Britten's Century by Nicholas Kenyon

Author:Nicholas Kenyon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Celebrating 100 Years of Benjamin Britten
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2013-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Notes

iBritten had written out the full score at great speed and felt that it was too untidy for future use by other conductors; it was very unusual for a pre-publication full score not to be in his own hand.

iiBritten never composed at the piano, but he would play through what he had composed each day ‘to fix the music in time’, as he once explained to me. He went on to say that he had once, during the composition of Billy Budd, written an extended passage without recourse to the piano, and that the timing had consequently gone wrong.

iiiDonald Mitchell describes being sole audience to a complete performance of the opera, with Britten taking all the parts, in December 1972, in his introduction to the Cambridge Opera Handbook Death in Venice. A subsequent ‘performance’ was given to a small audience of those who would be involved in the production, including Colin Graham and John and Myfanwy Piper.

ivRosamund Strode’s account of the genesis of the opera in the Cambridge Handbook, A chronicle, is indispensable, containing greater detail about specific musical issues than I have given here.

vThe 350 pages of my handwritten vocal score are now in the Britten-Pears Foundation’s archive.

viThere is no division into acts in the composition sketch, and Rosamund Strode says that the final decision was not taken until December 1973. However, in a letter to Myfanwy Piper written in February 1972, Britten speaks clearly of ‘Act I’ and ‘Act II’

viiIn Humphrey Carpenter, Benjamin Britten, p. 546

viiiOther interpretations would doubtless have been made had Myfanwy Piper’s suggestion that the boys dance naked been pursued. Donald Mitchell’s description of this proposal as ‘somewhat unworldly’ (Cambridge Handbook p. 13) is a masterpiece of understatement. It is significant, though, that this is one of the few Britten operas where no children’s voices are heard.

ixMyfanwy Piper writes of the difficulty of reconciling ‘the comparative austerity of language required by the composer with the extreme wordiness of the text’ in her account of the libretto in the Cambridge Handbook.

xSee my article ‘The Venice Sketchbook’ in the Cambridge Handbook.

xi‘Usually I have the music complete in my head before putting pencil to paper. That doesn’t mean that every note has been composed, perhaps not one has, but I have worked out questions of form, texture, character and so forth, in a very precise way so that I know exactly what effects I want and how I am going to achieve them.’ In Murray Schafer, British Composers in Interview (1963: the interview was given in 1961).

xiiRosamund Strode says that in May 1973 she listed 346 corrections to the vocal score and 415 to Act I of the full score (Cambridge Handbook, p. 41).

xiiiAn invoice in the Britten-Pears Foundation archive shows that I worked 22½ hours in Aldeburgh during March (for which I was paid £2 an hour).

xivCambridge Handbook, p. 71

xvCambridge Handbook, p. 41

xviThe German translation was made by Claus Henneberg and Hans Keller, but it was a collaboration in name only. I have a copy of the

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