Letters from a Life: Selected Letters of Benjamin Britten, Vol. 3: 1946-1951 (review)

Volumes 1 and 2 of Letters from a Life: Selected Letters and Diaries of Benjamin Britten, published in 1991, covered the years 1923 to 1945 in 1,403 copiously annotated pages. Now Volume 3—no diaries this time, just 'selected letters'—appearing thirteen years later, covers six years in 758 pages: or rather 620 pages, preceded by an Introduction by Donald Mitchell, a further selection of letters from the years 1936–45, and an essay by Mitchell about Britten's correspondence (1942–5) with Edward Sackville-West, which has only recently been made available for study.

A very rough average of a hundred pages per year is far from excessive, given Britten's multifarious and immensely important activities in the wake of Peter Grimes, and his often laconic and hurried letters benefit greatly from being placed within this kind of documentary biography, so that the reasons for haste can be explored, the significance of passing references and allusions unscrambled. The editorial team score highly in avoiding redundant or pedestrian annotation. Informed comment may be voluminous, but speculation is kept to an absolute minimum, and even the initially plausible argument that materials like the extensive newspaper reviews of Britten premieres would best be shunted off onto a website (as may happen with later volumes) loses force when their presence on the page among the correspondence and other documentation serves to reinforce so vividly what really mattered about these years for Britten, and for British music. For example, the material about responses to The Rape of Lucretia and Albert Herring, with conflicting views on the former passionately expressed by Grace Williams, Imogen Holst, Michael Tippett, and Edward Sackville-West, among others, is the more striking when placed in the context of Britten's own involvement in the work's early performances; and the detailed biographical notes devoted to other figures—a good instance is Clifford Curzon (p. 190)—also provide fascinating and relevant information at exactly the point where it is most useful.

A brief chronology of these years serves to indicate Britten's phenomenal work rate, at least from 1946 to 1949. In 1946 he completed The Rape of Lucretia (first performed at Glyndebourne on 12 July), attended the American premiere of Peter Grimes, founded the English Opera Group, and began work on Albert Herring. In 1947, having moved from Snape to Aldeburgh, he decided to found a festival there: Herring had its premiere, and the English Opera Group toured in Europe. 1n 1948 he completed St Nicolas (which, conducted by Leslie Woodgate, served to inaugurate the first Aldeburgh Festival), completed his version of The Beggar's Opera, began to compose the Spring Symphony and The Little Sweep and to plan Billy Budd with E. M. Forster and Eric Crozier. In 1949 The Little Sweep had its first performance at Aldeburgh, Spring Symphony in Amsterdam. Work on Billy Budd continued, and there was a lengthy recital tour of North America in the autumn. Only in 1950, when the composition of Billy Budd was being pursued in earnest, did the number of other activities begin to be reduced: the opera was eventually premiered in December 1951.

While not exactly uninformative, such a bald chronicle is woefully devoid of human interest, and a particular reward of the accumulation of detail in Letters from a Life is that jumping to conclusions about Britten's temperament and motives for this or that creative decision—virtually unavoidable even in quite densely documented biographical narratives, like Humphrey Carpenter's—becomes that much more difficult to justify. The Britten who had phenomenal natural gifts as a musician, who worked hard, had outstanding success, yet whose fundamental unease in the world was behind his recurring health problems as well as his difficulties with personal relations outside his immediate, supremely protective and tolerant inner circle: this Britten is still recognizable from these pages. Yet the familiar attributes of that...