‘At the Railway Station, Upway’ is the penultimate song, with its poignant trio of characters: the convict, the constable and the ‘little boy with a violin’. Britten’s long childhood train journeys with his viola provide, as we’ve already seen, one parallel to this, and we may now add a second: another journeying boy, this time with a cello, named Paul Rogerson. The final song, ‘Before Life and After’, returns to the first’s theme of a time beyond memory:
A time there was – as one may guess
And as, indeed, earth’s testimonies tell –
Before the birth of consciousness,
When all went well.
Hardy’s poem looks back in another and specifically literary sense, for its opening phrase can’t help recalling the start of Wordsworth’s ‘Immortality Ode’ (a poem Britten didn’t set, although Finzi did):
There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparell’d in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
The crucial difference between Hardy and Wordsworth – and, one might almost say, between Britten and Finzi – is that the edenic state which Wordsworth remembers persisting through childhood is pushed further into the past – even ‘Before the birth of consciousness’ – by Hardy. For Britten, that innocent apprehension of childhood which Wordsworth called the ‘visionary gleam’ seems to have become clouded and compromised early on: we are back, yet again, at South Lodge.
At first, Britten discouraged the use of the phrase ‘song cycle’ to describe Winter Words, preferring to regard it simply as a group of songs; in fact, the last poem’s return to the cosmic timescale of the first is strikingly cyclical. It is among the most personal of his works for voice and piano, but in a quite different way from the Michelangelo Sonnets: it is grounded in his inner life and memory rather than in his relationship with Pears who, as performer, only glancingly and ironically becomes part of his own sung material when, at the end of ‘The Choirmaster’s Burial’, we learn that this is the story ‘the tenor man told / When he had grown old’. It may well have been a liberating experience for Pears to perform Winter Words; certainly the recording he and Britten made of it for Decca in March 1954 is one of their finest. The pointedly non-metropolitan venue of its premiere, while serving to remind doubters that Harewood was above all a musical friend, somewhat restricted the amount of press coverage; but Ernest Bradbury in the Yorkshire Post, after expressing mild surprise at the combination of composer and poet, noted that Britten had caught Hardy’s ‘sombre, ironic quality, that essential non-pitying sadness in his music’.118 The rest of the concert at Harewood House, given by the Wind Ensemble of the LSO, consisted of music whose autumnal colours provided a perfect context for the Hardy songs, but there was also a practical reason for this: Britten’s right arm had now become too painful for him to perform throughout an entire concert.
Before he was ordered to rest his arm, Britten travelled to Copenhagen in September, where he recorded his Sinfonia da Requiem and A Ceremony of Carols, stayed at the Hotel d’Angleterre and got ‘tiddley’; back in England, he and Pears recorded Winter Words for the BBC Third Programme in October; and he began work, with Imogen Holst, on a Symphonic Suite from Gloriana. But he was unable to conduct Peter Grimes, when it was revived in a production by John Cranko at Covent Garden in November, and he had to cancel a planned European concert tour with Pears, the German leg of which was replaced by an extended Christmas and New Year holiday at Wolfsgarten, near Darmstadt, with Prince Ludwig of Hesse and the Rhine and his wife Princess Margaret (née Campbell Geddes). They had been introduced to ‘Lu’ and ‘Peg’ – who were to become lifelong friends, travelling companions and supporters of the Aldeburgh Festival – by Lord Harewood: ‘Peg’ was the founder of the Hesse Students Scheme, under which music students receive free passes to all festival concerts in exchange for organisational help, and the annual Hesse Lecture; while ‘Lu’, under the pseudonym Ludwig Landgraf, was the German translator of several Britten works, including the one on which he started at Wolfsgarten that winter, The Turn of the Screw.
The opera had been intended for production at the Venice Biennale of 1953 but, when this plan was effectively derailed by Gloriana, The Turn of the Screw was rescheduled for 1954 – a year in which there couldn’t, by definition, be a biennale: instead it would form part of the 27th International Festival of Contemporary Music in Venice. More than twenty years had passed since Britten had heard a radio dramatisation of Henry James’s novella, which he then read, but this passage of time had served only to emphasise its congruence with his own creative imagination. Yet, like Peter Grimes and Billy Budd, it was a perversely intractable text to transform into an opera. James’s story – which concerns a governess in a remote country house, her two young charges Miles and Flora, the housekeeper Mrs Grose, and the ghosts of Peter Quint and Miss Jessel, the former valet and governess – is carefully wrapped in ambiguity: the ghosts remain invisible to the illiterate and down-to-earth (but perhaps therefore all the more reliable?) housekeeper, while the children’s oddities and illnesses may be at least partly attributable to their peculiar isolation and family circumstances. Moreover, James filters and distances the tale: we have it in the governess’s words, but we are to imagine these being read aloud to the remnants of a Christmas house party by a man (‘Douglas’) whose sister was once taught by her, at the prompting of a Jamesian first-person narrator. These framing and qualifying devices must inevitably be sacrificed when the action is presented onstage; so must the characteristic inwardness of the narrative. With a rather cumbersome writer such as Melville, this loss may be not greatly felt; with James, it is more serious. For example, James conveys the shifting, often suspicious or uncomprehending, relationship between governess and housekeeper in terms of breathtaking subtlety and aptness: ‘She offered her mind to my disclosures as, had I wished to mix a witch’s broth and proposed it with assurance,
she would have held out a large clean saucepan.’121 What on earth is the librettist to do about that?
The librettist was Myfanwy Piper, John Piper’s second wife, who had at first suggested The Turn of the Screw as the basis for an operatic film, in which medium its ambiguities would have been more easily retained. She took on the task almost by accident: ‘Ben said to me, “Would you try and think of a way it might be done and then we might get someone in to write it”’ and, when she’d given this some thought, ‘we began work on it together, and there seemed no reason to ask anyone else’.122 The obvious candidate, William Plomer, professed himself in any case to be not much of a Jamesian. Piper’s – and Britten’s – solution to the challenges of James’s text was a radical recasting which reduced the distancing to a modest, piano-accompanied Prologue and involved the invention of crucial scenes, such as the Latin lesson towards the end of Act 1 and the dialogue between the ghosts at the start of Act 2, into which Piper interpolated a famous line from Yeats’s ‘The Second Coming’: ‘The ceremony of innocence is drowned.’ Britten’s musical approach was no less daring: each of the sixteen scenes is introduced by a variation on a theme (‘Scene 1: The Journey’) based on a row of twelve notes, though this doesn’t make it in any sense a ‘twelve tone’ composition. The opera is compact both in its cast – six singing roles, of which four are for women – and in its duration: two acts, each running for under an hour. Yet, as Britten himself liked to remark (on one occasion artfully ascribing this opinion to Donald Mitchell), the simpler he made his music, the more difficulty people seemed to experience in performing or understanding it.
He had intended both the children’s parts to be sung by children but, after the disappointment of the first auditions, held at the Royal Court Theatre on 12 December 1953, it was clear that this mightn’t be possible. The part of Flora would have to be taken by an adult soprano; however, in the absence of an available castrato, Miles could only be sung by a boy treble. Among the boys who auditioned for the role were Michael Ingram (later known as Michael Crawford) and a twelve-year-old chorister, ‘one of the more bumptious boys in the choir of the Chapel Royal at Hampton Court Palace’,123 called David Hemmings. It was Hemmings who, as much on account of his engaging personality as of his rather thin voice, was recalled to a second audition with Britten and George Malcolm at Chester Gate on 27 January. He got the part and was soon invited for an extended stay in Aldeburgh, which he recalled as lasting two or three months. There, Basil Douglas of the English Opera Group was to arrange for him to have three or four hours’ academic study per day while he learned the role of Miles; but there were, of course, distractions such as tennis and swimming and – when Britten gave him time off – mending nets on the beach with the fishermen, who’d take him along with them for a drink at the Mill, the pub opposite the Moot Hall. David was roguish and precocious and perfectly cast as Miles. Imogen Holst taught him to play the piano, as he would have to pretend to do onstage. His voice grew steadily stronger.
Looking at photographs of the young David Hemmings, we may feel – as perhaps Britten did – that we’ve seen him before: it isn’t so much an exact physical likeness as an identical air of irresistible mischief that makes him so resemble another boy, Francis Barton, leaning out of a railway-carriage window with his older friend Ben in 1928. It is also, in both cases, the unmistakable assurance of being loved. Hemmings, who described himself as ‘more heterosexual than Genghis Khan’, had been warned about Britten in frank terms (‘You know he’s a homo, don’t you?’) by his father. The son, though similarly disinclined to mince his words, nevertheless insisted that there was no ‘hanky-panky’ (using the same expression as David Spenser) and described his friendship with Britten in terms which exactly echo those of his predecessors: ‘He was not only a father to me, but a friend – and you couldn’t have had a better father, or a better friend. He was generous and kind, and I was very lucky. I loved him dearly, I really did – I absolutely adored him.’124 ‘In all of the time I spent with him,’ he said on another occasion, ‘he never abused that trust.’125 Maureen Garnham, Basil Douglas’s secretary, recalled a moment on Crag Path, just outside the Jubilee Hall, which captured the essence of the relationship: ‘David, just arrived from London, spotted Ben among the many people enjoying the sunshine, ran to him, and with a shout of greeting took a flying leap into his arms. He received in return a laughing kiss on the forehead before Ben set him down.’126 Britten rather endearingly made his recurrent hopeless attempt to sponsor a protégé’s education, even arranging a place for him at Gresham’s, but by then David was beginning to set his sights on an acting career.
Somehow the work was finished, just in time, and the English Opera Group decamped with its child star to Venice: trusting on Italian munificence, they had wildly overspent, so it was wryly appropriate that Basil Douglas should find himself rewarded with the title ‘Impresario Generale’ of the EOG on La Fenice’s programme. David Hemmings, who appeared from a publicity photograph to be irresistible even to the pigeons, was delighted by a headline in the Children’s Newspaper: ‘HEMMINGS THE MENACE SINGS OPERA IN VENICE’.128 The EOG’s inner circle was less cheerful: according to the stage manager, Colin Graham, ‘the “family”, the Pipers, Basils C. and D., Ben and Peter, and others, went about Venice as a little clique doing nothing but worry’.129 The day of the premiere, 14 September, was accompanied – as Britten gently put it on a postcard to Lu and Peg – by ‘some alarms brought on by Italian character & heat’.130 First, the stage crew had threatened to go on strike; then, the performance itself, which was being relayed live on Radio Italia, the BBC Third Programme and other European stations, was held up by an overrunning broadcast; there was slow-handclapping from the impatient audience in the rose-decked Teatro La Fenice. The cast included Peter Pears (Prologue and Quint), Jennifer Vyvyan (Governess), David Hemmings (Miles), Olive Dwyer (Flora), Joan Cross (Mrs Grose) and Arda Mandikian (Miss Jessel); the production was designed by John Piper, directed by Basil Coleman and conducted by the composer. Lord Harewood, who was there, reported that the occasion was a ‘genuine success’, but for David Hemmings it was something more. His recollection, told half a century later to John Bridcut, of the opera’s end – when, as the Governess sings a reprise of Miles’s ‘Malo’ song from Act 1, he dies in her arms – is remarkably like Leonard Thompson’s account of the Peter Grimes first night:
Curtain comes down. Not a sound in the audience – not a sound! And I’m lying in Jennifer Vyvyan’s arms – who has just done this unbelievable aria – and then there are one or two
faint claps in the audience … And it’s absolutely sound-throbbing. Well, if that’s not great music, I don’t know what is. And I am so proud to be a part of it, and I’m sorry that I’m sort of weeping about it, but it was pretty magnificent stuff.131
There was some disappointment in the Italian press with the opera’s scale and, in particular, with the modest size of the chamber orchestra; but this would have bothered Britten only superficially, if at all, since with The Turn of the Screw he had perfected his new ‘invention’, chamber opera, of which The Rape of Lucretia had been the prototype. A reviewer for the Paris paper L’Express wrote of ‘the composer’s customary intense preoccupation with homosexual love’, which may well be, as Carpenter thought, ‘the first time that homosexuality was mentioned in print in connection with Britten’.132 That this may seem to us surprising is testimony to the power of English innuendo. In the British press, there were particularly appreciative reviews by Colin Mason in the Manchester Guardian – for whom, ‘With the possible exception of Billy Budd it is in musical style the most difficult and tightly unified of Britten’s operas’ – and Felix Aprahamian in the Sunday Times: ‘It is not only Britten’s most gripping score: it is among his finest.’133 Both Aprahamian and the anonymous critic in The Times singled out Hemmings for special praise. John Ireland, who listened to the Third Programme broadcast, thought that The Turn of the Screw contained ‘the most remarkable and original music I have ever heard from the pen of a British composer – and it is on a firmly diatonic and tonal basis’; what Britten had ‘accomplished in sound’ with his thirteen instruments was ‘inexplicable’ and ‘almost miraculous’.134