COMPOSERS, WRITERS AND A STRIPTEASE ARTIST: BRITTEN'S BOHEMIAN CIRCLE IN BROOKLYN

“I left England on a vacation trip across the Atlantic, a vacation rather from the general European atmosphere than from overwork.”
-  Benjamin Britten in Tempo magazine, 1940.

On 29 April 1939, just months before the outbreak of the Second World War, Britten and his friend – not yet partner - Peter Pears boarded the liner Ausonia in Southampton, bound for North America. Although Pears at least had a return passage booked for late summer, their transatlantic trip eventually lasted three years, and was a time of new friendships, hard work, creative ups and downs, and an ultimate disillusionment with such an American dream.

Motivations for such an uprooting of their lives, whether just a “vacation trip” or longer term, were inevitably varied. Friends and colleagues already over there, such as WH Auden and Christopher Isherwood, promoted the attractions of fresh creative influences and socially liberal communities – as Wilfrid Mellers put it, “a potential Eden”. The possibility of filmscore work in Hollywood had been dangled, and the wider prospect of big earnings in a burgeoning music scene was clearly attractive.

By contrast, there was the opportunity for two kinds of evasion and escape: from impending war, military service, and, as Britten recalled in 1960, from a Europe that he and Pears both felt was “more or less finished; and, for Britten specifically,  a different kind of flight, from dangerously strong feelings for one friend (Wulff Scherchen) and growing, unwelcome romantic interest from another (Lennox Berkeley). As he wrote to Aaron Copland, while crossing the Atlantic, “a thousand reasons…mostly ‘problems’…have brought me away.”

With major works such as the Violin Concerto, Sinfonia da Requiem, Paul Bunyan, the Michelangelo Sonnets and a first String Quartet written between 1939-41, this was no “vacation trip”. If it was a working holiday, the work was hard and productive, even with the disruption of a particularly bad run of ailments in 1940 that included streptococcal infections, dangerously high temperatures, severe nosebleeds, dental trauma and a tonsillectomy.

Fresh off the boat in Quebec, and after a peaceful but mosquito-ridden stay in a lakeside log cabin near Montreal, Britten and Pears rented a studio near Copland’s house in Woodstock, upstate New York, for the summer of 1939. The two composers had met each other in June 1938 at the London meeting of the International Society for Contemporary Music. Admiring the music they heard of each other’s there, and getting on well, Copland then spent some time at Britten’s converted mill in Snape the following month. In Woodstock, the new friendship developed further with much tennis (Britten always won, Copland recalled), swimming in the Hudson, going to the cinema, and musical connection. With a 13 year age gap, there was a certain avuncular, mentoring aspect to the friendship (Britten called him “Father” at times – though Pears was “mother hen”…work that one out). Copland signed off in one letter as “your one hell of a friend”, and in a 1940 article Britten described him “as important and vital a composer as any living.”

Britten’s first new transatlantic assignment was a commission from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. As a fanfare for strings and piano, it was, he wrote, “very bright & brilliant music – rather inspired by such sunshine as I’ve never seen before.” He could have also written that Young Apollo was inspired equally by the teenage Wulff Scherchen, because letters back to England showed that the hazardous infatuation remained - despite his friendship with Pears having become romantic only weeks before. His note for the Toronto premiere on 27 August quotes the final lines from Keats’ poem Hyperion, where Apollo’s “golden tresses” and “celestial limbs” make him “the new, dazzling Sun-god, quivering with radiant vitality.” Based almost entirely around the development of a sunny A major chord, this brief festive gush features brilliant solo flourishes and scalic cascades that contrast with an insistent, unison answering phrase from a quartet, set apart from the tutti strings.

Also in Woodstock that summer, Britten made more progress with his settings of the visionary teenage poet Arthur Rimbaud, Les Illuminations. WH Auden had introduced him to the poems in 1937, and two songs were already complete before the departure for North America (“Being Beautous”, dedicated to Pears, and “Marine”). One of the Woodstock settings, “Antique”, was dedicated to Wulff Scherchen, and another dedicatee, of “Interlude”, was Elizabeth Mayer, the cultured wife of an immigrant German psychiatrist whom Pears had met on a US choir tour in 1937, and who hosted the pair at her family home in Amityville, Long Island, from August for a year and more.

The intended singer of this new orchestral song cycle was not Pears, but the London-based Swiss soprano Sophie Wyss, who had previously premiered Britten’s Auden settings Our Hunting Fathers (in Norwich’s St Andrew’s Hall) in 1936 and On This Island in 1937. She gave the first complete performance in London on 30 January 1940, while Pears premiered these remarkably vivid and varied songs in the USA with the CBS Symphony Orchestra in 1941.

Britten had already proven himself as a brilliant composer for strings in the 1937 Frank Bridge Variations. The instrumental writing in these Rimbaud songs is equally dazzling, while also sharing the same triadic and scalic consistency shown in the newer Young Apollo writing. The inspired simplicity and confidence of his setting of such dreamlike, proto-surreal poetry betrays the strong connection Britten had for such elusive work. Progressing from the riveting advance of the opening bitonal fanfare, there is vocal and instrumental writing that effortlessly portrays kaleidoscopic cityscapes, sensous moments of amorous repose and exquisite night scenes. The penultimate song, "Parade", “is a picture of the underworld,” Britten wrote to Wyss. “It should be made to sound creepy, evil, dirty (apologies!), and really desperate.”

Eventually, the comforts as well as the smalltown “intrigues & scandals” of the Long Island Mayer household were traded for several months of bohemian chaos in New York City. Auden persuaded Britten and Pears to move into a houseshare he had established earlier in 1940 in a four-storey brownstone overlooking Brooklyn docks. The mainstays of this mostly squalid and eccentric cohabitation, alongside Auden (and his occasionally resident, serially unfaithful teenage boyfriend Chester Kallman) were the literary editor and socialite George Davis, the precocious, increasingly unstable novelist Carson McCullers, and the celebrated striptease artist Gypsy Rose Lee. (When she decamped to Chicago for an extended run of performances, a family of circus artists, including a monkey that modeled for Vogue, sublet her rooms).

Davis was the planner and ringmaster for nightlong revels that became legendary among the arty set of New York. Bernstein, Copland, Dali, Weill and Balanchine were just a few of the hundreds who partied hard at 7 Middagh Street. And amidst the sexual adventures (naval yard sailors were never in short supply), the amphetamines and the houseshare bickering, Auden and Britten emerged, somewhat anti-climactically, with their pre-Grimes stage-flop Paul Bunyan in May 1941.

Another couple who rented rooms during the months Britten and Pears were resident was the composer-writer pair Paul and Jane Bowles. Theirs was a relationship even more volatile than those of Auden with Kallman, or McCullers with her equally booze-soaked husband Reeves. Alongside the all too audible and often violent rows, Paul Bowles’ arrival presented Britten with another problem: there were now two composers with two pianos in the house. Even though Bowles knew Auden and Isherwood from their time in Berlin together (Isherwood’s Sally Bowles, the Liza Minelli character in Cabaret, was named after him), and though he was an ex student and North African travel companion of Copland’s, Britten still won the battle. Bowles was forced to move his upright into a tiny space in the basement to avoid soundbleed. There can’t have been any love lost, so it is satisfyingly mischievous to insert some music by Bowles between the two Britten pieces.. It is even quite possible that one or more of these Six Preludes (1938-44) was composed there, while Britten worked on Paul Bunyan upstairs in much greater comfort. A few years later, Bowles gave up composition, and returned to writing (his first creative efforts had been in poetry). His 1947 novel The Sheltering Sky was a big success, and much later became a film starring John Malkovich and Debra Winger.

After months waiting to secure berths on the perilous North Atlantic convoy back to England, when they finally boarded the Swedish cargo ship Axel Johnson in March 1942, customs officers confiscated two manuscripts Britten had with him. (There was a suspicion they were coded messages for the enemy.) One was the Auden setting, A Hymn to St Cecilia, and the other was sketches for a Clarinet Concerto for the jazz maestro Benny Goodman. Britten’s acute musical brain enabled him to write the Cecilia motet out again once he’d set sail, but he let the clarinet project go. Colin Matthews completed the first movement sketches decades later, and it was premiered in 1990. But Benny Goodman had to wait for a different Clarinet Concerto – from Aaron Copland, no less, in 1947.

Goodman was a fine all-round musician, equally at home with a string quartet or swing band, and he often brought the improvisatory spirit of jazz to his classical playing. Copland must have been inspired by Goodman’s style, writing a three movement concerto in which the character and rhythms of swing are never far away.

Harp, piano and strings are Copland’s chosen ensemble for a work that combines lilting repose, such as the opening, with more spirited, hard-edged passages, and an engaging cadenza that showcases the clarinet’s full extremes of register and dynamic range.

Such words could have been uttered by any number of composers in more recent decades, reacting, as many have, against the alienating effect of the modernist avant-garde. In fact, Copland wrote this of his experience back in the 1930s, when the American Depression and his own nascent socialist convictions caused him to regard his audience rather more sympathetically and his work more pragmatically. The result was a radical simplification of his style, and an acknowledgment that he must deal with a split creative self – “the austere, intellectual modernist on one side,” he wrote, “the accessible, popular composer on the other.”

Like Britten’s collaborations at the same time in London, Copland’s music for radio and theatre productions in the 1930s contributed significantly to this fusion of creative selves. This was the case, even more so, in the three ballets, Billy the Kid (1938), Rodeo (1942) and Appalachian Spring. The last of these was premiered, with immediate success, by the Martha Graham Dance Company in the Library of Congress, Washington D.C., in October 1944.

The ballet’s scenario eventually settled around the account of a wedding in Pennsylvanian hill country at the beginning of the 19th century. Graham’s outline to Copland was “to do with living in a new town, some place where the first fence has just gone up. Spring was celebrated by a man and a woman building a house with joy and love and prayer; by a revivalist and his followers in their shouts of exaltation; by a pioneering woman with her dreams of the Promised Land.”

Following accolades that included the 1945 Pullitzer Prize, Copland trimmed the full ballet score by about 15 minutes into a concert suite, and expanded the orchestration symphonically from its original ensemble of string nonet, piano, flute, clarinet and bassoon. The essential clarity of the texture and directness of Copland’s triadic, bi-tonal harmonies, are best heard in this original instrumentation - the piano’s spiky, percussive qualities fully registering in the first Allegro section where strings and piano combined provide an alert contrast to the gentle expanse of the opening. Elsewhere, Copland’s score is a captivating representation of what may now seem an idealised, long-gone America: the wholesome, prairie-wide optimism of the pioneering age, its people better connected to the land, and enjoying a simplicity captured in the Shaker melody that Copland uses with relish towards the end: “Tis the gift to be simple.”

© Meurig Bowen