Darkness Audible

Nicholas Spice

Benjamin Britten by Humphrey Carpenter
Faber, 680 pp, £20.00, September 1992, ISBN 0 571 14324 5

Among the minor characters to appear in this biography, the least important (he only gets two sentences) is a manservant whom Britten employed early in 1950, just before starting work on his opera Billy Budd. The man, who is not named, went mad. He believed he was a great composer and that Britten was his servant. In the middle of the night, he would come downstairs at Crag House, in Aldeburgh on the Suffolk coast, where Britten was living at the time, and play crashing discords on the piano. Eventually, his mother came and took him away.

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Vol. 15 No. 3 · 11 February 1993 » Nicholas Spice » Darkness Audible (print version)
pages 3-6 | 5288 words

Letters

From Anthony Arblaster

Nicholas Spice tells us firmly that ‘the notion that Pears confined Britten’s development is implausible … if it hadn’t met his creative needs to write for Pears, we may be sure he wouldn’t have done so’ (LRB, 11 February). I’m not entirely convinced. I am surely not the only person to have been struck by the rather odd disposition of voices in Billy Budd, in which the young lead is a baritone, and the elderly, fatherly Captain Vere a tenor. Pears’s voice was obviously never suited to the role of the young foretopman, and Vere is a wonderful role for a lyric character tenor. But the oddity of making Billy a baritone role remains. It is surely explained in the first instance by the need to write the opera around Pears’s voice and talents.

Spice also writes interestingly about the sense of unrealised possibilities, of ‘greatness … somehow held in check’ in Britten’s music. Things might have been different if he had been able, as he wanted, to go and study with Alban Berg. There is a fierce audacity in some of the early music, notably Our Hunting Fathers and the first two movements of the Sinfonia da Requiem, which seems to get smoothed out later on. And Britten seems to have felt a need for, or an urge towards, the consolatory which, to my mind, weakens the endings of both Billy Budd and the War Requiem, and explains why, in the end, he could not face turning King Lear into an opera: it is too unrelentingly bleak a work. No composer can be blamed for turning aside from a project which even Verdi ultimately evaded. But my own feeling is that it is in this turning away from the heart of darkness, from events in which there is no hope or comfort, that we find the limits of Britten’s actual achievement as a composer.

Anthony Arblaster
Sheffield

From Roland Allen

Never airborne without your excellent journal, I am bound for Copenhagen on SK508 reading about Humphrey Carpenter’s biography of Benjamin Britten, who, I learn (LRB, 11 February), was fond of ‘mince, herrings, rice pudding, apple pie, treacle tart [and] spotted dog’. One of those charming revelations for which I continue to subscribe to your … hang on: ‘spotted dog’, spotted dog? My Danish fellow-passenger is openly displaying a massive Engelsk-Dansk Ordbok, which he graciously allows me to inspect. But no entry for my dappled dessert. Intrigued, my companion inspects the article himself and, with an awareness of cultural resonance astonishing in so reluctant a European, suggests that, given the subject-matter, ‘perhaps it is a euphemism’ – a cop-out, a way of avoiding the frightening disorder of a fully expressed nursery food. But whose? Yours, Mr Spice, the forthright publisher? Or Mr Carpenter’s, the fearless biographer? Or Benjy’s, that most private and problematic man?

Have I myself been horribly misled concerning the appellation of the huge, spongy, spotted (spicy!) pudding, dripping cream, with which I, guileless infant, stuffed my mouth? The moment I can lay my hands on the Carpenter biography, the OED and Mrs Beeton, I intend to penetrate this mystery, willy (to coin a phrase you are not above using, Mr Spice) nilly.

Roland Allen
SK 508