Britten and Symbolism

The Hudson Review, Inc
Message, Meaning and Code in the Operas of Benjamin Britten

Author(s): JAMES CONLON
Source: The Hudson Review, Vol. 66, No. 3 (AUTUMN 2013), pp. 447-465
Published by: The Hudson Review, Inc
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JAMES CONLON
Message, Meaning and Code in the

Operas of Benjamin Britten
British
Benjamin opera,
British which
opera, had lain
Britten whichdormant
is oftenfor
hadtwo
laincenturies. He
credited dormant with for having two centuries. reawakened He
could equally be recognized for awakening the contemporary
operatic world to the hitherto untapped dramatic potential
within the subject of homosexuality and male relationships. He
was no doubt constrained by the law. Homosexual acts between
consenting adults were decriminalized in the U.K. in 1967, at
which point Britten was fifty-four years old and within a decade of
his death. He was also constrained by the sense of opprobrium
that was still standard fare in polite, if hypocritical, society. He
came of age in the 1930s, inescapably aware of the not-so-distant
events surrounding the trial, imprisonment and death of Oscar
Wilde.
Britten's revolution was a subtle one, and he accomplished

much of it by writing in code. The written word lends itself to the
use of code. Code assuredly has preliterate roots, but the growth
of alphabets and the increasing sophistication of languages
nurtured a corresponding development in coded messaging.
Literature and poetry are replete with them. The roman clef
and the nom de plume are code in another form. In complex
human society, one word can be used to mean another.
Music also has codes and hidden meanings. Modern research
has discovered that even Plato utilized musically constructed
codes. But music, it is often said, starts where words stop. It is an
inarticulate art. Music need not have any meaning at all, and if it
does, it is implicit. Music affects us by perception of the senses,
which then provoke emotional reactions. Subsequently we may
attempt to reduce these feelings and perceptions to words and
ideas. We grasp literature intellectually through words and ideas,
which stimulate us in many ways, including provoking emotions.
448 THE HUDSON REVIEW
Music can be implicit but not explicit, whereas the word ca

both.
Code as such is therefore a very small element in classical
music. Composers often amuse themselves with notation in vari-
ous guises or employ a type of "text painting" by using exclusively
musical means to illustrate or parallel a text. Music has developed
an enormous evocative power, whether describing landscapes,
grand emotions, nature, forests, oceans or mountains.
But musical code is different. It is a murky subject, strewn with
conjecture, elusive meanings and speculation. Musical code
would suggest using notes that imply one thing to imply another.
It could only be effective when the composer (even in absentia) ,
the performer and the listener simultaneously share the same
wavelength.
There are many examples, increasingly so in the twentieth
century. Sir Edward Elgar's Enigma Variations is just what the tide
implies. The Expressionist composers, Alban Berg in particular,
employed code. For example his Lyric Suite is so named because
he took a love theme from Alexander Zemlinsky's Lyric Symphony
and used it to send a message to a secret love.
In the 1930s, as the political situation worsened in German-
speaking countries, it became more common for composers who
fell under Nazi suppression to use code. Viktor Ullmann, who
wrote over twenty compositions while interned at the transit
concentration camp Terezn, used it extensively to communicate
with his Czech-Jewish compatriots, avoiding interference by the
Nazi authorities. The String Trio of Gideon Klein (Ullmann's
younger colleague in Terezn) is purportedly written entirely in
code. Karl Amadeus Hartmann, in his opposition to the Third
Reich, withdrew from public life and elected to write in code for
himself and his friends.
But the most significant examples of musical code in the
twentieth century are to be found in the works of two of its
greatest composers: Benjamin Britten and Dmitri Shostakovich.
Both men felt the necessity for adopting code for many of their
works, though the circumstances leading to that choice were
dissimilar. The story of their friendship and mutual admiration
across the barrier of the Cold War is an extraordinary one.
From every perspective, I consider Britten one of the great
composers of the twentieth century. He was fluent in all major
JAMES CONLON 449
genres: opera, church, choral, vocal and instrumental music

(both symphonie and chamber music). His compositional tech-
nique was strongly disciplined, his musical language distinctive
and his mastery of instrumentation flawless. He had an unfailing
ability to marry word and tone. Text and music enhance each
other, inspire each other, and interact with a dynamic chemistry.
Rare are composers who have successfully transformed great
works of English literature into operas. Who else has effectively
set any of William Shakespeare's plays in the original, or Henry
James, Thomas Mann, Herman Melville or Guy de Maupassant,
let alone all of them?
In the words of Sir Peter Pears, the eminent English tenor and
Britten's lifelong partner, "With his 16 operas, by eighteenth-
century standards Benjamin Britten was a moderate producer. By
the standard of the twentieth century, his own century, he was
incredibly fecund. He could be called the only British profes-
sional composer - and yet how much more!"
His thematic spectrum was wide, but he returned consistently
to those themes that were important to him: pacifism, the
betrayal of innocence, injustice and cruelty, the tragedy and
senselessness of war and aggression. He was not afraid to portray
the ugly, the morally ambiguous character of the human condi-
tion; nor did he hesitate to defend the outsider.
Britten and Shostakovich
The great friendship that developed between Britten and

Dmitri Shostakovich is meaningful on many levels. They were
close contemporaries, lived to view the damage of two World
Wars from their different vantage points and, philosophically,
they shared much common ground on social issues.
Both highly disciplined and seemingly endlessly fertile, they
composed a staggering volume of music across a range of genres.
I would cite both men above most others in their ability to
compose, orchestrate and notate their intentions in a way that is
virtually impossible to misunderstand. Inspired and creative, they
were complete and thorough craftsmen.
To achieve a good performance of either of these composers'
music, an "interpreter" (a term I use guardedly and with a certain
amount of distrust) need simply ensure that their intention

served and rendered accurately with the feelings they insp
One needn't know a thing about their lives to react viscerally
performance of their music. And yet . . .
Interestingly, significant facets of their lives and music
mained hidden from view during their lifetimes and have
comparatively recently become open subjects and, increasin
the focus of much historical-interpretive discussion. One of
facets concerns us here. That facet is code.
Shostakovich, from January 29, 1936 onwards, lived a life of
fear. That day he read the now-infamous article ("Chaos Instead
of Music") in Pravda condemning his opera Lady Macbeth of
Mtsensk (after it had enjoyed nearly two years of phenomenal
success), and until the day he died he was pressured by the Soviet
regime, well beyond Stalin's death in 1953. His very being
became politicized and was never to be left in peace again. He
could not speak his mind in public (hardly even in private!), nor
could his music touch on any "unacceptable" subject. And when
he premiered an important new work, he was expected to explain
it in a politically correct manner. In Shostakovich's scores, the
several paragraphs often published in the introductions were
filled with Communist Party platitudes to placate the authorities.
When asked what a composition "meant," he invariably equivo-
cated or said it didn't mean anything at all.
These "intros" were decoys, pabulum for ready digestion by the
apparatchiks. The real message, be it musical, personal, political,
visionary or one of desperation, was in the music. Whatever
notions the greater public was to form about the "meaning" of
Shostakovich's music began to change only as information,
narratives and personal stories trickled out after the composer's
death. Today, the discourse is about powerful emotional messages
reflecting the composer's silent but resolute resistance to the
Stalinist regime and about his life of fear and isolation. He was
determined to keep the Russian soul alive in the twentieth
century during, in his words, the "Stalinist occupation."
Benjamin Britten lived in those same turbulent times but on
the Western side of the Cold War divide, enjoying freedom of
speech and most civil liberties: the right to dissent (he was a
conscientious objector as far back as 1930s) and a near complete
lack of censorship. Britten could choose to write what he wanted;
JAMES CON LON 451
Shostakovich couldn't. Despite all of this, Britten chose code as

well. In his choice of subjects (primarily, though not exclusively,
of the operas) and their treatment, he was one of the first to deal
with homosexuality and homoerotic relationships in his works.
Censorship? No, not exactly. But neither the subject nor the
word homosexual could be mentioned in a theater until 1958,
and, as mentioned, homosexual acts were illegal until 1967.
Though Britten never doubted his orientation, he was averse to
discussing it publicly.
He was equally reticent on other subjects. He disliked talking
about music, his own in particular, eschewed theorizing, and
rejected any and all orthodoxies, schools of composition or any
systematic approach to composition. This rejection, especially of
dodecaphonic music (although he freely used its devices and
methods when it suited his purposes) , earned him the scorn of
many. He was far more outspoken on social issues, and early
declared himself a supporter of the Republicans in the Spanish
Civil War. He was a conscientious objector leading up to World
War II and a supporter of many left-wing social causes both
before and after the war. He ended up on the wrong side of
history as it pertained to World War II, and was profoundly
shaken when he played in a concentration camp with Yehudi
Menuhin at the end of the war. Despite criticism he remained a
pacifist until the end.
Unlike his Russian friend and colleague, Britten, who was not
forced to stay quiet, preferred to remain discreet and private
about his sexuality. And yet, out of preference, inner need or a
combination of both, he chose operatic subjects with which he
could present stark emotional dramas surrounding homosexual-
ity, whether these themes were central or subsidiary, latent or
manifest. Britten explored a subject that had been off-limits to
the operatic world until he confronted it.
In the late nineteenth century, ugliness gradually was recog-
nized as a legitimate inspiration to a new aesthetic that could
recharge art, theater and music. It became acceptable and even
fashionable to portray cruelty and ugliness (whether in appear-
ance or behavior) with graphic clarity. On the opera stage,
Richard Strauss set off the bomb with Salome and Elektra in the
first decade of the twentieth century. Alexander Zemlinsky and
Franz Schreker followed.
Britten quietly accomplished a similar revolution not fifty ye

later. His was a complex and sometimes contradictory nature
espoused many left-wing social programs, enjoyed his own
bourgeois existence, and both yearned for and spurned
attention of royalty and the aristocracy. He had an almost
tanical work ethic and a religious orientation. But despit
lifelong devotion to writing church music and setting bibli
subjects, Britten was, in Peter Pears's words, "not religious in
form of the word that I know." He was an admirer of Jesus Chr
and his teachings more than an adherent to a life of faith. A
had his own deeper secrets as well, particularly in the form
yearnings for adolescent youths. By most contemporary acc
this attraction was the focus of his sexuality. It is not really kn
how much, if at all, he acted on this.
W. H. Auden, by his example, had influenced Britten
Pears to go to America along with other artists and writers
were conscientious objectors. Auden's powerful personality
dominated Britten for a while, and the eventual rupture in
friendship was inevitable. At the moment Britten and Pears
returning to England in 1942, Auden wrote him a letter
lectured the younger composer on "the dangers that beset y
a man and an artist . . . your attraction to thin-as-a-bo
juveniles, i.e., to the sexless and innocent, is a symptom
[Britten's preference of Bourgeois Convention and tech
skill] . Your denial of the demands of disorder is responsible
your ill health . . . You see Benjy dear, you are always tempte
to build yourself a warm nest of love ... by playing the lov
talented little boy ... If you are really to develop to your
stature you will have ... to suffer, and make others suffer . . . y
will have to be able to say what you never yet have had the righ
say."
The friendship was essentially over after that, but Auden's
darts were not wide of the mark. All added together, Britten had
his reasons for his lack of candor. His operas needed to be and
not to be, to say and not to say. That those operas that enjoyed
great success did so without provoking a great reaction to their
homoerotic implications is due equally to his nuanced dramatic-
musical presentation and the public's own reticence to see those
implications. Britten's great works achieve a universality that
ultimately explains why they are still vibrant today, why we are
JAMES CON LON 453
performing them, celebrating them, and why we are discussing

them, and will in the future. Britten's big lifelong themes -
justice and injustice, outraged innocence, violence and pacifism,
the individual's struggle against society - were so well matched to
his compositional and dramatic genius that the world has appre-
ciated them for several generations, while largely ignoring many
homoerotic themes.
Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony (1937)
Among Shostakovich's most popular works, the "meaning" of

the Fifth Symphony has long been a matter of debate. This work
was to be the composer's rehabilitation after the Lady Macbeth
episode. On the surface, a type of mea culpa, he referred to it as
"a Soviet artist's response to just criticism." He proceeded to write
a nearly perfect work; its musical construction and inspiration
throughout have rightfully gained it a permanent place in con-
cert halls around the world. Its finale is an apotheosis worthy of
Gustav Mahler, suggesting a great spiritual victory over equally
great tribulations. "Bright, clear, joyous, optimistic and life affirm-
ing" were the words of a leading critic. The symphony came to
the West understood as such, and the composer viewed as a
functionary of the Party.
Or is the finale actually the opposite: the crushing of the
individual under the Soviet regime's machinery? The slow move-
ment, one of the most powerful in the repertory, was, by some
accounts, grasped by many at the world premiere, and silently
understood to express the immense spiritual suffering of Russia
in the Soviet era. The symphony can be interpreted from diamet-
rically opposing viewpoints. I would give my unqualified support,
of course, to this second view - if it weren't for another extraordi-
nary story.
Shostakovich had fallen in love with a young woman and would
have divorced his wife and offered marriage to the young lady.
She declined and subsequently left for Spain and married a
documentary film producer who was filming the Spanish Civil
War. His last name was Karmen. Themes from Georges Bizet's
Carmen are interwoven throughout the Fifth Symphony; the great
"apotheosis" is taken from the opera's "Habanera." Elena, the
young woman, had a nickname: "Lala." In solfge, "la" is th

A Natural. It is first sounded and repeated three times
beginning of the symphony and, at the end of the symph
obsessively repeated two hundred fifty-two times!
So, which code is it: the political allegory (which one?), o
personal love story or none of the above? It is an enigma w
ofjames Joyce.
Peter Grimes (1945)
The evolution of Peter Grimes's character through the course

of Britten's collaboration with Peter Pears, Montagu Slater and
Ronald Duncan (the librettist of his subsequent opera The Rape of
Lucretia ), can be traced, to some degree, from various extant
earlier versions of the libretto. Floating in the background of the
genesis of Britten's first great opera were the influences of E. M.
Forster (whose article on George Crabbe's "The Borough" first
attracted the attention of Britten and Pears during their stay in
southern California), W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood. It
reveals the gradual transition from the specific homosexual
orientation of its protagonist to a broader context.
Consider the following statements: Pears, having heard some
of the new score, wrote to Britten, "The more I hear of it, the
more I feel the queerness is unimportant and doesn't really exist
in the music (or at any rate obtrude) so it mustn't do so in words.
P.G. is an introspective, an artist, a neurotic, his real problem is
expression, self-expression." This can be compared with Britten's
own statement about the focus of the work: " [A] central feeling
for us was that of the individual against the crowd, with ironic
overtones for our own [Pears and Britten's] situation." Musicol-
ogist Philip Brett writes, "The remark was addressed to the social
situation in which the two found themselves - pacifism, in this
instance as on other occasions in Britten's life, doing double duty
as a controversial but mentionable position for still unspeakable
homosexuality."
E. M. Forster observed there was "no crime on Peter's part
except what is caused by the far greater crimes committed against
him by society."
Time magazine quotes Britten in the February 1948 cover story
JAMES CONLON 455
that preceded the New York premiere: Grimes was "a subject very
close to my heart - the struggle of the individual against the
masses." And tinted with Britten's view of social issues is an
accompanying statement: "The more vicious the society, th

more vicious the individual." If Peter is cruel, he is so because the
Borough is cruel. If he is violent with the apprentices, it
because the system allowed him to be.
Almost one hundred years before this, in 1851, approximately
the time of Crabbe's "Borough," Giuseppe Verdi, through th
mouth of Rigoletto, hurls the following at his audience: "Odio
voi, cortigiani schernitori ... Se iniquo son, per cagion vostra
solo!" ("I hate you, scoffing courtiers ... If I am wicked, it is on
because of you!")
Music has the unique power to affect our emotional state
moods, and impressions instantaneously. In the course of an
opera, music holds the cards, deals the deck and determines th
play and its outcome. If we are sensitive to feeling the music, n
just listening to it, our sympathies and antipathies can be cast i
any direction. There is no question that Grimes's music captur
and maintains our sympathies throughout the opera despite hi
gruff character and regardless of his actions. Peter is the outsid
par excellence and Britten's first great example of what w
become a recurring theme in his operas.
Britten abhorred violence and empathized with its victims. H
women often are casualties of cruelty. Ellen Orford, the schoo
mistress who tries to befriend and help Grimes, is joined by a
extraordinary threesome - Auntie, whose pub houses a brothel
and two of her "nieces," who are in her employ. When the men
the town take off in their vigilante posse to Grimes's hut, the
women are scorned and left behind. The ensuing quartet is one
of the most powerful moments in the opera.
This quartet and Ellen Orford's "school mum ways" create an
overall positive image of women, particularly in Britten's view,
caring, compassionate and comforting caretakers of home and
hearth. This theme will be developed in the next opera, The Rap
of Lucretia. The virtue of the Roman aristocratic protagonist
unassailable, and yet she interiorizes the shame and culpability
for being raped and chooses suicide. Both Grimes and Lucret
have so ingested the judgment and condemnation of their soci
environments that they mete out their own severe justice. Despi
her noble rank, from the moment of the rape, Lucretia, i

own mind, becomes an outsider. Victim both of rape an
society's unjust and unbalanced sexual code, her suicid
double tragedy.
The abuse of innocence is another Britten theme. Grimes is
not guiltless, but his victimization by the townspeople qualifies
him in this category nonetheless. It cannot be established that he
was responsible for the death of one boy, and we see the circum-
stances of a second's accidental death. It might be more just to
place the blame for this second young death at the doorstep of
the townspeople themselves. The "outraged" innocence of the
two dead apprentices is beyond question.
Pears further remarked, "Grimes is not a hero nor is he an
operatic villain. He is not a sadist, nor a demonic character, and
the music quite clearly shows that. He is very much a weak person
who, being at odds with the society in which he finds himself,
tries to overcome it and, in doing so offends against the conven-
tional code, is classed by society as a criminal, and destroyed as
such. . . . There are plenty of Grimeses around still, I think."
All these statements taken together add up to an indictment of
society. Peter Grimes is a powerful tale of the plight of the outsider.
The status of any homosexual male in England at the time was to
be a man who finds himself "at odds with the society in which he
finds himself." Britten, like Grimes, "is an introspective, an artist."
Britten and Pears together felt "the individual against the crowd
with ironic overtones for our [Britten and Pears's] own situa-
tion."
For decades after its brilliant international success, there was
no widespread consideration given to the notion that Peter Grimes
is also the story of a homosexual outcast. That nearly universal
silence helped to obscure a key element in this story. Now, in
2013, I find it impossible not to discuss it. In staging the work
today, interpretive choices can and must be made, but the
question cannot be ignored.
Shostakovich
As Britten's code masks homosexuality, so Shostakovich's

masked just about anything that could give the appearance of
JAMES CONLON 457
sedition. Britten reacted to societal pressures, an oppressive

criminal code and an inner censor. He still had the great
advantage to live in a country with freedom of speech. The Soviet
system suppressed all dissent, and consequently Shostakovich,
after the closing of Lady Macbeth , abandoned any further
thoughts of writing for the theater to the opera world's incalcula-
ble loss. He set songs, wrote some cantatas and choral works, but
he did so with great care. If hidden messages might be there, they
were so subtle that they could always be denied.
Under these circumstances, it is no accident that Shostakovich
wrote fifteen symphonies and fifteen string quartets. The lack of
text gave him freedom. His implied messages and inner feelings
could be expressed abstractly, unfettered to a text that in the end
had to have some identifiable meaning. Britten and Shostakovich
wrote copiously in all genres. But it is instructive to note that
considering the operas, church parables, church music, War
Requiem, and song cycles, there is far more of Britten's music
with voice than without. The opposite can be said of Shostakovich.
The parameters governing his choices were tight. He had to write
music in which "viewpoint" or possible "interpretation" could not
be deemed offensive by the regime, forcing him into a corner
from which he could plausibly deny any meaning at all. The
absence of "the word," therefore, was a necessary companion.
Thanks to his genius, he was able to create a seemingly infinite
universe in that tight space.
Classical music and opera grew over four centuries in a world
that was both political and private. These two realms often came
into conflict with one another. The kings and royal patrons of
composers, the emerging governments of the nineteenth century,
the Roman Catholic Church, the aristocratic sponsors all could
and did exert influence on the subject matter of any music with a
text. Verdi struggled incessantly with censors who had recognized
that the power of his music could influence the populace. But
overall, there was both an expectation and a tradition (and to
some degree it is in the nature of things) that vocal and operatic
music would deal primarily with the personal realm. Whether
melodrama of the Italian operatic theater, lieder with the
yearning of German poets, the rapturous emotionality of
Tchaikovsky - it was all about love and personal feelings. The
political world was there, but apart.
In the twentieth century, however, politics, totalitarian regim

and social upheaval so heavily affected the world, they beca
impossible to ignore. The young Britten already reacted to
Spanish Civil War, espoused pacifism and nonviolence and w
music about it. The political world inflicted itself onto the ar
world with a force hitherto unseen. The dimensions of cru
displayed by the twentieth-century authoritarian regimes
never been seen before. Britten and Shostakovich, along
many others, reacted accordingly and abandoned the rela
safety within the realm of conventional melodrama.
Albert Herring (1949)
Shostakovich had a sharp sense of satire and parody. A com

nation of cynicism and dark humor served his muse well. Br
preferred serious drama. But on those occasions when he ch
to write a comedy or a farcical scene, he was second to none.
Verdi and Puccini, who almost exclusively wrote melodra
Britten produced one great comedy, Albert Herring (unless
considers A Midsummer Night's Dream as such). The w
hilarious and endearing portrait of small-town life in Britai
be taken at face value, without looking for inner mean
Despite its very specific location, the work achieves universa
through its treatment of a rite of passage that we have all kn
that defining and often symbolic moment when we pass fr
adolescence to the sexuality of adulthood.
The opera is very funny, but not a farce. Like most g
comedies, an underlying seriousness raises it to a higher lev
Beneath its mirth and delightful humanity is a stinging critique
the mores of Victorian England, which still were operative in
1940s. Young Albert finally rebels against his mother, a wid
grocer in an imaginary small market town in 1900. It satirize
town's leading lights. It dissects its social stratification, from La
Billows, "an elderly autocrat" who leads a one-woman crusad
safeguard the town's "morals," down to three working-class chil
This unlikely young hero cuts himself loose from his mot
apron strings and defies the entire town on the eve of
ceremonial crowning as "May King." His night of debaucher
also his achievement, part defiance and part affirmation of
JAMES CONLON 459
new sexual identity. He comes of age after "a nightmare example

of drunkenness, dirt and worse . . Albert's triumph is in
defining himself as he is, or wishes to be, not as what society and
his mother have told him he should be.
The comedy is replete with social criticism and now familiar
themes: the outsider, the victim, the tension between the
individual and society. The delightfully drawn village types could
have walked right out of Peter Grimes % waterside borough and into
Albert's inland town. Lady Billows, the Mayor, the Rector, Miss
Wordsworth, the Schoolmistress, and the Police Chief are not
that different from Mrs. Sedley, Bob Boles and the Rector and,
with some dissimilarities, Ellen Orford, the schoolmistress. Albert
has the encouragement of the self-confident Sid, as Grimes had
Captain Balstrode. Albert reveals to us (when he is alone) his
pent-up frustration, resentment and pain playing the role of
mama's boy. He has been under her domination and now he
rebels and determines to define himself.
That Albert's raucous night included a roll in the hay with
some local girl can be accepted at face value. It was taken for
granted for decades that that was the case. But there is consider-
able internal evidence to suggest Albert is "coming out" and
affirming his homosexual feelings. Neither viewpoint can be
proven or disproven but, as with Peter Grimes , it cannot be
ignored. Perhaps productions should pose the tantalizing
question and not give an answer. Albert Herring is a comedy
because it ends happily, and Peter Ormes a tragedy because it does
not. But the inner dynamics are remarkably similar.
Billy Budd (1951)
Billy Budd, the protagonist of Herman Melville's novella, is a

victim of another sort. Both his physical and spiritual beauty
exude a positive energy that emits rays like the sun. He, like
Lucretia, is impeccable in all aspects of his being. Captain Vere
and the sergeant-at-arms Claggart are the darker side of this story.
Billy, who stammers, unintentionally kills Claggart, by punching
him out of sheer frustration when Claggart spreads lies, suggest-
ing that Billy has conspired with the enemy. The Captain could
pardon Billy but doesn't, and allows him to hang.
Claggars character could be explained in the words w

which Samuel Coleridge described Iago, a man with "motive
malignity." E. M. Forster, who wrote much of the libretto,
him the equivalent of Iago's Credo, which he termed "my m
important piece of writing ... I want passion, love constrict
perverted, poisoned ... a sexual discharge gone evil."
Claggart tells his own story:
O beauty, o handsomeness, goodness! Would that I ne'er enco

tered you! Would that I lived in my own world always, in
depravity in which I was born. There I found peace of a sort; th
established an order such as reigns in Hell. But alas! The lights sh
in the darkness, and the darkness comprehends it and suffers
beauty, o handsomeness, goodness! Would that I had never seen
Having seen you, what choice remains to me? None, none! I a
doomed to annihilate you; I am vowed to your destruction. I will
you off the face of the earth, off this tiny fragment of earth, off
ship where fortune has led you.
At this point Claggart imagines what he will not live to see

the audience will - Billy's execution. Claggars desire for Bi
cannot be fulfilled, and therefore he must destroy him
librettist intended this all to be specifically and passionately sex
He was disappointed on first hearing Britten sing this a
piano. He made his comments, and was later admonished no
again. The sensitive composer did not appreciate such critic
Britten may or may not have shared Forster's view, but
comes out is diabolical. Perhaps seeing the big picture: Billy i
sacrificial lamb (Christ); Claggart, the incarnation of evil, cr
and alienation (Satan); and Vere, the human authority fi
who is, in reality, the ineffectual father figure.
The Vere/Billy relationship is similar to Abraham and Isa
Britten liked the subject of this Biblical father and son,
writing a Canticle, and then quoting it in the Offertorium o
War Requiem. God's Angel releases Abraham and sugges
lesser sacrifice. But, in the War Requiem, Wilfred Owen's ant
poetry turns that upside down and puts it thus: "But Ab
would not so, and slew the boy, and half the seed of Europe,
by one." Captain Vere and the potentates of Europe bet
innocence and let it be destroyed.
JAMES CONLON 461
The Turn of the Screw (1954)
In The Turn of the Screw, Henry James's story serves up a savory

plate to Britten: on the surface a ghost story in a haunted
Victorian estate in the English countryside, it plumbs the depths
of the human psyche. It poses questions of good and evil, truth
and falsehood, reality and fantasy that it purposefully leaves
unanswered. It wades into treacherous waters in evoking the
sexuality of children and the questionable role of adult predators.
After the immensity of Billy Budd, he returns to the chamber
opera, of which this is the third and final example. The close-up,
the portrait, the size of the drawing room drama, the claustro-
phobic interior are preferred to the wide shot of Peter Grimes and
Billy Budd.
Britten succeeds not only in perfectly transforming this novel
into theatrical form, but also in maintaining the emblematic
ambiguity of Henry James. Whether the ghosts are real or
figments of the Governess's and the children's imaginations is a
fundamental question and left unanswered in the novel. Britten
decided that, given that the two ghosts must sing, they must be
real. That uncertainty gone, he strove nevertheless to distill
"ambiguity" in some other way. He accomplishes this by peering
into each of the protagonists' souls, probing their motives and
the very essence of their character. Is Peter Quint a child abuser,
a corruptor of young souls? Or has he been summoned by the
emerging self-awareness of the young and precociously gifted
Miles? Is the Governess a staunch defender of morality or a young
woman who displaces her unfulfilled sexuality, transfers it to the
boy, and destroys him through her escalating, obsessive atten-
tion? Or was Miles "evil" to begin with, infecting the Governess?
It is not impossible to conjure up the image of young Benji
(Britten's childhood nickname) at the keyboard in the "piano"
scene, playing for his mother and sisters. Did he identify himself
with Miles (Britten alluded to having been sexually abused
himself) or with Peter Quint, who wants to possess the young boy,
soul and body? Miles and Peter Quint are two sides of a common
coin. Either way, Britten's courageous step in setting this delicate
subject on the operatic stage is extraordinary.
When The Turn of the Screw was first presented in Venice,
questions were barely asked. Overt presentation of this taboo
subject would have no resonance for the Italian public, w

neither the dominant Roman Catholic Church nor cultural
machismo would tolerate it. Had Britten been any more explic
he and the opera would have been condemned. He had to h
its true meaning with a code. That way, if pressed, the respo
would be easy: It is only a ghost story. (Shades of Shostakovich
I am skeptical of psychoanalyzing composers through th
music. Biography, whether psycho- or not, is fascinating, int
esting and informative. It is also very often irrelevant. In ar
literature and music, it is not the sources, muses or backgro
that matter but the final product. The work of art and the ar
are distinct. None of this, code and all, would interest us if t
works of Britten and Shostakovich were not first and foremost
great music, which needn't be about anything. Ultimately, it is an
extraordinary collection of notes, harmony, rhythms, chords,
dissonances, noises and sounds which, obeying only its own laws
of organization, results in a coherent and compelling whole.
In 1954, in the deep freeze of the Cold War, The Turn of the
Screw and Shostakovich's Tenth Symphony were perceived,
appreciated or disliked, with a mistaken or at least incomplete
understanding. In the west, Russia's great composer was broadly
considered to be a musical spokesperson for the Soviet regime
and its ideology. There was no doubt about his prodigious
abilities, but they were often dismissed with words such as
brilliant, superficial, bombastic and the like. Not until the facts of
his life gradually became known after his death did that percep-
tion change. Before, few understood the irony, the satire and the
parody. Few comprehended the depth of his music behind the
frozen mask, its searing agony (not bombast) or its poetic genius.
Few deeply appreciated his creative genius, his imagination and
compositional mastery. Amongst those few was Benjamin Britten.
Gloriana (1952), written for the Coronation of Queen
Elizabeth II, caused tremendous uproar and drew indignant
criticism. Britten, rather than simply delivering pomp, pageantry
and flattery tailored to this joyous occasion, drew a less than
flattering portrait of the Virgin Queen and her court. Was there a
coded message suggesting the composer's very ambivalent
feelings about the royalty? Shades of his Russian colleague ... ?
Shostakovich was expected to produce a celebratory homage
with his Ninth Symphony (1945). Composed to celebrate Stalin
JAMES CONLON 463
and Russia's victory in the war, the anticipation was that he would
write a Ninth Symphony on the grand scale of Beethoven and
Schubert. His response was to compose a short work, with a
smaller orchestra than was his custom. He produced a witty,
ironic opus, lacking in militaristic bombast and fulsome glorifica-
tion of the Regime. Of course because there was no text, he could
deny everything . . .
Even in A Midsummer Night's Dream (1960), Britten did not
entirely abandon his characteristic themes and subtle messaging.
Here, his primary challenge was to write a work worthy of its
Shakespearean source. Unlike all of his other operas, the libretto
was not developed and transformed in the process of compo-
sition. In accepting the challenge of setting the original text and
editing it for the operatic stage, Pears (who accomplished this
task) succeeded in providing a coherent (yet different) organiza-
tion of the opera that corresponded to Britten's very clear notion
of its architecture. It contains only a single line that was not
Shakespeare's. Among the work's multiple accomplishments, it
still stands for many as the most successful operatic rendition of
any original Shakespearean text. It fuses that text with music in
such a way that neither overwhelms the other and tribute is
rendered to both.
Britten once again digs deeply into elusive and tantalizing

terrain. The sexually ambiguous voice of a countertenor for
Oberon, King of the Fairies, fixes the audience's awareness that
the conflict between him and his Queen Tytania is over posses-
sion of a little boy. Is what Oberon reveals to, and about, the
characters in the forest not a dream but a deeper reality than
their everyday existence in society? Have the mysteries of that
forest revealed to us the polymorphous character of erotic
attraction? Or, was it just a dream?
The three church parables - Curlew River (1964), The Burning
Fiery Furnace (1966) and The Prodigal Son (1968) - were first
inspired by Japanese Noh theater. They are a subset within the
Britten corpus, an exquisite fusion of theater and church sung by
an all-male cast and boy sopranos. The only female character, the
Mad Woman in Curlew River, is sung by a tenor. Created by Pears,
this example of a sort of cross-dressing is a vocal and dramatic
tour de force for the protagonist. Together with Billy Budd, there
are four works with exclusively male singers. That caused some
remark and resistance in 1951 with Budd (as Giacomo Pucci

all-female Suor Angelica did thirty-five years earlier) , but Brit
imposed its legitimacy on our ears, and its efficacy is not q
tioned today.
Owen Wingrave (1971), also based on Henry James, is Britten's
most powerful, concrete avowal of pacifism. Owen defies his
family, which has a multi-generational tradition of military educa-
tion, by refusing to serve. The Jamesian design is reminiscent of
The Turn of the Screw. Both works - part ghost story, part depth
psychology - play out in a country manor in the English
countryside. Both operas are constructed with an increasing
sustained tension, with catastrophic endings culminating in the
deaths of young men, one an adolescent and one already adult.
Owen's defiance and confrontation with his family can also be
read as "coming out." At the end, the ghosts of the past destroy
the youths, and an overall sense of pessimism reigns.
As emphatically as Britten reaffirms his pacifism in Owen
Wingrave , he reveals his sexuality in Death in Venice (1973).
Thomas Mann's novella, which needs no introduction, was the
subject of what turned out to be Britten's final opera. It is
tempting (and most of us have fallen into the trap) to believe that
the final great work of a composer is some sort of farewell to life,
a testament or a summing up. Death in Venice is no exception.
Britten displayed an openness that is uncharacteristic. All of the
intellectual battery is brought to bear, as it is in the novella: Plato,
Socrates, Nietzsche, Apollo and Dionysus. Britten increasingly
employed gamelan music (an Indonesian instrumental ensemble
and a complex compositional system) in the last decade and a
half of his life. His use of percussion, bells, harp, celesta over
those years gives us an opportunity to make connections and to
imagine, if not a meaning, a spiritual zone. It evokes a world, a
sense of the intangible and of proximity to transcendence. It
suggests a paradisiacal existence. All of those associations have
been in Britten's music since The Turn of the Screw . But their link
with Tadzio, the object of Aschenbach's fascination, the boyish
model of physical perfection and quintessential beauty, reveals
retrospectively the meaning of the ever emerging mingling of
spirit and sexuality in the earlier operas.
In his last stage work, it may be that Britten has given us the key
to exploring the code(s) of his earlier operas. If fate had been
JAMES CONLON 465
otherwise, and had he lived a longer and healthier life, he would

have gone further. There was so much more he wanted to write;
above all, King Lear eluded him and, hence, us. His complex
personality can be seen in many guises: pacifist and combatant,
victim and culprit, outsider on the inside, amoral moralist,
betrayer and betrayed, just and unjust, reticent and bold, loyal
and disloyal, honest yet withholding.
The meaning of his code, or even its existence, can be argued.
Such codes are for the initiated, and it is nearly impossible to
penetrate them. The power of the extraordinary combination of
Britten's musical, dramatic and theatrical genius has bequeathed
us a rich legacy of works, whose mysteries are deeply hidden.
They cannot be, and perhaps should not be, completely unearthed.
Fortunately, they are covered with music so powerful, so expertly
realized, so gripping, that it will compel us to keep digging long
into the future.1
1 The author Philip Brett, whom I wish to acknowledge, has influenced much of my
thinking on the substance of the Britten operas. His writings, contained in Music and
Sexuality in Britten, make for fascinating reading.

Britten and Symbolism

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Britten and Symbolism

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The Hudson Review, Inc

Message, Meaning and Code in the Operas of Benjamin Britten

Message, Meaning and Code in the

Britten's revolution was a subtle one, and he accomplished

Music can be implicit but not explicit, whereas the word ca

genres: opera, church, choral, vocal and instrumental music

Britten and Shostakovich

The great friendship that developed between Britten and

amount of distrust) need simply ensure that their intention

Shostakovich couldn't. Despite all of this, Britten chose code as

Britten quietly accomplished a similar revolution not fifty ye

performing them, celebrating them, and why we are discussing

Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony (1937)

Among Shostakovich's most popular works, the "meaning" of

young woman, had a nickname: "Lala." In solfge, "la" is th

Peter Grimes (1945)

The evolution of Peter Grimes's character through the course

accompanying statement: "The more vicious the society, th

her noble rank, from the moment of the rape, Lucretia, i

As Britten's code masks homosexuality, so Shostakovich's

sedition. Britten reacted to societal pressures, an oppressive

In the twentieth century, however, politics, totalitarian regim

Albert Herring (1949)

Shostakovich had a sharp sense of satire and parody. A com

new sexual identity. He comes of age after "a nightmare example

Billy Budd (1951)

Billy Budd, the protagonist of Herman Melville's novella, is a

Claggars character could be explained in the words w

O beauty, o handsomeness, goodness! Would that I ne'er enco

At this point Claggart imagines what he will not live to see

The Turn of the Screw (1954)

In The Turn of the Screw, Henry James's story serves up a savory

subject would have no resonance for the Italian public, w

Britten once again digs deeply into elusive and tantalizing

remark and resistance in 1951 with Budd (as Giacomo Pucci

otherwise, and had he lived a longer and healthier life, he would

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