The Cambridge Companion to Benjamin Britten (Cambridge Companions to Music) by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780521573849
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 1999-06-13T03:00:00+00:00

10 Violent climates

DONALD MITCHELL

Any account of the evolution, chronology and documentation of Britten’s pacifism will, I believe, benefit from first acquiring a familiarity with what I would describe as his creative awareness of ‘violent climates’, when we may be a shade surprised by the persistence and sheer volume of it. This means a scrutiny, brief in some instances, more extensive in others, of those works in which that creative response shows itself.

Its manifestations were various, varying indeed according to aim, utility and genre. This in itself will entail breaking the broad generalization down into categories, to the first of which, ‘documentary’, I assign to film, the so-called ‘Peace’ film of 1936 – Peace of Britain – and the Pacifist March (a unison song) that was written in 1937 for the Peace Pledge Union. These and others like them are works or collaborative projects that, literally and liberally, document Britten’s pacifist convictions and his political and social sympathies. They speak for themselves; indeed, the need for simplicity and clarity – for the clear articulation of a ‘message’ – defines the ‘documentary’ mode and its necessary limitations. These ‘documentaries’ are in fact close to propaganda; and it is worth remembering that they belong to a period when Britten was highly active in collaborating in the creation of a genre of film, with its own aesthetic, that was to become known as ‘documentary film’. It was an aesthetic, incidentally, that incorporated a very powerful element of social propaganda. These were films with a ‘message’, undisguisedly, but executed with such sophistication and so imposing an array of innovative techniques that a reference to ‘propaganda’ seems singularly inappropriate. However, while John Grierson’s GPO Film Unit – if not in the business of propaganda – was certainly committed to propagating information about matters of social or communal importance, Peace and Pacifism (whatever the convictions of the creative participants may have been) were not on the Unit’s agenda; for which reason, when it came to the making of the famous ‘Peace’1 film it had to be undertaken by a private film company of which the animateur was Paul Rotha, a strikingly independent-minded director. Thus, while the documentary films for which Britten wrote the music can certainly be produced as evidence of his general social concerns – typical, one might think, of a 1930s artist on the left of the political spectrum, though none the less important for that – it is elsewhere that we must look for manifestations of the composer’s preoccupation with violent climates altogether more complex than the Pacifist March, the poster for Peace that was Rotha’s film or the plea for trades union solidarity that was Ralph Bond’s.2

Curiously enough, it was perhaps in another area of Britten’s pre-war composing, one often loosely associated with his composing for films, for the radio, for the theatre – the whole area of ‘incidental music’ – that we encounter the first substantial signs of what was to become, in my estimation, one of the fundamental preoccupations of his art: acts of violence, their consequences and the ‘climates’ that unleash them.

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