The Operas of Benjamin Britten: Expression and Evasion (review)

This book derives from a doctoral dissertation which is not listed in the Bibliography but presumably dates from the later 1990s. The Bibliography contains no references to material on Britten published since then, and this provides one explanation for the limitations of a text which would have benefited greatly from access to some of those more recent materials. Since nothing dates more rapidly than the self-consciously controversial, Seymour's liberal quotations in her Introduction and Conclusion from Catherine Clément, Wayne Koestelbaum, and Michel Poizat also lend a certain aura of remoteness to the enterprise. That is not to argue that the issues raised by gender studies and other subcategories of critical musicology are no longer relevant to Britten interpretation; but it does highlight the perils of not keeping pace with a subject that has deepened and widened considerably in the last few years.

Seymour has done good work in the documentary sphere, and her use of archival materials at Aldeburgh and elsewhere is thorough and illuminating, dealing in depth with the genesis and evolution of the librettos that Britten set. Nor is she imperceptive as an interpreter determined to stress the composer's psychology. Even if she has not found much of significance that was not available to Humphrey Carpenter and the editors of the three volumes of Britten's letters and diaries, there is still room for a critical narrative which consistently aligns what is known about the personal circumstances of Britten's life with a discussion of the form and character of his compositions for the stage. Yet is it really the case that the life determined the nature of the operas as directly as Seymour seems to believe? The exercise of bringing life to bear on works risks descending into naivety if all aspects of those works—musical as well as verbal—are not considered in appropriate depth.

What constitutes 'appropriate depth' is a matter of opinion, but for me there is a troubling disparity between Seymour's way of narrating genesis and her analysis of the technical and artistic results of that genetic process. Her musical analyses are more structural than hermeneutic, her focus on matters of tonal signification too often an end in itself rather than a means of exploring the very particular rhetorical devices through which Britten achieves his dramatic effects. This might be because, in Seymour's judgement, other writers have been too ready to ignore the flaws in Britten's operas. There is certainly little open enthusiasm in her pages, and even a statement like 'there is no denying the beauty and seductiveness of Quint's melodies' (p. 189) seems captious, as if to suggest that beauty and seductiveness can only be the result of corruption. As for those 'extraordinary pinnacles of transcendence which are experienced by composer, performer, operatic protagonist and audience' in such passages as Grimes's 'Great Bear' aria or Miles's 'Malo' song, and which demonstrate 'how Britten's music is more than mere self-gratification and communicates directly, powerfully, with the listener': these turn out, in Seymour's view, to fail in the sense that they are 'inevitably reassimilated within the forward movement of the literary and musical narrative. The promise of fulfilment is denied, the symbol does not disclose its meaning and the narrative resumes, its events and characters—and by implication the performer and the listener—untransformed by the existential peak which Britten has climbed' (p. 325). I suspect that most readers will disagree with this loftily generalized assertion, implying as it seems to do some sense in which a maimed life maimed the work.

Seymour's initial premiss rests on the questionable assumption that Britten 'was driven by his desire for an appropriate public "voice" which might embody, communicate, and perhaps resolve, his private concerns and anxieties' (p. 1). But should Britten's compositions simply be seen as some kind of personal therapy? Even a psychoanalytic interpretation of his personality as embodying...