Remembering, Repeating, Passacaglia: Weak Britten*

In 2013, the year of his centennial, Benjamin Britten was doing just fine: festivals and performances world round, two excellent, press-powering biographies, conferences, and symposia. Amid these shoals in the boiling sea of Britten, however, one also found pockets of persistent grievance: that Britten was a mean, cold, manipulative, childish man; that he had a "tin ear" for politics; that he was, after all, a rather reactionary composer—impoverished, shallow, moderate, weak. In this article, I restage these complaints in the "Oedipal arena" of musical modernism, and reframe them through ideas of repetition and revision, specifically of an artist's precursors or, in psychoanalytic terms, his "chosen objects." I argue that many critiques of Britten's music rely on legislative presumptions about what constitutes an adequate revision of pre-existing music within an artist's habitus. Over and against these critiques, I argue that "moderate modernist" music such as Britten's affords a way to rethink Oedipal dynamics, and with them the attacks and self-fashionings of the avant-garde and radical modernists who were Britten's contemporaries. The several positions against Britten are problematic and produce symptoms. I develop this premise via one of Britten's most venerable forms of repetition, remembering, and (arguably) working-through: the passacaglia.