IN ENGLISH
30
DA NCING QUEEN
BY BA RT DE V R IES
Against all odds, Benjamin Britten (1913– 1976) became Britain’s national musical hero. As this concert demonstrates, some of his lesser-known works are now getting the exposure (and praise) they deserve. Dance is the red thread that holds the works of the program together. Britten’s talent for music was spot ted at an early age. As Imogen Holst, the daughter of the other great English com poser, Gustav Holst, once said, Britten could harmonise before he could write. His mother, a gifted singer, was confident enough to predict small Benjamin would be the next great B, the fourth after his illustrious predecessors Bach, Beethoven and Brahms. But his ascent to becoming England’s most celebrated living compos er wasn’t obvious. Just too young to be immersed in the cosmopolitan lifestyle of the roaring twenties, Britten always re mained a provincial guy. With the excep tion of a three-year interlude in New York, he lived for most of his life on the Suffolk coast. Moreover, although under the spell of Alban Berg as a teenager and young composer, he always stayed true to his belief in tonal music and classical form, making him the laughing stock among fellow composers who adhered to more modern styles. Furthermore, Britten’s ho mosexuality, and in particular his attrac tion to younger boys, was a continuous threat to his reputation. Perhaps most importantly, in the post-war years he was approached with suspicion due to his paci fism and his conscientious objection dur ing the Second World War. But despite the fact that he was almost certainly interro gated by the secret service in 1953, he was also commissioned in the same year by the Royal Opera House Covent Garden to write an opera, Gloriana, as a part of the festivi ties for Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation.
Edmund Spenser’s allegorical poem The Faerie Queene (from the 1590s) formed the base of the libretto for Britten’s opera G loriana, the name Elizabeth I goes by in the poem. As the opera not only heralded Elizabeth’s strengths, but also displayed her weaknesses, the work was met with dis gruntlement and largely disappeared from the stage. However, Britten did create a symphonical suite from its most impor tant musical material. In this suite, Britten displays his ability to blend his own style with a neo-Tudor (renaissance) style of music, much like Stravinksy did with clas sicism. After the first movement, depict ing a jousting tournament, the second is completely dedicated to a lute song. The Earl of Essex, for whom the queen had af fectionate feelings, sings the gentle, intro spective Happy were he. The lyrics reflect two of Britten’s most important themes: pressure of society on the individual and a yearning for a pure, unsullied and un corrupted world. While the third and bestknown movement is a mostly upbeat se quence of courtly dances, in the fourth and last reflective movement Gloriana moritura (Gloriana about to die) the queen seems to look back on her life gone by. Just like Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante for violin and viola, Britten’s Mati nées Musicales, together with his earlier work Soirées Musicales, both recycling an array of Rossini themes, were used by George Balanchine to create ballets for the American Ballet Theatre. Dance thus links all three pieces on this program to gether.
