{"id":1464,"date":"2023-01-16T08:50:56","date_gmt":"2023-01-16T08:50:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.justsheetmusic.com\/blog\/?p=1464"},"modified":"2023-01-16T08:50:56","modified_gmt":"2023-01-16T08:50:56","slug":"fishing-in-the-depths-of-benjamin-britten","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.justsheetmusic.com\/blog\/composers\/fishing-in-the-depths-of-benjamin-britten\/","title":{"rendered":"Fishing in the Depths of Benjamin Britten"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Fishing in the Depths of Benjamin Britten<\/p><\/div>\n

This year is the 100th<\/sup> anniversary of the birth of Benjamin Britten, a great English composer and conductor who created several outstanding operas: Peter Grimes<\/em> (1945), Billy Budd<\/em> (1951), and The Turn of the Screw <\/em>(1954) among them. [The Queen had made him a peer in 1976, and Britten died of congestive heart failure later that year.]<\/p>\n

\"\"

Benjamin Britten (22 November 1913 \u2013 4 December 1976)<\/p><\/div>\n

We\u2019ll take a few minutes today to praise Lord Britten, <\/a>by means of admiring descriptions of each of the three operas just named.<\/p>\n

Two of the three have a maritime theme, the third goes fishing in psychological depths instead.<\/p>\n

Peter Grimes<\/h3>\n

Peter Grimes<\/em> drew inspiration from a collection of George Crabbe poems, The Borough, <\/em>published in 1810. In one of the poems in that collection, Peter Grimes, a fisherman by trade, mistreats his apprentices, and [or consequently?] each dies while in his charge. After each of the first two deaths Grimes is acquitted \u2013 after all, the townspeople reason, fishing is a dangerous craft<\/a>, the unskilled youngsters involved sometimes die, etc.<\/p>\n

After the third time, the borough\u2019s officials get tough with him; he is prohibited from buying any further indentured servants. \u201cHire thee a freeman,\u201d says the mayor.<\/p>\n

\"\"Thereafter he is shunned by the towns\u2019 people. This shunning and his own guilt collude to drive Peter mad.<\/p>\n

Grimes himself becomes a much more sympathetic figure in Britten\u2019s treatment, with the assistance of his librettist Montague Slater, than he had been in Crabbe\u2019s. Crabbe (portrayed left) describes Grimes as a \u201csavage master\u201d who discovered, upon buying the first of his doomed indentured boys, that \u201che\u2019d now the power he ever loved to show\/ A feeling being subject to his blow.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"But in the hands of Britten and Slater, Grimes becomes a misfit loner deserving of sympathy. It is the town, he sings, that ought to be ashamed, \u201cSelling me new apprentices,\/ Children taught to be ashamed\/Of the legend on their faces \u2013 \u2018You\u2019ve been sold to Peter Grimes!<\/a>\u2019\u201d Softening the character becomes easier by virtue of the reduction of the number of his victims: \u2018only\u2019 two apprentices die in the opera, rather than the three of the poem.<\/p>\n

We see a more important change when we come to the manner of Grimes\u2019 death. He doesn\u2019t go mad as a result of anything as mild as a general shunning. Rather, he is pursued by an angry mob, singing \u201cHim who despises us we\u2019ll destroy.\u201d<\/a> Click that song title for a YouTube clip of 23 minutes from the opera. If you\u2019re impatient, skip forward to about 19:30, when the people of the borough have persuaded themselves that Grimes has done something awful to the second apprentice. See how the crowd is both angry and joyous in equal measure \u2013 joyous in its very unity \u2013 and how all this is musically expressed.<\/p>\n

The choice of this material for an opera was Britten\u2019s, a decision made a year before he requested Slater\u2019s help. The bare plot might seem on first thought a slender thread on which to hang a drama. Yet on second thought the suspicions the town directs against Peter stand for other sorts of suspicion, whether directed at innocent or at not-to-innocent targets. The opera becomes a meditation on the psychology of crowds. That has been the gist<\/a> of commentaries like this.<\/p>\n

Billy Budd<\/h3>\n

\"\"Billy Budd<\/em> was a novella by the superb American writer Herman Melville, one left unpublished at his death in 1891. Since its first publication in 1924, it has become a central work in the canon of great 19th<\/sup> century novels.<\/p>\n

Britten\u2019s opera<\/a> from this work boasts a libretto by E.M. Forster and Eric Crozier.<\/p>\n

That libretto includes a priceless bit of self-referential dialogue, as the Master at Arms \u2018welcomes\u2019 the newly-impressed members of his crew. Click here for the ten-minute scene that includes this:<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cCan you read?<\/p>\n

\u201cNo, but I can sing.<\/p>\n

\u201cNever mind the singing.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"This opera received a posthumous compositional assist from Giuseppe Verdi<\/a>. According to an anecdote from Mervyn Cooke’s biography<\/a> of Britten, Peter Pears (a tenor who was Britten\u2019s long-time lover) sent Britten a score of Verdi\u2019s La Traviata<\/em> while he, Britten, was in the midst of a blockage on this project. In a letter to Pears, Britten thanked him for the gift and added, \u201cI\u2019m in a bit of a muddle over Billy & not ready to start on him again yet. Anyhow one learns so much from Verdi so B.B. will be a better opera for your present, I\u2019ve no doubt!\u201d<\/p>\n

Pears played Captain Vere in the opera\u2019s first run.<\/p>\n

Turn of the Screw<\/strong><\/p>\n

Turn of the Screw<\/em> has nearly as lofty a literary pedigree as Billy Budd. Turn<\/em> was a ghost story written by Henry James, originally published in 1898, with a story that is on its face the struggle for the souls of two children, a young boy and girl named, respectively, Miles and Flora. The combatants in this struggle are: their governess (who is not given any name in the story) who is surely working for the side of good; and two ghosts, one of them that of a former governess, Miss Jessel, who seeks possession of the waifs.<\/p>\n

\"\"That, as I say, is the struggle on its face<\/em>, because there have been many readings of the story that have held that this is not really what is going on, that the ghosts don\u2019t exist outside of the deluded mind of the current governess, and that she herself is the real danger to the children she thinks she is protecting. The ambiguity is surely part of the reason Rebecca West once called this novella \u201cthe best ghost story in the world.\u201d <\/a><\/p>\n

Britten worked with librettist Myfanwy Piper in preparing this work for the operatic stage. This was the first Britten\/Myfanwy collaboration, though it would not be the last. They worked together in another Jamesian text, Owen Wingrave<\/em>,<\/a> years later, and on an opera based on a work by Thomas Mann, Death in Venice<\/em>,<\/a> after that.<\/p>\n

Here is one interpretation of their Turn of the Screw<\/a>. For the 1982 movie, director Petr Weigl introduced a long wordless opening sequence that shows Jessel and her lover, Peter Quint, when they were still alive and already a corrupting influence on the children. At about 6:30 in that clip, there\u2019s an erotically charged close-up of Jessel biting into an apple in the estate\u2019s garden, and of course sharing the fruit with the children. [Things get even worse when she\u2019s dead.]<\/p>\n

That Britten\u2019s work, like James\u2019, is subject to a variety of interpretations makes life interesting for producers and directors.<\/p>\n

Final Thoughts<\/h3>\n

<\/a>Speaking of the subtle and psychological side of ghost stories \u2026 Britten\u2019s Turn<\/em> might be in a sense a precursor of the great Stanley Kubrik movie, The Shining. <\/a> You can see that this story, too, was much enhanced by the musical element. Original music for its soundtrack was provided by Wendy Carlos and Rachel Elkind, but the most effective spooky music in the soundtrack comes from Krzyztof Penderecki, his De Natura Sonoris No. 2<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I think Penderecki would have gotten along well with Henry James.<\/p>\n

But let us return to Britten. Here is our farewell to a versatile genius. This clip will give you the music that accompanied the Governess\u2019 first reactions to her new abode, as the screws begin turning:<\/p>\n