My Beloved Man. The Letters of Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears ed. by Vicki P. Stroeher, Nicholas Clark, Jude Brimmer (review)

This handsomely produced volume contains the complete surviving correspondence between Britten and Pears, from 1937 to 1967. A number of the letters have been previously published in full or in part in the series Benjamin Britten: Letters from A Life, but to present the letters complete (as Pears himself intended) in chronological order and conveniently annotated makes a compelling and readable narrative, shedding light on the development of a relationship which was of the greatest importance in both creative and personal terms. For the most part, these are, inevitably, letters defined by separation and there are some protracted gaps, as between October 1966 and February 1968. In addition, post-1970 letter-writing had clearly become subordinate to the telephone and falls off dramatically. Nevertheless, one is presented with a vivid overall sense of a relationship which was both personally and artistically driven. It develops from the sexual as well as artistic intimacy of the earlier letters, Pears giving Britten ‘a loving critical confidence – in every way’ (Britten to Pears, March ?22–4, 1950), to, one senses, a greater detachment on Pears’s part by the time the relationship settled into a regular domesticity focused on the Red House after his and Britten’s move there in 1957. Finally, during Britten’s final illness, we have the wonderful exchange of letters in November 1974, which eloquently sums up the entire relationship and is, appropriately, reproduced as an illustration.

That said, those looking for startling revelations, either personal or musical, will be disappointed; there is likewise little reference to the contemporary political scene. There is also relatively little about Britten’s music beyond the genesis of Peter Grimes and Spring Symphony, although we have some telling glimpses of his working practice (as with ‘a solitary thinking walk’ in Venice in February 1968). What comes across much more strongly is a shared love of Bach, Mozart, and Verdi, the latter evident in Britten’s joy on receiving the score of La Traviata from Pears in 1950 (‘one learns so much from Verdi so B[illy] B[udd] will be a better opera for your present, I’ve no doubt!’], and a very practical (and unsparingly self-critical) focus on musical performance and communication. One is also left with a clear sense that Pears’s own cultural formation (not least at Lancing College, his alma mater) and his musical judgements were both strongly assertive whilst highly complementary to those of Britten: Pears thus wrote in November 1942, ‘I am so ambitious for you, as I am for myself’. Six years later, hearing a recording of Paul Bunyan made him ‘cry & shudder . . . The performance was appalling! and some of it is faintly embarrassing, though I believe by drastic cutting one could make a thing of it still’. Yet this is also elusive: there is very little reference to, for example, Pears’s significant influence on Britten in selecting poetry to set to music, or how Pears really viewed the instrumental works Britten composed for other performers. Indeed, whilst the letters are frequently indicative of a high cultural intelligence, with several notable exceptions they are practical, even prosaic, in tone, and perhaps increasingly so as the decades move on. Their responses to external events can also seem inhibited. If the experience of visiting Belsen in August 1945 undoubtedly had an immense impact on Britten, it is his sense of duty as a composer to perform there which comes across more strongly in his letter to Pears at that time. Yet we know that Britten’s acute appreciation of inhumanity was a potent creative force: in 1959, during the gestation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, he has a nightmare of ‘moans & shrieks all night, just like animals or...