Benjamin Britten Studies: Essays on an Inexplicit Art ed. by Vicki P. Stroeher and Justin Vickers (review)

This latest volume of Aldeburgh Studies in Music, whose contributors adopt a range of contrasting but ultimately complementary approaches to their subject, captures the vitality of the research which has been undertaken on Britten since the 2013 centenary. For the most part, the essays in this new collection deepen our understanding of the composer and his music, whilst also revealing that we can never fully 'know' Britten in spite of our access to documents, recordings and, of course, the music. Lucy Walker makes this point explicitly in her witty and thought-provoking final essay. Yet this also raises an unresolved question of methodology: with the exception of Christopher Mark's and Philip Rupprecht's contributions, technical musical analysis is a somewhat secondary feature of the volume, which extends across a wide range of documentary evidence, particularly at Aldeburgh itself (with regard to which, Philip Reed tells us in his excellent introduction, there is still much to be uncovered). However, by acknowledging that all analysis of the composer is 'an inexplicit art', since we can never know what Britten actually 'meant' by a particular compositional device nor by his words in a particular letter, there are nevertheless several common criteria by which this scholarship might be judged: clarity of expression to the non-specialist; rigorous interrogation of source material; and also—perhaps particularly in the sphere of musicology—asking the caveat 'So what?' That a significant number of the contributors hold academic positions in the U.S. and Canada certainly indicates that, over twenty years after his death, Britten's stature shows no sign of abating.

Regarding the first: clarity of expression to the non-specialist. The collection is a rich diet for one sitting, but is refreshingly jargon-free and the editors adopt a sensitive and open-minded tone. Just occasionally I wished that self-justifying phrases such as 'It is probably/surely no coincidence that', 'Revealingly', 'Interestingly' and 'equally feasible' had been challenged. Nicholas Clark's lucid and balanced consideration of Britten's transition from Boosey & Hawkes to Faber Music is indicative of the high standards set by the editors and publishers, and prompted me to ask the question: did Faber Music really expect some of those post-1964 works to enter the wider repertoire and make money? I was more reserved about Colleen Renihan's discussion of Gloriana, which makes some important observations regarding the 'curious musical idiom' of that opera, but in dealing with two elusive themes—remembrance and renewed citizenship—gets rather bogged down in terms such as 'performativity', 'constructedness', and 'historical opacity of meaning'. It also seems a curious omission not to discuss the Queen's prayer at the end of Act 1 and the opera's palpable allusions to Verdi and Musorg -sky. Likewise, I felt that Paul Kildea's elegant consideration of Britten in exile rather overstated the composer's affinities with Hans Keller. More rewarding is Byron Adams's astute discussion of Britten as 'a reluctant heir' of the English tradition of boy worship from the mid-Victorian period to the 1930s, focusing on his uneasy relationship with his former teacher John Ireland, though in drawing out the 'ghostly lineaments' of Ireland in Death in Venice one feels that he pushes the evidence too far: by the 1970s Britten surely inhabited a very different creative world, and the music for Aschenbach, a refinement of what Britten had achieved through the Church Parables, reflects this creative summing-up. I also particularly enjoyed Vicki Stroeher's examination of the sociopolitical context in which Britten wrote Paul Bunyan and her demonstration of how this work both embraced 'Americanness' but also strongly undercut it. This is both fresh and important analysis and demonstrates that, with this work, Britten was surely entering a minefield. Danielle Ward-Griffin's detailed consideration of Britten's revisions to this work...