A strange case of amnesia seems to attend people reading John Bridcut's book Britten's Children. Petroc Trelawney is one of several who don't seem to have been paying attention. Otherwise he wouldn't have written the following in the Torygraph: "Yes, Britten found working with young people exciting and inspiring – but that was as far as it went. In current times, it’s reassuring that we can listen to Britten comfortable in the knowledge that he is unlikely to be the subject of a posthumous tabloid exposé".
Actually Bridcut's book sets out in some detail the curious case of the chorister Harry Morris. In 1937 Britten, then 24, took Morris, aged 13, on holiday to Crantock in Cornwall with his family. Britten had bought Morris new pyjamas. Whilst there an incident occurred; Morris returned to London and a stand-up row took place between Britten and his elder brother; they were estranged for a time afterwards. Bridcut writes (p.52) that later in life Morris said he had been alarmed "by what he understood as a sexual approach from Britten in his bedroom. He said he screamed and hit Britten with a chair. This brought Beth (Britten's sister) rushing into the room, who, he said, shouted at her brother. She and Ben left, and Beth locked the door. Harry got dressed, packed his bags, and sat waiting for the morning. Without speaking, Beth took him to the station, and dispatched him to London. When he reached home, he told his mother what had happened, but she told him off and refused to believe his story. He never told his father." Morris died in 2002. Bridcut notes (p.46) that "as an old man he had revisited Crantock, and the experience had made him feel ill".
With all the participants dead, it is impossible to be specific about what happened between Britten and Morris. But it doesn't seem unreasonable to suppose that this was an incident where Britten's interest in young (and therefore vulnerable) boys crossed the line. It may be the only time Britten did so; it may not be. In either event, Bridcut's general conclusion about Britten's conduct and proclivities - that he was blameless - is somewhat undermined.
Britten's admirers are prone, like Trelawney , to drawing a veil over the less pleasant side of his personality. Extraordinarily, Bridcut himself is just as guilty as Trelawney. A couple of years ago he wrote to the Guardian defending Britten on the paedophilia charge. "There was no suggestion of impropriety", he wrote. Had he forgotten about Harry Morris? Had he not read his own book?
Actually there is a clue to Bridcut's approach in its title - Britten's Children. It should have been called Britten's Boys. There are no girls in it.
As a fellow toiler in the field I admire Britten's talent. He could do anything he chose and do it brilliantly. But like all composers he was limited by the constraints of his personality and preoccupations, which in Britten's case were focused on the corruption of innocence (my suspicion is that Britten knew about this corruption from both sides - corrupter and corrupted). But this is a narrow theme and Britten mined it to the point of tedium.
In any case musical history is littered with examples of the prodigiously talented who are now forgotten. Talent is not everything. Hector Berlioz, a far far greater composer than Britten, has been described as a "genius without talent". If this is slightly unfair to Berlioz on the talent front, it well makes the point that genius and talent are separable.
(It's also worth pointing out that for all his genius, Berlioz never succeeded in co-opting the French musical establishment - when he finally got a job at the Paris Conservatoire it was as assistant librarian - whereas Britten was a master at rising up the greasy pole and discarding those who were no longer any use to him. I genuinely think this does account for at least some of his pre-eminence today. There is a deeply unpleasant vignette in Britten's letters where he and Lennox Berkeley are recorded as spending an evening sniggering over Vaughan Williams' scores, laughing at the "mistakes" in the orchestration; this the same RVW who interceded on Britten's behalf when the LSO were ridiculing Our Hunting Fathers, the composer's first major orchestral work.)
Ultimately what makes music last is the quality of the invention, and it is on this front that Britten, for me, falls down. I have seen most of his operas and conducted some of his music but I can't remember a note of any of them. Perhaps a few bits of the Four Sea Interludes. People will be whistling and playing John Williams in a hundred years; I'm not sure about Britten.
And I have to correct Petroc Trelawney about the popularity of his work. I went to see Midsummer Night's Dream recently - it left me cold, although that's not the point: the point is that the theatre was half empty. Doesn't Trelawney know that these shows are put on not because the public wants them, but because the world of state-subsidised arts administration has decided the public should have them? It'll be interesting to see how that pans out.
Lastly, Britten is often accused of scuttling off to America in 1939. To be fair, the evidence suggests that he and Pears didn't go because of impending war (although of course everyone knew it was coming). But I have always thought the War Requiem (one of his best works) both telling and evasive in its choice of poetry: much easier, after all, to make the pacifist case in the context of the 1914-18 war than the one which had just finished. If I could have asked Britten one question today it would have been this: "If more people had been pacifists and we had lost the war, how long do you think it would have been before the fascist regime had allowed gay marriage?" I hope the irony that this reform was enacted by the kind of conservatives that Britten savaged in Peter Grimes would not have been lost on him.
Yesterday I had the good fortune to conduct the D Minor Piano Concerto by Brahms in a stunning performance by the Indian pianist Julian Clef, aka Julian Pulimagath. Now Britten despised Brahms, saying that he played some through once a year to remind himself how bad it was. And yet the Brahms D Minor has a degree of pathos, dignity, tenderness, determination and finally warmth which I find conspicuously lacking in Britten's music. The sad thing is not that Britten couldn't have done all that if he'd wanted to. It's that he didn't want to.
