I had assumed I would, over a period of time, dip into this
pictorial album of Britten’s life and eventually review
it but, once started, I could not put it down until I had looked
at every picture (400 odd) and read every word. At a highly
affordable price, this is more than value for money and heads
what will be a procession of books and other reminders that
2013 is Britten’s centenary year. As well as Britten
in Pictures (a clever pun on Britain in Pictures,
a social history series produced in the 1930s and 1940s edited
by W J Turner), Boydell Press publishes the sixth and last volume
of Letters from a Life, also Making Musicians
(a personal history by Moira Bennett of the Britten-Pears School),
Hans Keller’s Britten, The Musical Character and Other
Writings, Essays on Gloriana edited by Paul Banks,
Christopher Wintle’s All the Gods (Britten’s
Night-piece in context) and offers books already in their
current and back catalogue (The Britten Collection).
There is curiously no mention that I can find in Britten
in Pictures that the composer also had the first name Edward,
other than what one can see in a few images themselves, student
signatures ‘E B Britten’ and his application form
made out to Edward Benjamin Britten to register as a conscientious
objector. Why he dropped it could have been included in the
fine introduction by Christopher Grogan (Director of Collections
and Heritage at the Britten-Pears Foundation), which not only
makes compelling reading but is also full of insight and sensitivity
when dealing with the Britten-Pears relationship and Britten’s
camera shyness, which was manifested by maintaining strict control
of images destined for the public domain. The two men first
met in 1937 but the relationship began a few years later when
they arrived in America and it lasted until Britten’s
death in 1976. Of those four decades, three quarters were spent
in the threatening shadow of possible criminal prosecution until
laws against homosexual acts between consulting adult males
were repealed in 1967 after the Wolfenden report ten years earlier.
As Pears himself succinctly put it, ‘we are after all
queer and left and conshies, which is enough to put us, or make
us put ourselves, outside the pale, apart from being artists
as well’. Britten, unlike Pears, was far more concerned
that their relationship would be exposed. Their relationship
was both touching and, at the end, deeply moving with the singer’s
craggy features showing visible concern for his partner’s
rapidly increasing frailty in photographs taken during the few
years remaining to Britten after his serious valve-replacement
heart operation. Within these pages you will find a tiny handful
in which they face one another. Britten very rarely looks at
Pears, who invariably looks with devotion at his partner. Pears
has a look for the camera which warmly invites whereas Britten
shyly excludes, Pears smiles but Britten is serious, Pears is
relaxed whilst Britten is tense and rarely relaxes beyond that
‘enigmatic smile’.
Whilst being biographical in its chronological arrangement of
the photographs, this book is not a conventional biography but
rather each of the six chapters sets out a bullet-point timeline
which traces the course of Britten’s 63 years. A small
complaint concerns the captions for which some of the font size
is either too small or unclear against various coloured backgrounds.
His Suffolk homes, from that of his birthplace in Lowestoft
to his final purchase at Horham to escape the roar of low-flying
American planes which disturbed his creative process, provide
one continuum whilst another are the increasing opus numbers
of his compositions. Opera productions dominate the photographic
content with informal ones of cast members, rehearsals, sets
and costumes from drawing board to stage but there are also
musical manuscripts, sketches, notebooks, letters and programmes
together making this a fascinating compilation of black and
white and colour images. Naturally Aldeburgh and Snape dominate
Britten’s working and private life - including pictures
of Pears and Britten in the ruins of the burnt-out Maltings
reminiscent of Henry Wood in those of the bombed Queen’s
Hall - but there are also plenty taken elsewhere at home and
abroad from Bali to Venice. Britten may have, as Grogan describes
it, ‘constructed impervious defences when put in the position
of sitting for artists and photographers’ but as well
as such stiff poses there are plenty where he has been caught
off-guard and those darker corners have been illuminated. My
favourite is an informal one for Picture Post of Pears
and Britten choosing vegetables from the stall of the bowler-hatted
and wonderfully named greengrocer Jonah Baggott on Aldeburgh
High Street in 1948. This collection is a must-buy for all devotees
of one of the greatest composers of the last century.
Christopher Fifield
Contents
Foreword by Nigel Luckhurst: Photographing Ben
Introduction: Looking behind Britten’s ‘enigmatic
smile’
Chapter 1: A boy was born: 1913-1939
Chapter 2: Diversions: 1939-1947
Chapter 3: Metamorphoses: 1947-1957
Chapter 4: Voices for today: 1957-1967
Chapter 5: A time there was: 1967-1976
Chapter 6: Praise we great men: after 1976
