"Literary Britten" (3-4 September, Cambridge)

Last weekend I was lucky enough to be able to attend the conference on "Literary Britten" at Girton College, Cambridge. It was interdisciplinary and deeply thought-provoking, with very many interesting people in attendance. And a great concert included in the price of attendance! I was so happy to get the chance to get to share some of my enthusiasms with people in person, rather than just through the medium of the internet.

Lucy Walker's talk on "Britten's early texts" introduced many of the conference participants to his classic early composition, "The rabbits stand around and hold the lights". Possibly those from the Britten-Pears Library were less enthusiastic, having had to listen to this and other juvenilia on loop for the six month span of their recent exhibition on Britten's childhood works. Still, "Rabbits" seemed to keep getting brought up in comments for the rest of the weekend.

Among other things it was mentioned in the discussion of Rebekah Scott's fascinating talk on "Britten's Drops." She explored instances of rain, tears and other droplets in the texts set by Britten, discussing his musical responses to this imagery, which seems to have fascinated him almost as much as that of sleep and dreams. You might think that this would be a limited topic but let me echo Flora's riposte regarding the pond at Bly: "Small? It's huge!" Someone whose name I didn't catch brought up Britten's childhood compositional fondness for cascades of notes linked by curving lines (to paraphrase his own description) and wondered about the idea of music as a metaphor for droplets merging into lakes and seas. A topic that deserves further exploration. "Deliquescence" is without a doubt my favorite word of the conference.

Will May gave a great talk on Britten, Austen and Mansfield Park, which you might be surprised to learn was one of the operas that Britten very seriously considered creating (but, obviously, didn't). We heard about the penumbra of uncreated works that inevitably hover around any creative artist, and about the textual links that connect Britten and Austen (they were both fans of Crabbe, for one thing). In discussion the main question at issue was: what attracted Britten to Mansfield Park and to the determinedly unartistic and unmusical Fanny Price? Performance is a theme in the story, to be sure, but was the possible immorality of performance really a subject of concern for him? It was Alison (?) who cracked this conundrum, pointing out that the issue that Fanny and Edmund have with the proposed amateur theatricals is the sexual content of "Lover's Vows," and in particular the way in which its themes threateningly echo the private lives and loves of the young would-be performers. Oh. Suddenly Mansfield Park sounds so much more Brittenish.

One of the great joys of the conference for me was getting the chance to meet John Bridcut, whose "Britten's Children" is in my opinion the single best piece of biographical writing on the composer, despite the limited scope of its topic. Among other things we discussed the recent Christopher Alden production of "Midsummer Night's Dream" at ENO, which I seem to have liked much more than everyone else did. Even so I was struck by Bridcut's suggestion that the production would have made more sense if all of the fairies had been schoolchildren, with Oberon as a sixth former infatuated with a younger boy. It makes so much sense to position the fairies as symbolizing the different world of childhood; I wish I'd thought of it myself. I would pay good money to see… well, any Bridcut production of a Britten opera, really.

Inevitably there are going to be corners of the topic that don't get covered. I was not the only one who thought it would have been nice to hear more explicitly feminist and/or queer readings of texts. I may have been the only one to feel the gap left by limited discussion of the role of Peter Pears in all of this. He did, after all, claim to be the literary one in the partnership. And Britten was so focused on writing for performers that a focus on his relationship with texts in isolation with no discussion of the instantiation of those texts in practice seems rather unsatisfying to me.

Hopefully there will be more work on "Literary Britten" in the future because it felt as if we only scratched the surface here. Everyone was overflowing with ideas and new angles to discuss. I hope to be able to post about further Brittenish excursions in the future!

Currently reading... and hoping to read...

After seeing Christopher Alden's thought-provoking production of A Midsummer Night's Dream at the English National Opera--seeing it twice, I might add--I realized how little, relatively speaking, has been written about it compared with Britten's other operas. Philip Rupprecht hardly mentions it in Britten's Musical Language; Carolyn Seymour devotes eighteen pages to it in The Operas of Benjamin Britten but that chapter doesn't seem central to the arc of the volume.

One of the more satisfying treatments I've found is in Daniel Albright's Musicking Shakespeare, which I hadn't encountered before now. It's densely written, very much in lit crit style, but very insightful, particularly when it comes to the range of musical styles represented in the opera.

Says Albright:

"The smaller fairies and the fairy rulers and the mechanicals and the Athenian lovers all inhabit different musical spaces, different musical centuries; they scarcely speak the same tongue. Oberon, fluent in florid Purcellian, seems to have trouble making his wishes clearly known to Puck, an English speaker who can’t sing (or, more exactly, can only impersonate singing); and between Oberon and Lysander, who knows pidgin Italian Opera as taught by Wallace, Balfe, and Sullivan, there seems no possibility of communication at all. This Babel of musical languages mirrors the fundamental property of Shakespeare’s play: garbling."

He concludes that "Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a series of tumbles: first it falls from occluded chamber music into opera; then it falls from opera into minstrel show... I believe that, in the Pyramus skit, Britten is not just making a joke about opera but declaring that opera is itself a joke. Opera is flamboyant and meretricious and slightly smelly, at once the grandest of arts and beneath art."

Not being a native speaker of the language of opera myself, this Brittenish ambivalence makes some sense to me. Despite having been a keen opera-goer and opera listener over the past two years, I still haven't come to terms with the core repertoire of the genre. I leap uneasily from early to late and do my best to ignore most of what is in the middle. Does that make me a proper opera devotee or not? Perhaps I can settle for being an improper devotee... and perhaps, given my enjoyment of the Alden production, this is exactly what I am.

On the theme of fannish acculturation, I'm very much looking forward to Claudio E. Benzecry's upcoming book, The Opera Fanatic. Ethnography of an Obsession. His earlier article on the same theme, exploring the culture of fans queuing for standing room at an opera house in Buenos Aires, rang true to me based on my limited experiences at the Proms and (once) at the Met. It was, after all, a friend that I met in the Day Tickets queue who first encouraged me to try getting into opera, and made the idea of going to a performance at the Coliseum (a place I'd never heard of before that day) seem not so intimidating at all. Expect a review of this book as soon as I can get hold of it