Benjamin Britten by Neil Powell

Author:Neil Powell [Powell, Neil]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780805097757
Publisher: Henry Holt and Company
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 6

A MODEST FESTIVAL

1947–55

1

Why not have an Aldeburgh Festival? Where to start? The town is small and, as festival locations go, remote: on the bulge of the East Anglian coast, at the end of the road. Until 1963, it was marginally more accessible than Southwold or Orford, since it still had a branch railway which connected with the not especially main line at Saxmundham and a local train humorously known as ‘The Aldeburgh Flyer’, but the timetable definitely hadn’t been arranged with concert-goers in mind. Aldeburgh had hotels and guest houses for summer visitors, though these couldn’t begin to cope with the numbers a music festival might generate. Its only suitable venues were the parish church, the cinema and the tiny 300-seat Jubilee Hall – also between Crabbe Street and the beach, a hundred yards from Britten and Pears’s home – unless you were to count (and they would) the Baptist chapel in the High Street. Yet it’s strange that, even now, beginning to list the reasons why a festival in Aldeburgh couldn’t work seems to make the idea all the more irresistible.

Britten, Pears and Crozier must have tried hard to banish the first act of Albert Herring from their memories as they assembled their committee of the locally great and good. Among the first of these was Margery Spring-Rice, of Iken Hall, near Snape: she was the granddaughter of Newson Garrett, who had built the local Maltings, and she would live to see the Aldeburgh Festival’s eventual transformation of the redundant malthouse into its main concert hall. ‘I think the “Festival Idea” has cheered her,’ Britten reported to Pears in September; ‘she thinks it is the idea of the century, & is full of plans and schemes.’1 She proposed an initial meeting at Iken Hall and suggested the involvement of the Countess of Cranbrook, who lived nearby at Great Glemham, where Crabbe had once been rector. Crozier remembered calling on ‘Colonel Colbeck, the Mayor, and Mr Godfrey, the Vicar, for their advice’ and then giving ‘a tea-party for local friends and acquaintances’.2 Resembling Albert Herring’s Lady Billows only in her determination, Fidelity Cranbrook chaired the first formal meeting of the Executive Committee, held on 27 October at Thellusson Lodge in Aldeburgh: among those present were the rector, the Revd R. C. R. Godfrey, and (a sound strategic choice) G. L. Ashby Pritt, the owner of the Wentworth Hotel; Anne Wood was there, ‘representing the English Opera Group’, and ‘Mrs C. E. Welford’ – Ben’s sister Beth – tactfully represented the Britten family. Apart from describing the festival’s quite promising financial basis and registering such interesting details as the Bishop’s insistence that two hundred free seats should be available at any performance in the church, the minutes of this initial meeting record what would prove to be a momentous decision: ‘It was AGREED that the Festival be called “The Aldeburgh Festival”, but the question as to whether the words “Music” and/or “Drama”, and a reference to Mr Britten’s name be included, was left open.

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