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for this scene, Britten wrote: “Climax of storm (+ boy’s fear of murder?).” As
chromatic scales crash downward in the orchestra—two parallel scales, a whole
tone apart—Grimes takes the boy out of the inn and into his world.
Act II begins on a golden Sunday morning. The music is cast in the Lydian
mode, with the fourth degree of the scale raised; in this context the flared note
suggests an excess of radiance, light glittering on the surface of the water. As
the curtain rises, the townspeople are streaming into church, and for once their
chatter sounds wholesome. But in the middle of the D-major festivities a B-flat-
major triad sounds low in the orchestra, creating a sudden, jarring dissonance.
It is anchored on the rounded tone of a church bell. Off to the side of the
Sunday procession, Ellen has appeared with Grimes’s new apprentice, John.
A magnificent two-tiered sequence follows, worthy of Verdi. The churchgoers
sing the hymns and responsories of their Sunday service in the church offstage,
while Ellen sits with John by the beach, trying to assuage his fears. Noticing a
bruise on the boy’s body, she surmises that Grimes’s violence is reawakening—
“It’s begun.” She tells John that he has already discovered how near love is to
torture. (In a lastminute revision, “love” was changed to “life,” spoiling a chain of
correspondences in the words and music.) In the background, the chorus sings
such lines as “We have done those things which we ought not to have done.”
Indeed, Ellen shouldn’t have let the boy anywhere near Grimes; her misplaced
faith in human goodness sets the scene for the coming disaster.
When Grimes shows up, Ellen challenges him about the bruise, whereupon
Grimes hits her, accompanied by an orchestral reminiscence of the storm. “God
have mercy upon me!” he exclaims, in a downward-plunging, corkscrew-like
musical line, and goes away with the boy. “Grimes is at his exercise,” the
churchgoers sing, to the same notes on which Grimes sang “God have mercy.”
Wagner, in the Ring cycle, established a leitmotif system in which recurring
melodic figures cue the audience to recall certain concepts and characters.
Britten, complicating the Wagnerian idea, attaches two distinct meanings to his
leitmotif, one having to do with Grimes’s feelings of guilt and the other having to
do with the townspeople’s condemnation. Their interpretation of the motif
inevitably wins out—the church organ gives it moral gravity—and the corkscrew
figure takes on percussive, propulsive energy. The townspeople resolve to send
out a delegation to determine what is going on in Grimes’s clifftop hut, and as
they go, they are accompanied by a militaristic thudding of drums: “Now is
gossip put on trial …”
Britten refrains from showing what happens between Grimes and the apprentice
as they go back to the hut, but the fourth interlude, a fearsome passacaglia, lets
us imagine what the boy is feeling.
Passacaglia form—variations over a bass ground—already had a distinguished
history in twentieth-century opera. Berg, in Wozzeck, used it to depict the
torturous experiments of the horrific Doctor. Shostakovich, in Lady Macbeth,
employed a passacaglia to describe the aftermath of the killing of the kulak
Boris. Britten introduced a passacaglia into the gravely sorrowing finale of his
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1939 Violin Concerto, which obliquely memorializes the anti-fascist fighters of
the Spanish Civil War.
In all these works, the passacaglia suggests murderous or destructive forces at
work, and so it does in Grimes, where grim orchestral activity accumulates over
repetitions of the “God have mercy upon me!” / “Grimes is at his exercise”
leitmotif. When Britten prepared a stand-alone score for this interlude, he
annotated it with more detailed associations, some of which are: “A crisis—a
mistake? rough sea?,” “the boy’s guilt, depression, loneliness,” “tears,” “G’s
comforting,” “G’s encouraging” (spooky arpeggiated chords for trumpets and
trombones), “Boy’s efforts to work & please,” “fe[ar?]” (fast, snaking figures for
high winds and violins), “G threatens,” “The walk up the hill, the boy’s terror”
(pushy figures in the horns, precipitate upward runs in the winds). The “boy
himself” speaks through a halting song on the solo viola—an instrument that
often carries autobiographical implications in Britten’s music, the composer
having played it in his youth.
What happens next is harrowing, particularly when the Passacaglia’s
programmatic indications are taken into account. John is thrust onstage, Grimes
following behind. The boy’s mental condition is indicated by the main viola
theme and by the music denoting “tears” and “fear.” Grimes insists on going
ahead with the day’s fishing expedition, and rants about marrying Ellen. The
“crisis / mistake” music returns as Grimes shakes the boy, followed by a reprise
of the uncomforting “comfort.”
As the town procession nears, Grimes threatens further violence unless John
makes a dangerous descent down the cliff: “Will you move or must I make you
dance!” (The original libretto reads, “Will you move if the cat starts making
Sove”—as if Grimes is holding a whip.) The Passacaglia’s “terror” figure shrieks
in the strings. As John climbs down, he loses his grip, screams, and falls.
Britten notates the scream with the phrase “portamento lento” (slowly sliding
tone). The gesture of a descending shriek recalls the murder of Marie in
Wozzeck (“Hilfe!”). That echo undermines the “official” interpretation of Grimes
as “victim of society”: the music comes close to accusing him of murder, in mind
if not in deed.
The bloody-minded townspeople arrive, but they see nothing amiss.
Commenting among themselves that Borough gossip might have got out of
hand, they leave. Captain Balstrode, one of the few who want to understand
Grimes rather than condemn him, stays behind to look around, and after a
moment he makes a terrible discovery: the boy’s Sunday clothes are lying on
the floor. The solo viola melody of the Passacaglia is heard, but with its intervals
inverted, so that it resembles the pattern to which Boles sang the fateful words
“His exercise is not with men but killing boys!” It’s as if the boy’s ghost were
talking.
Act III: night has fallen. A band is playing a barn dance in the Moot Hall—a tall-
chimneyed sixteenth-century building that still stands in Aldeburgh. Outside,
Swallow and Ned Keene are pursuing the coquettish nieces. The rector,
sampling the racy atmosphere before going back to the cultivation of his roses,
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sings a brief but infectious song with the refrain “Good night, good people, good
night.” There is even a jokey cameo by Dr. George Crabbe, Grimes’s creator.
Amid the merrymaking, the awful Mrs. Sedley skulks in, trying to interest the
townspeople in her theory that Grimes has murdered his apprentice:
In midnight’s loneliness and thrilling quiet
The history I trace, the stifling secret
Murder most foul it is, and I’ll declare it!
Mrs. Sedley is a great detective in her own mind, a sort of diseased Miss Marple
who has been waiting for years for a crime to be committed on her doorstep. A
chromatic bass line makes her sound like a ridiculous comic-opera villain, but a
sliver of militant trumpet signals her ability to wreak havoc. The irony is that Mrs.
Sedley is actually right: something is amiss with Grimes. But the justice that she
seeks is vindictive rather than redemptive.
Ellen enters holding John’s torn jersey, which Balstrode has found on the beach
below the cliff. The schoolteacher knitted the garment herself, in an effort to
create a perfect icon of childhood dreams. Now her handiwork tells a chilling
tale—it is, she says, “the clue whose meaning we avoid.” As she sings, she is
accompanied by gauzy string chords and strummings on the harp, in the style of
a Renaissance lament. The studied archaism of the aria suggests that Ellen is
still averting her eyes from the truth about Grimes, even with the clue in her
hand. Her role as an unwilling accessory in Grimes’s actions is even hinted at in
the music—when she and Balstrode declare, “We shall be there with him,” they
sing to the tune with which Grimes threatened the boy.
Having overheard Ellen and Balstrode’s exchange, Mrs. Sedley goes
victoriously to Swallow, bellowing, “This is official.” She seizes control of B-flat
major, the key of the introductory courtroom scene, and the others rapidly join
her there, intending now not to investigate Grimes but to convict him: “Who
holds himself apart, lets his pride rise / Him who despises us we’ll destroy!”
They are a kind of Un-Anglian Activities Committee, bent on personal
destruction. The drunken vigor of the dance turns malevolent; Mrs. Sedley’s
formerly creaky chromatic line roars in the brass. To close, the chorus sings
“Peter Grimes!” nine times fortissimo, eventually shortening it to a triple-forte
“Grimes!” But they search in vain for their quarry. During the final sea interlude,
the scene changes to the empty beach, where Grimes has fled.
But is he alone? At the beginning of this most mysterious of the interludes, a
flute motif recalls a little flurry of notes that played as Ellen sat with the boy on
Sunday morning. Other instruments join in with “Grimes is at his exercise” as
the orchestra collectively plays a massive chord of E—the key in which the viola
sang its ghostly song at the end of Act II. As in the original Crabbe poem,
Grimes seems surrounded by the ghosts of his victims. Indeed, in the “mad
scene” that follows, he sings fragments of his previous music and talks to the
two boys who have died (and even to a third whom he has not yet met).
Meanwhile, the chorus continues to chant his name offstage, seventy-nine
times in succession: “Grimes! … Grimes! … Grimes! … Grimes! … Grimes! …
Grimes! …”
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The man’s sense of self breaks down, and all he can do in the end is to sing his
own name in response, in a drawn-out melisma. He sees himself only as the
town sees him. Balstrode and Ellen appear, but Grimes does not hear them.
Balstrode stops singing and simply talks: “Sail out till you lose sight of the Moot
Hall. Then sink the boat. D’you hear? Sink her. Goodbye Peter.”
As a new day dawns, the music of the first interlude returns. The residents of
the Borough go about their tasks. Boles and Auntie watch a boat sinking out to
sea. “What is it?” Auntie asks. “Nothing I can see,” Boles replies. “One of these
rumours!” Auntie replies, to the tune of “Grimes is at his exercise.” With the
outcast banished from its midst, the Borough appears to have forgotten all
about him. The chorus sings again of the uncaring majesty of the sea: “In
ceaseless motion comes and goes the tide … it rolls in ebb yet terrible and
deep.” Dense chords, like the ones that played when Grimes first walked into
the courtroom, grunt in the bass. An ocean of sound, neither dark nor light,
neither major nor minor, marks the fisherman’s grave.
Britten’s Cold War
The premiere of Grimes took place at the Sadler’s Wells Opera Company on
June 7, 1945. The ensuing triumph changed British music and Britten’s life.
Interest in the opera grew so intense that late in the run a London bus
conductor entered the title into his litany of destinations: “Sadler’s Wells! Any
more for Peter Grimes, the sadistic fisherman!” European and American
performances followed. In America the opera played first at the Tanglewood
Festival and then at the Metropolitan Opera. The composer’s face appeared on
the cover of Time. Even Virgil Thomson was forced to admit thatPeter Grimes
was “not a bore.”
From that storied first night onward, Britten was England’s most celebrated
living composer. He bore his national duties without difficulty, composing
prolifically until his death a little over thirty years later. He went on to write
thirteen more operas, equaling the output of Richard Strauss. His selection of
literary sources was dauntingly ambitious, encompassing a Roman tragedy by
the French playwright André Obey (The Rape of Lucretia, 1946); a social
comedy by Guy de Maupassant (Albert Herring, 1947); a multilayered seafaring
story by Herman Melville (Billy Budd, 1951, with a libretto by E. M. Forster); a
historical drama of Elizabeth I’s affair with the Earl of Essex (Gloriana, 1953);
two tense and enigmatic stories by Henry James (The Turn of the Screw, 1954,
and Owen Wingrave, 1971); a Shakespeare setting (A Midsummer Night’s
Dream, 1960); three church parables (Curlew River, The Burning Fiery Furnace,
and The Prodigal Son, 1964–68); and, finally, Death in Venice (1973). Britten’s
songs drew variously on Donne, Blake, Wordsworth, Shelley, Coleridge,
Goethe, Hölderlin, Pushkin, Thomas Hardy, T. S. Eliot, Edith Sitwell, Robert
Lowell, and, most memorably, Wilfred Owen—the soldier-poet who supplied the
core of the antiwar oratorio War Requiem of 1962.
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Amid the raging paranoia of the Cold War era, however, Britten’s position was
never entirely secure. During the Second World War he had registered as a
conscientious objector, and he remained committed to pacifism and other leftist
causes throughout the anti-Communist witch-hunting era. Homosexuality also
counted against him. If any whisper of those romantic friendships with boys had
reached the press, Britten would have been destroyed in an instant.
Furthermore, as in Cold War America, homosexuality was considered the mark
of a duplicitous, anti-patriotic nature. After the defection of the gay spy Guy
Burgess to the Soviet Union in 1951, Scotland Yard began hunting down
homosexuals in the upper reaches of English society. Britten apparently
submitted to an “interview” with Scotland Yard at the end of 1953, although no
action was taken. Across the ocean, J. Edgar Hoover kept a file on Pears and
Britten, listing them as “prohibited immigrants,” which meant that every time
they wanted to visit the United States they had to go through an elaborate visa-
application process. A page from the composer’s FBI file is so heavily redacted
that only his name remains; the rest is blacked out.
As the Western world turned into the Borough writ large, a community of ill will,
Britten kept pursuing his favorite themes: love among men, the beauty of boys,
the endangerment of innocence, the pressure of society on the individual, the
persistence of secret wounds, the yearning for unblemished worlds.
Homosexuality, implicit in Grimes, becomes more or less explicit in Billy Budd.
The Melville story presents a kind of love triangle among male subjects: the
beautiful sailor Billy, who loves all; the rapacious master-at-arms Claggart, who
lusts after Billy and swears to destroy what he cannot possess; and Captain
Vere, who hides his own sentiments for Billy behind an austere facade. Claggart
falsely accuses Billy of fomenting a mutiny; Billy strikes him dead in a rage;
military justice demands that Billy die. Vere, though, is torn. He summons Billy
for a “closeted interview,” presumably to explain why the death sentence cannot
be reversed.
In Melville’s telling, the interview between Billy and Vere is wrapped in “holy
oblivion,” in double negatives and circumlocutions, but the author lets slip that
the captain may have “caught Billy to his heart”—words suggesting a physical
embrace. In setting the interview to music, Britten brings the emotion, if not the
action, into the open. Before an empty stage, the orchestra moves slowly
through an array of thirty-four major and minor chords, each of which
harmonizes a note of the F-major triad. The chord changes are often jarring: a
tritone move from D minor to A-flat major, gentle C major in the strings giving
way to rasping F-sharp minor in the brass, dynamics changing in almost every
bar, as if in total-serialist fashion. But the tension slowly subsides, and the
sequence ends in a peaceful alternation of F major and C major, with a muted
D-major chord supplying one last gentle jolt at the end. This is the music of
mute passion—“love that passeth understanding,” as Vere says in the
epilogue—and it nearly reverses the tragic momentum of the story.
The Turn of the Screw ventures into still riskier territory. The Henry James story
tells of a governess who is hired to care for two children in a remote house and
finds that they are seemingly under the spell of two ghosts, those of the former
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manservant Peter Quint and the former governess Miss Jessel. As in Billy
Budd, Britten spells out what his nineteenth-century source merely implied.
Quint becomes a fully supernatural presence, rather than a mental projection,
while his designs on the boy, Miles, are given an erotic thrust: it is said that
Quint “liked them pretty … and he had his will, morning and night.” But the
opera is really centered on the governess, who, like Ellen in Grimes, finds
herself complicit in the children’s fate even as she tries to rescue them. And, as
in Grimes, the complexity of guilt is shown in the slippage of leitmotifs from one
situation to another.
The opera takes the form of variations on a twelve-note theme, each of whose
notes is sustained while the others enter, until all twelve are sounding. The
score is hardly a riot of dissonance, though; all manner of melodies are teased
out of the master matrix. We associate the theme with the malice of Quint, but it
becomes clear as the opera proceeds that the theme also has much to do with
the governess, and that Quint is slowly taking over her consciousness. When, at
the climax of the opera, she urges Miles to say aloud the name of the specter
haunting him, she finds herself singing through the “screw” theme. Unable to
bear the shock of uttering Quint’s name, Miles falls dead. The opera thus
illustrates James’s—and Britten’s—favorite theme of characters thinking good
and doing evil. It also shows how a child can be damaged by excesses of adult
emotion, even if the emotion is not sexual.
The plots of Peter Grimes, Billy Budd, and The Turn of the Screw all pivot on
the death of a boy or a young man. Each could be summarized with a line from
Yeats’s poem “The Second Coming,” which Britten and his librettist Myfanwy
Piper put into the mouth of Peter Quint: “The ceremony of innocence is
drowned.” Britten identified strongly with the victims, but he may also have seen
something of himself in the predators. Even as he was rehearsing The Turn of
the Screw for its 1954 premiere, he became infatuated with the twelve-year-old
David Hemmings, who played the role of Miles.
Hemmings himself did not feel preyed upon; he later attested that although he
and Britten slept in the same bed nothing overtly sexual happened. None of the
boys whom Britten befriended over the years subsequently spoke ill of him, with
one significant exception: Harry Morris, who had met Britten back in 1937, when
he was thirteen, many years later told his family that Britten had made an
apparent advance, which he fended off by screaming and throwing a chair.
Then twenty-three, Britten may have understood the harm his desires could
cause, and drawn a boundary that he did not cross again.
If The Turn of the Screw is the most comprehensively disturbing of Britten’s
operas, A Midsummer Night’s Dream makes amends. In writing it, Britten
possibly exorcised the darkest strains in his nature and found some semblance
of the innocent haven that he had always sought. Working in the tradition of
such twentieth-century “literature operas” as Pelléas, Jenůfa, Salome, and
Wozzeck, Britten set Shakespeare to music directly, word for word, although,
with Pears’s help, he reduced the play to a manageable size. The mechanism
of the “screw,” the invasion of the supernatural and the unnatural, now turns in
reverse: when troubling emotions arise in parallel human and fairy-tale realms,
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Puck’s magic resolves them, mostly by undoing the mischief that it has caused.
Britten casts his own spells, inventing a language of sweet noises, harmonic
pratfalls, and supremely graceful melodies that vanish before they can be
caught. At the end of Act II, Puck and a chorus of fairies send the four mortals
into what the fairy king Oberon calls “death-counterfeiting sleep.” As Puck
prepares to squeeze juice on Lysander’s eyes, the fairies sing:
On the ground,
sleep sound …
And the country proverb known,
In your waking shall be shown:
Jack shall have Jill;
Nought shall go ill;
The man shall have his mare again,
And all shall be well.
Britten describes the potion of sleep by way of sweet chords that add up to a
twelve-note row: D-flat major, D major with B attached, E-flat major, and the
notes C and E. Over iridescent orchestration, the boys sing a rising-and-falling
melody in thirds, a lullaby from another world. Nothing more fragrant has ever
emanated from Schoenberg’s twelve-tone principle. Something equally magical
happens in the coda, when the orchestra plays through the verse once more,
violins taking the place of the voices. The sequence of four chords stops
moving, instead coming to rest on warm D-flat, and utter peace seems at hand.
Yet, as the thirds of the melody sink back down, their meaning changes: for the
briefest instant, major turns to minor, and a shadow darts across the mind.
In November 1940, a German air raid nicknamed Operation Moonlight Sonata
ravaged Coventry and made a ruin of a cathedral that had stood in the city
since the Middle Ages. Twenty-two years later, on May 30, 1962, a new
cathedral was dedicated next to the shell of the old, and Britten’s War Requiem
had its first performance. It is the composer’s “official” work, his grandest public
statement.
The complex literary and musical structure of the War Requiem may owe a debt
to Michael Tippett, whom Britten respected as much as any colleague. The
libretto for Tippett’s oratorio A Child of Our Time, written during the early years
of the Second World War, unfolds on two ingeniously intersecting levels–
Tippett’s own solemn, T. S. Eliot–like poetic meditations on the mid-century
crisis and redemptive selections from James Weldon Johnson’s Book of
American Negro Spirituals (“Nobody Knows de Trouble I See,” “Go Down,
Moses,” “Deep River”). In a similar vein, the War Requiem intersperses the
Latin text of the Requiem Mass with antiwar poems by Wilfred Owen, which
give rich new resonances to words that have been set to music thousands of
times. Three soloists are positioned against two orchestras and two choruses,
creating a multidimensional musical space which rivals that of Stockhausen’s
Gruppen. The complex architecture has the effect of folding the personal into
the political, the secular into the sacred.
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The climactic moment in the War Requiem comes in the “Libera me,” where the
composer pleads for peace, for liberation from “eternal death.” After a mammoth
choral-orchestral explosion, the tenor and the baritone recite to each other lines
from Owen’s poem “Strange Meeting,” in which a freshly dead English soldier
meets the German soldier he killed the day before. “It seemed that out of battle I
escaped / Down some profound dull tunnel,” the Englishman declares. “I am the
enemy you killed, my friend,” the German answers. By giving a tremor of
eroticism to this meeting of strangers—sonorities marked “cold” give way to
warm vibrato chords, the indications “expressive” and “passionate,” a sense of a
shivering midnight assignation—Britten cuts through the false complexities of
politics. He could be echoing his ex-friend Auden’s unforgettable cry of “We
must love one another or die.”
Britten and Shostakovich
In September 1960, Dmitri Shostakovich came to London to hear his Cello
Concerto played by Mstislav Rostropovich. At that performance he was
introduced to Britten. In the next several years Britten and Pears made several
visits to Russia, usually in the company of Rostropovich and his wife, Galina
Vishnevskaya. The friendship between the two composers blossomed in the
summer of 1965, when Britten and Pears traveled to a Soviet composers’
colony in Armenia,where the Rostropoviches and Shostakovich were staying.
Despite obvious differences in temperament—Britten was warm and
affectionate with those whom he trusted, Shostakovich nervous to the end—the
two quickly found sympathy with each other, and their connection may have
gone as deep as any relationship in the life of either man.
Britten had long admired Shostakovich’s music, as the Lady Macbeth—like
Passacaglia in Peter Grimes shows. Shostakovich, for his part, knew little of
Britten’s music before the summer of 1963, when he was sent the recording and
score of the War Requiem. He promptly announced to his old friend Isaak
Glikman that he had encountered one of the “great works of the human spirit.”
In person he once said to Britten, “You great composer; I little composer.”
Britten’s psychological landscape, with its undulating contours of fear and guilt,
its fault lines and crevasses, its wan redeeming light, made Shostakovich feel at
home.
Both men seem almost to have been born with a feeling of being cornered.
Even in works of their teenage years, they appear to be experiencing spasms of
existential dread. They were grown men with the souls of gifted, frightened
children. They were like the soldiers in Wilfred Owen’s poem, meeting at the
end of a profound, dull tunnel.
Shostakovich met Britten only one week after he had experienced yet another in
his seemingly endless series of political humiliations. He had been asked by
Nikita Khrushchev, Stalin’s successor as the general secretary of the
Communist Party, to lead the Composers’ Union of the RSFSR, and shortly
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after, he became a candidate member of the Party itself. Previously,
Shostakovich had sworn to friends that he would never join an organization that
used terror to carry out its aims. He now gave conflicting accounts of the train of
events that led him to go back on this resolution, one being that he was drunk.
“They’ve been pursuing me for years, hunting me down,” he told Glikman, tears
streaming down his face. Lev Lebedinsky claimed to have heard him say such
things as “I am scared to death of them,” “I’m a wretched alcoholic,” and “I’ve
been a whore, I am and always will be a whore.”
Shostakovich would probably have suffered no serious consequences if he had
turned down the RSFSR office or the membership. By the sixties younger
musicians were actively resisting the Party’s aesthetic strictures, studying
twelve-tone composition and avant-garde techniques, aligning themselves with
the dissident movement. They were aghast at Shostakovich’s gesture of
conformity. “Our disappointment knew no bounds,” said the young composer
Sofia Gubaidulina. “We were left wondering why, just at the time when the
political situation had relaxed somewhat, when at last it seemed possible to
preserve one’s integrity, Shostakovich fell victim to official flattery.” Later,
Gubaidulina said, she understood better what Shostakovich had endured.
This latest crisis prompted Shostakovich to write his scathing, self-punishing
Eighth Quartet, one of the most extraordinary autobiographical pieces in
musical history. It was written in just a few days, following a visit to Dresden,
where the director Lev Arnshtam was making Five Days, Five Nights, a film
about the Allied bombings of February 1945.
No doubt the Dresden experience contributed to the Eighth Quartet’s fraught
tone, but Shostakovich’s letters indicate that the dedication “to victims of
fascism and war” was something of a cover for his own private anguish. To
Glikman he wrote: “The title page could carry the dedication: ‘To the memory of
the composer of this quartet’ … It is a pseudo-tragic quartet, so much so that
while I was composing it I shed the same amount of tears as I would have to
pee after half-a-dozen beers. When I got home, I tried a couple of times to play
it through, but always ended up in tears. This was of course a response not so
much to the pseudo-tragedy as to my own wonder at its superlative unity of
form. But here you may detect a touch of self-glorification, which no doubt will
soon pass and leave in its place the usual self-critical hangover.”
The personal motto D S C H, which sounded pseudotriumphantly in the finale of
the Tenth Symphony, is woven into almost every page of the Eighth Quartet. It
appears alongside quotations from previous Shostakovich works, including the
Tenth Symphony, Lady Macbeth, and the youthful First Symphony, not to
mention Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique, Siegfried’s Funeral Music from
Götterdämmerung, and the revolutionary song “Tormented by Grievous
Bondage.” Was Shostakovich speaking ironically when he described the quartet
as an exercise in “self-glorification”? The designation might apply to the ending
of the Tenth, but it seems inappropriate for the Eighth Quartet, which trails off
into a black, static chorale of lamentation. The final pages of the score
resemble, in a curious way, the mad scene of Peter Grimes, in which the
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fisherman is reduced to singing his own name: “Grimes! Grimes! Grimes!” It is
the ultimate moment of self-alienation.
The desolate psychological terrain of Shostakovich’s late-period music overlaps
everywhere with that of Britten’s. Shostakovich busied himself with one of
Britten’s favorite forms, the song cycle. The Seven Poems of Alexander Blok,
the Six Poems of Marina Tsvetayeva, and the Suite on Verses of Michelangelo
Buonarroti—the last probably inspired by Britten’s Michelangelo songs—show a
newly economical approach to word setting, while the texts themselves
resonate with the composer’s life in the half-confessional style that Britten
perfected with Les Illuminations and Serenade: villainous tartars, killings, and
famine (Blok); the tsar as a murderer of poets (Tsvetayeva); Rome overrun by
greed and bloodlust (Michelangelo).
Shostakovich’s boldest political statement of the Khrushchev Thaw came in the
Thirteenth Symphony, based on anti-Stalinist poems by Yevgeny Yevtushenko.
The first movement, “Babi Yar,” is ostensibly a lament for Jewish suffering
under the Nazis, but it also remembers life under Stalin. Yevtushenko devotes
one section to a depiction of Anne Frank cowering with her family in the attic:
“Someone’s coming!” “They’re breaking down the door!” “No, it’s the ice
breaking.” Shostakovich responds with a series of dissonant, hammering
chords, which, in their peculiar hollowed-out voicing, suggest not only a
murderous hand hammering at a door but also the terrified reactions of those
waiting behind it.
Britten, meanwhile, resumed writing chamber and orchestral music, which he
had largely ignored since his American period. Between 1964 and 1971 he
composed three great suites for cello, which echo the taut language of
Shostakovich’s quartets while also honoring Bach. The beginning of the Second
Suite quotes the opening cello theme of Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony almost
note for note. The dedicatee was, of course, Rostropovich, for whom Britten
also wrote, in 1962 and 1963, the Cello Symphony, the only major orchestral
work of the latter part of his career. Here, too, Shostakovich’s influence is
perceptible, almost pervasive. The final movement is another passacaglia, this
one roughly optimistic rather than tragic in tone. As Lyudmila Kovnatskaya
points out, both Britten and Shostakovich used the recurring bass lines of the
passacaglia to suggest the inescapable tensions of modern existence—“a chain
of metamorphoses taking place within the confines of a closed circle of fate … a
spiritual compass bridging the gap between the commonplace and the eternal.”
In 1969 Shostakovich capped the friendship by placing Britten’s name on the
title page of his Fourteenth Symphony, a song cycle on poems by Lorca,
Apollinaire, Rilke, and Wilhelm Küchelbecker. The dedication is sealed by a
quotation: in the last bars of the first movement, half of the double basses slide
up a major seventh and then go back down, exactly as the same instruments do
at the beginning of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. But the Fourteenth goes some
way toward revoking Britten’s half-hopeful worldview. As in Serenade and
Nocturne, the poems are organized around a common theme; here, the theme
is death. In some prefatory remarks before the dress rehearsal, Shostakovich
cited various works, Britten’s War Requiem included, that aim to describe the