack of bias. At times one is frustrated by the lack of photographs of telling details in the text (Kennett Green’s double portrait is one example). Similarly helpful would have been a chronological list of Britten’s works and a complete discography, not only as a performer of his works but also as conductor, piano soloist, and accompanist.
Welcome as this year’s centenary celebrations are, more welcome is the fact that the four decades since his death have seen no decrease in performances of his works – quite the contrary. Kildea’s advocacy of some neglected works might lead to the rediscovery of yet more of the repertoire of this great artist, who wrote music with meaning for us all, whose language was always accessible, and for whom art had a central part to play in society, which this eminently readable book shows so admirably.
Published in June 2013 no. 352
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Always inclined to the clear and clean
Michael White reviews Britten on Music edited by Paul Kildea and Britten, Voice and Piano by Graham Johnson
12:01AM BST 25 Aug 2003
'I have a very real dread of becoming one of those artists who talk," said Benjamin Britten, picking up his umpteenth honorary doctorate in 1962; and it's a dread that turns up time and again in the collected essays, radio transcripts, interviews and speeches that comprise Britten on Music - lovingly researched and scrutinised by Paul Kildea, a Britten scholar recently appointed artistic director of the Wigmore Hall.
"I do not easily think in words"; "I hate talking about my own music", "The artist's job is to do, not to talk about what he does" - But if nothing else, you'll take from these pages the fact that the greatest British composer of modern times did a surprising amount of speaking and writing about his work. And though his plain-man's prose was too steeped in the world of 1950s primary-school broadcasting to stun like Percy Grainger's or seduce like Michael Tippett's, it's very straightforwardness was persuasive. It had a moral tone. Responsibility. And the responsibility of artists to the world they "serve" (a favourite verb in Britten's lexicon) was one of its persistent themes.
Britten was not, he insisted, an ivory-tower resident writing arcana for the culturally initiated. He was socially engaged and believed passionately in the idea of the artist as servant. Addressing the people of Lowestoft at his installation as Freeman of the Borough (the kind of small-town honour he clearly enjoyed), he speaks approvingly of the historic subservience of musicians to the church and state - adding: "Today it is the community, or all of us in our own small ways, that orders the artist about. And I do not think that is such a bad thing either."
But the preparedness to receive orders had its limits. It coloured his musical language ("there is a way of pleasing most people and still not hurting one's aesthetic standards," he writes in 1940) but it didn't quite make him a populist. In 1942 he rails against "the crop of interpreters, commentators, explainers and synthesisers who make such comfortable livings telling the public that music is really very simple and easy to understand… whereas any honest musical craftsman can tell you it is not". Deploring people who "sell music as if it were a kind of breakfast cereal", he wouldn't have liked Classic FM.
But trawling through the fascinating minutiae in this book, we learn that Britten did like the Beatles ("frightfully funny"), as well as Disney cartoons (allegedly as a paradigm of film-music fully integrated into visual narrative, but more probably because he had a childlike sense of humour). And we also learn - well, it was news to me - that he began life with perfect pitch that somehow went askew. "It seems to have sunk," he told an interviewer in 1963. "It's now almost a semitone flat."
We learn almost nothing about Britten's sexuality, and references to his lifelong lover Peter Pears are always decorously arms-length. But that's no more than could be expected from a man whose manner was austere East Anglian middle-class. Compositionally he was (as he says in 1944) "always inclined to the clear and clean - the slender sound of, say, Mozart… or even Tchaikovsky if he is played in a restrained though vital way".
Above all, though, he was a professional - destined to sweep aside the world of English gentleman composers who "generally think it rather vulgar to take too much trouble". Folksong, he argues, is no basis for organised music, and nationalism a mere camouflage for inefficiency - as are most movements in the art world: "It is only those who accept their loneliness and refuse all the refuges, whether of tribal nationalism or airtight intellectual systems, who will carry on the human heritage." This was the credo of a man who made a virtue of not fitting in.
But as a "doer" Britten was in fact a decidedly English figure with an abiding love of folksong - which accounts for two of the eight essays in Britten, Voice and Piano (270pp, Ashgate Publishing, £29.95), a collection of expanded lectures from that fabulously erudite accompanist Graham Johnson.
Anyone who has heard Johnson play or talk, or who has read the biblically encyclopedic liner-notes to his recordings, will appreciate the wisdom, insight and practical experience that lives in these essays.
Packaged with an illustrative CD, they probe beyond the possibilities of Britten's prose, starting more or less where it stops. As Johnson says, "some go to their psychiatrists to talk through their preoccupations and problems; Britten seems to work them out in his music for all to hear". And the workings-out are never more acute than in the voice-and-piano song-settings, which speak from the very heart of the composer's genius.
Nobody has set the English language so effectively; and no commentator I can think of has so sure a grasp of what that means. So between them, Britten and Johnson make a formidable, though post-mortem, partnership. If you read only one book about music in the coming months, let it be this.