Barringer palmer britten by Southbank Centre

‘I am a native, rooted here’: Benjamin Britten, Samuel Palmer and the Neo-Romantic Pastoral Tim Barringer

Detail from Samuel Palmer, Cornfield by Moonlight with the Evening Star, c.1830 (plate 5). DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8365.2010.00796.x Art History | ISSN 0141-6790 34 | 1 | February 2011 | pages 126-165

On their way to the Wigmore Hall, in central London, for the evening concert on 15 October 1943, audience and performers alike must have passed bomb-sites, boardedup or open to the eye. The London County Council’s ‘Bomb Damage Maps’ record in neat blocks of watercolour the extensive destruction in the neighbourhood of the hall, and the far greater devastation across the City and the East End.1 The vivid evidence at street level of the effects of the Nazi bombing campaigns on Britain’s urban fabric spawned a distinctive form of visual representation in the work of painters such as Graham Sutherland and John Piper, the photographer Bill Brandt and the film-makers Michael Powell and Emric Pressburger.2 Characterized by their deep affection for the architectural heritage of the city, their sensitivity to the traditions of the picturesque and to the literary and historical associations of the English countryside, these artists have been recognized in the recent literature as the central figures of neo-Romanticism, the multi-faceted cultural movement of the war years. In a series of works entitled Devastation, Sutherland, earlier admired for landscape paintings enshrining a ‘magical vision of nature’, 3 endowed the ruined city with the qualities of a wounded human body. Devastation in the City: Twisted Girders against a Background of Fire (plate 1) uncannily suggests the mutilated ribcage of a victim of the Blitz, the unnatural darkness of the blackout to the left sharply contrasting with the flames of the burning city to the right. Adapting his accustomed practice as a landscape painter, making ‘small, careful drawings on the spot’, Sutherland substituted urban wreckage for the dominant motifs of his earlier works, biomorphic forms derived from the branches and roots of trees.4 Neo-Romanticism was at the forefront of debates on the role of the arts in wartime. E. H. Ramsden, in the introduction to the catalogue of an exhibition New Movements in Art, at the London Museum in 1942, demanded that artists should provide ‘the refreshment of a dream remote from the cares of the common day’, a sure invocation of the pastoral.Yet he added that ‘the art of today is playing no inglorious part in keeping alive those qualities by which alone a nation can ultimately survive’: the arts, then, were also charged with articulating the irreducible essence of national identity.5 Faced with the very real threat of defeat and invasion, artists were entreated to be both dreamers and realists, detached and engaged, remote and immediate – ambiguities that characterize neo-Romantic cultural production. In the scarred capital that October evening was heard the premiere of the Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings by the twenty-nine-year-old Benjamin Britten, a work that will be presented here as a musical contribution to British neo-Romanticism deeply 127

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1 Graham Sutherland, Devastation 1941: City,Twisted Girders, 1941. Ink and crayon on paper, 65.4 × 112.4 cm. Hull: Ferens Art Gallery. Photo: Hull Museums/The Bridgeman Art Library.

imbricated in that movement’s visual, as well as its literary, culture, and as a manifesto for the role of the arts in wartime. An orchestral song-cycle, unusually scored (as its title suggests) for male vocalist, obbligato French horn, and string orchestra, the Serenade is a setting of seven poems linked by pastoral themes. The cycle’s unity is achieved by an abiding concern with the evening landscape, with sleep, dreams and, finally, with death. Prologue

The opening bars of the Serenade signify distance from the modern, urban world and from the destruction of war. The work begins with a prologue played, solo, on the French horn (plate 2). The part was taken at the premiere by the twenty-twoyear-old virtuoso Dennis Brain, then a member of the RAF Band, who had recently demonstrated for Britten the potential of the natural harmonic series, notes that can be played without use of valves. Some of the tones in the series jar with our expectations of tuning in the well-tempered scale (causing some early critics to describe the Prologue being as ‘out of tune’6 ), and the exclusive use of natural harmonics renders a sound which is at once archaic and modern. Suggestive of some originary instrument of an ancient pastoral world, far from the troubles of urban modernity, this full exploration of the compass of the open horn paradoxically also introduces dissonance of a kind associated with avant-garde modernism. The opening bar firmly establishes the key of F major with the interval of a rising fifth, the traditional call of the hunting horn.Yet the initial statement of Britten’s horn-call is uttered softly, eschewing the instrument’s associations with the chase, or the battlefield, and only towards its recapitulation in bar 10 is a full forte achieved. The music makes its way slowly across an imaginary landscape, with a near-echo effect (compare bars 10 and 11) suggesting perhaps the reverberation of sound from a distant hillside. In only a minute-and-a-half, Britten’s prologue strikes a note of immemorial peace, achieved above all through the firm and assertive use of a triad © Association of Art Historians 2011

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formed of the tonic, the third and the fifth, the fundamental unit of western music. Yet simultaneously, the music undermines this by discomforting its audience with the apparently out-of-tune fourth and seventh notes of the scale produced by the open horn. The effect is a dialogue, or debate, between conventional harmony and an avant-garde disruption of the ‘natural’ order, redolent of modernism’s challenge to establish systems of tonality. By 1943, this was a long-established phenomenon, which included the bitonal primitivism of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, the atonality of the Second Viennese School, and the music of Béla Bartók and Zoltàn Kodàly which had embraced the distinctive intonation and rhythm of Eastern European folk song.7 While gesturing towards a modernist primitivism, however, Britten’s prologue is ultimately evocative and, here as elsewhere, the composer’s virtuosic powers of invention invert modernist devices, employing them to endorse, even bolster, mainstream musical traditions rather than to subvert or undermine them. This strategy epitomizes neo-Romantic cultural production across all media. The survival of the basic triad – like the survival of a vernacular, but nonetheless indexical, form of representation in the work of Sutherland, Piper and Henry Moore – offers

2 Benjamin Britten, Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings, vocal score with piano reduction of orchestral parts, London, Boosey and Hawkes, 1944, page 1.

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3 William Blake, frontispiece, plate 1 in Innocence, from Songs of Innocence and of Experience (Copy L), 1789–94. Relief etching printed in darkbrown with pen and black ink and watercolour, 18.1 × 12.7 cm. New Haven:Yale Center for British Art (Paul Mellon Collection). Photo:Yale Center for British Art.

a reassurance that, at least within the work of art or music, the natural order of things remained intact, amid the intolerable dissonance of the continuing bombing campaigns over London. Moore’s ‘shelter drawings’, for example, are far more insistent than his works of the 1930s, on the wholeness of the human body, its rounded contours recalling the Parthenon sculptures. The peaceful quasi-familial groupings seem insistently complete, despite the omnipresent threat of injury and dismemberment.8 At a moment of intense national isolation, the proponents of neo-Romanticism held an ambivalent attitude to avant-garde modernism, identifying long-established developments such as cubism, futurism, dada and surrealism as © Association of Art Historians 2011

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4 Samuel Palmer, Skirts of a Wood, 1825. Dark brown ink and sepia mixed with gum arabic, 17.4 × 27.7 cm. Oxford: Ashmolean Museum. Photo: Visitors of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.

being simultaneously aesthetically liberating and culturally alien. Britten’s deep regard for the work of Alban Berg, but continuing adherence in his own work to a modified from of tonal harmony, parallels the ambivalent engagement of artists like Paul Nash and Henry Moore with surrealism in which landscape and figure, respectively, though modified, are ultimately retained and endorsed. The prologue to the Serenade makes the first of Britten’s many deft, yet knowing, allusions to traditions of the pastoral, musical, literary and visual.Yet his strategy is one of difference from, rather than deference to, the prevailing pastoral mode in English music.9 This was represented above all by the patriarch of British composers, Ralph Vaughan Williams, who opened his Fifth Symphony, first performed only months before the Serenade at a Promenade Concert on 24 June 1943, with an evocative horncall in D major, albeit resting on a disquieting pedal C in the ’cellos and bases.The seventy-one-year-old composer had been working on the symphony since at least 1938, and it represents the distilled essence of musical ideas in his mind since the turn of the century.The first subject of Vaughan Williams’s opening movement (‘Preludio’) transports the listener immediately into a recognizably English pastoral sound-world shaped by the Pentatonic scale of folk song. In contrast to the harshly dissonant opening of the composer’s Fourth Symphony (1935), there is little suggestion of disquiet or violence in this tranquil landscape of repose.10 Vaughan Williams had himself earlier used the natural harmonics of a brass instrument – a natural trumpet pitched in Eb – in a passage now widely taken as his lament for the fallen in the First World War, the

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5 Samuel Palmer, Cornfield by Moonlight with the Evening Star, c. 1830.Watercolour and gouache with brown ink, varnished, 19.7 × 29.8 cm. London: British Museum. Photo: © Trustees of the British Museum.

central section of the slow movement of his Pastoral Symphony, no. 3, completed in 1922. This use of the natural trumpet, however, is no abrasively primitivistic gesture.11 The notes that do not conform to the equal temperament of the modern orchestra sound perfectly ‘natural’ (to use Vaughan Williams’s own term), perhaps evoking the military bugler sounding the ‘Last Post’. In Wilfrid Mellers’s compelling interpretation, this passage insists that, ‘acoustically as well as spiritually, innocence is truth’.12 Britten never saw himself as a follower of Vaughan Williams, and disavowed what Elizabeth Lutyens scathingly described as the ‘cowpat school’ of English pastoral music, which drew heavily on folk song.13 The cultivation of an indigenous musical style, to which Vaughan Williams gave much thought, was an inherently problematic project, especially for a self-consciously cosmopolitan figure like the young Britten.14 Moreover, unlike the visual arts and literature, where a rich Romantic heritage of local work was readily available, music could not offer a corpus of great British works to emulate, since there had been no efflorescence to compare with that of literature and the visual arts in music of the first decades of the nineteenth century. There was no Schubert or Chopin, and even Mendelssohn, too Victorian for Britten’s generation, had been only a tourist in Scotland when he produced the Romantic concert overture, The Hebrides: Fingal’s Cave. Composers such as Britten and Michael Tippett, like many of their elders, also rejected the recent, late-Romantic works of Delius and Elgar and drew instead on earlier moments in the history of British music, notably on Purcell and on the Elizabethan madrigalists. The penultimate movement of the Serenade, Sonnet, setting words of Ben Jonson, displays a certain Purcellian bravura, but that hardly amounts to a self-conscious embrace of local tradition of the kind promoted by Piper and Sutherland.

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6 Benjamin Britten, Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings, London: Boosey and Hawkes, 1944, front cover.

Britten’s prologue for single horn carries arcadian implications which resonate more closely with the visual culture of British Romanticism than with any musical antecedent. Its striking sonorities might suggest the reed pipe of the arcadian shepherd, such as that held by the singer who appears on the frontispiece of William Blake’s Songs of Innocence of 1789, the flying putto above him an emblem of the free creative imagination (plate 3). Or perhaps Britten’s prologue might bring to mind the tenebrous figure of a shepherd who sits in the shade of a great oak tree in Samuel Palmer’s nocturnal study in dark brown ink and sepia mixed with gum, Skirts of a Wood, of 1825, beguiling with his pipe a flock of slumbering sheep, while another, in the distance, leans on his crook, silhouetted against the evening sky (plate 4). The work is part of a group first published in 1936 to widespread admiration, and acquired by the Ashmolean Museum in 1941, which deeply influenced neo-Romantic painters and poets in the 1940s.15

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These comparisons are not mere fancy, for there is a demonstrable connection between Britten’s music and the visual and literary forms of the early nineteenthcentury British Romanticism. On the cover of the score to the Serenade published by Boosey and Hawkes in 1944, by choice of the composer was reproduced a work now widely acknowledged to belong among the consummate achievements of English romantic painting, Cornfield by Moonlight with the Evening Star (plate 5 and plate 6).16 Executed in a rich combination of watercolour, gouache and ink with gum by Samuel Palmer in about 1830, this luminous work celebrates the shimmering light of a waxing, sickle moon which gilds the standing wheat in the middle ground and the tree-tops of the distant downland woods. Palmer’s arabesques of penwork trace dark interstices between the bundles of wheat, known as corn-stooks, already cut, dried and bound, in foreground. The hard work of harvest is mostly done and the festival of harvest home, marking the turn of the year, is only days away. Across this landscape, bereft of explicit symbolism but redolent both of the classical pastoral and of the ‘Beulah’ of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, walks a shepherd in a broad-brimmed hat, preceded by his sheepdog.17 Moving silently but hastily, this humble figure seems oblivious to the glorious scene around him. Cornfield by Moonlight with the Evening Star passed from the collection of the artist’s son A. H. Palmer in 1929, via a dealer, to the private collection of Sir Kenneth Clark, director of the National Gallery from 1933 to 1946, in whose hands it remained until its acquisition by the British Museum in 1985. Clark was perhaps the most influential figure in the visual arts in Britain during the war years and immediately afterwards, a key patron, promoter and interpreter of British neo-Romanticism. His advocacy of Palmer was decisive for the wartime generation. Obscure in the artist’s lifetime, Cornfield by Moonlight with the Evening Star has become a palimpsest of the twentieth century’s taste for the Romantic era, quoted, adapted and appropriated by innumerable artists despite the fact that it has been exhibited only relatively rarely, and was not publicly seen in the UK between 1934 (when it entered the canon by appearing in the Royal Academy’s monumental exhibition British Art) and 1959.18 It was reproduced, however, in richly saturated colour, in a modest but influential publication, British Romantic Artists by the artist John Piper, produced by Collins in 1942 in a popular series devoted to ‘Britain in Pictures’.19 Britten had been on cordial terms with Piper since they first met in 1932 and both were associated with the radical Group Theatre, though it was only with the set designs for Britten’s opera The Rape of Lucretia (1946) that they began a close professional and creative collaboration, which would continue until the composer’s final opera, Death inVenice, in 1973.20 There is little doubt that Britten would have paid avid attention to Piper’s accessible and articulate advocacy in British Romantic Artists of an unbroken, pastoral line in British art from Gainsborough and Richard Wilson to the war work of Graham Sutherland. Such a confident exposition of a local, vernacular tradition, insulated from what are implicitly characterized as the totalizing, even totalitarian, tendencies of continental European art and culture, must have resonated powerfully in the isolated and vulnerable international circumstances of Britain in 1942. The Samuel Palmer portrayed in Piper’s text prefigures the artistic preoccupations and practices of Graham Sutherland and Piper himself, who, like the earlier artist, were both born in London or its suburbs, but moved to rural locations in search of a more authentic form of Englishness:21 Palmer was continually sketching out of doors .... Drawings he made of these trees [at Lullingstone Park] are the result (as he said) of ‘looking hard, long © Association of Art Historians 2011

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and continually at real landscape,’ and he speaks of ‘the grasp and grapple of roots, the muscular belly and shoulders, the twisted sinews’. Piper, who made a pilgrimage to Lullingstone Park to paint the same oaks as Palmer, emphasizes the poetic and musical rapture experienced by Palmer and his fellow ‘Ancients’, Edward Calvert and George Richmond, during the fall of dusk in the Kentish landscape: ‘They spent summer nights in the open air, watching the Northern glimmer and the approaching dawn. They sang at night in hollow clefts and deserted chalk-pits .... They visited hopfields, distant villages and primitive cottages, always travelling on foot ....’ 22 Palmer offered a paradigm of the British artist, simultaneously Romantic visionary and close observer of nature, always aware of the layers of historical association. ‘In Palmer’s Shoreham landscapes’, Piper noted, ‘the past is never absent. Ceres and Pomona, Chaucer’s Pilgrims on the North Downs way to Canterbury, Milton’s “branching elm, star-proof”, were urgent realities to him.’23 Piper’s own paintings and watercolours of the 1940s, and his stage set for The Quest, Frederick Ashton’s 1943 ballet from Spencer’s The Faerie Queene with music by William Walton, revisit this enchanted, sometimes haunted, evening landscape – vulnerable to enemy attack, but rich in association and in sensuous allure. Though framed in a more demotic idiom, Powell and Pressburger’s A Canterbury Tale, evoking the Kentish countryside of 1944, but allowing echoes of the medieval past to surface in both sound and image, belongs in the same lineage.24 This is the rich, troubled terrain evoked in Britten’s wartime Serenade, and the choice of Palmer’s image for the cover of the score was a self-conscious gesture of affiliation. What follows is a discussion of Britten’s score and its extensive web of cultural referents. I identify as a significant theme within both Romanticism and neoRomanticism a tension between a politically conservative, nostalgic sense of place, and a politically and aesthetically radical tradition in which the pastoral tradition becomes the site of a fundamental social and aesthetic critique rooted in questions of class and patronage. Paradigmatic here is the relationship of the two Romantic visionaries already introduced, Samuel Palmer and his early mentor, William Blake, suggesting that the contrast between Palmer, the lyrical conservative ruralist, and Blake, the radical Londoner. This, I argue, reveals a fault line at the heart of the English pastoral tradition between a High Tory poetics of vernacular nationalism, and a Radical, critical, self-reflexivity. Britten placed Palmer’s opulent vision of natural bounty on the cover of his score, but he included at the heart of the piece a setting of words by Blake, ‘The Sick Rose’ from Songs of Experience. This bifurcation offered a stark and uncomfortable choice to advocates of neo-Romanticism under the unique cultural circumstances of the Second World War, when historical circumstances – embodied most vividly in bombsites and rubble – transplanted these debates from the arcane world of the study, studio or recital room into the immediate stuff of daily life and survival. I propose that a dialogue between these two versions of pastoral – a conversation between Palmer and Blake – is played out in Britten’s Serenade, which (as E. H. Ramsden had requested of the wartime arts in 1942) blends nostalgic reassurance with existential disquiet, rootedness and alienation, escapism and engagement, just as it navigates a via media between musical tradition and modernism. As a musical form, the serenade is usually connected with evening entertainments, with the art of erotic persuasion amongst the lengthening shadows, the masked ball or the fête champêtre.25 Britten, however, provides not an evening’s seductive divertissement, but a work which explores the ambivalent sensations produced by the fall of a darkness that is moral as well as physical, bringing with it © Association of Art Historians 2011

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sensuous delights but also anxieties and torments. The pastoral, for Britten, was no diversion, but a genre that raised urgent questions about his own status and position as an artist, his relationship to the nation, to the region, and to his own identity and sexuality. At time of the premiere of the Serenade, the stakes were high and the times dark indeed for Benjamin Britten as well as for the British nation. The composer and his partner, the accomplished tenor Peter Pears, had fled to the United States in April 1939, largely to avoid conscription. With war looming, as pacifists and thus soon-to-be conscientious objectors, they had risked an uncertain future, possibly a prison sentence like that endured by their friend the composer Michael Tippett. Furthermore, living discreetly, though openly, as homosexuals in Britain they also ran the risk of prosecution.26 A fellow exile in America, and a strong influence upon Britten’s decision to leave England in 1939, was the poet W. H. Auden, with whom the composer collaborated on a witty but commercially unsuccessful musical, Paul Bunyan, which was produced at Columbia University in May 1941. The flippant, effortlessly virtuosic aspect of the young Britten’s creative persona is evident in the score, which excels in parodies of styles as various as the Rossini love duet, the Broadway showtune and the country ballad.Virgil Thompson, acting as critic of the NewYork Herald-Tribune, acidly noted ‘its particular blend of melodic “appeal” with irresponsible counterpoint and semi-acidulous instrumentation is easily recognizable as that considered by the British Broadcasting Corporation to be at once modernistic and safe.’ 27 A more encouraging assessment appeared in the English magazine Horizon. Established in 1939, it bore a cover designed by John Piper and became the most influential literary publication of the war years. Horizon’s music critic William Glock saw ‘no reason to set any limit on the hopes we may entertain of this young composer’, but added ‘nor ... has he achieved many bars of music that seem to result from an experience that really mattered to him.’28 These criticisms chime with anxiety felt by the composer himself, who acknowledged a certain hollowness in Paul Bunyan and his other American works, which he attributed to the ‘newness’ of the host country. Auden’s libretto for Paul Bunyan, a complex, at times incoherent, though fitfully brilliant performance, is studded with aphorisms which speak very directly to the experience of the new immigrant, and were probably directed personally at Britten himself. ‘America is what you do/ America is I and you’, for instance, suggested the possibilities for personal – artistic and sexual – liberation available in the New World.29 In a letter of brutal frankness written in January 1942, the poet urged Britten to strike a new balance between ‘Bohemianism and Bourgeois Convention’, the latter, Auden added, being ‘for middle class Englishmen like you and me, the danger’.30 But while Auden chose to remain in the United States, Britten, deeply entrenched in English culture, had soon become disaffected, and wrote to Enid Slater in 1940: ‘This country is dead, because it hasn’t been lived in, because it hasn’t been worked on. It may come in several hundred years ...’.31 Despite the cosmopolitan bravura of works such as Paul Bunyan and the brittle, glittering settings of Rimbaud in Les Illuminations (1939; first performed in the composer’s absence in 1940 at the Aeolian Hall, London), Britten remained deeply committed to a neo-Romantic aesthetic, a rootedness in place, and a vernacular means of expression. All of these became more powerful, more gripping, under the circumstances of war and with Britain facing the imminent threat of invasion. Britten confronted the reality of war in a full-length symphonic work written in America, the Sinfonia da Requiem, premiered under the English conductor John Barbirolli by the New York Philharmonic in 1941 and first performed in London at the Promenade Concerts on 22 July 1942. Like Sutherland’s Destruction compositions of © Association of Art Historians 2011

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7 Enid Slater, Benjamin Britten, 1944. Bromide print, 16.4 × 12 cm. London: National Portrait Gallery. Photo: © reserved; collection of the National Portrait Gallery.

the same date (see plate 1), the Sinfonia da Requiem employs extreme contrasts of light and colour and the fragmentation of familiar motifs to suggest the grotesque, destructive effects of war. The Sinfonia shares with the Destruction paintings a Janus-faced character binding lamentation with burlesque. The piece is structured in three movements. Slow in tempo, the ‘Lacrymosa’ and ‘Requiem aeternam’ frame a central swift movement, ‘Dies irae’, which operates as a scherzo, a dance of death. The ‘Dies irae’, with uncanny, fractured shards of fanfares and military music, and even suggestions of a popular dance-band, incorporates what Peter Evans has described as ‘a wealth of macabre detail’, such as sharply accented flutter-tonguing in flute, piccolo and brass. In this music, Britten created an idiom that would be explored to the full in the War Requiem of 1962.32 The Serenade was among a group of pieces written in a remarkable outburst of creative energy after Britten and Pears returned to England, landing at Liverpool on 17 April 1942. As a conscientious objector, Britten faced a tribunal which, surprisingly, gave him complete exemption from war work of any kind. Britten and Pears, however, toured the country giving recitals organized by the Committee for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA), and on 22 October 1942, gave a recital as part of the series organized by Myra Hess at the National Gallery in London, and supported by the director, Kenneth Clark.33 Although the collections were in storage during the war, there was a temporary exhibition of contemporary art, ‘Pictures bought by CEMA’ on show, which included neo-Romantic works by Sutherland and Piper.34 The programme included just two works, Robert Schumann’s Dichterliebe (1840), a

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8 John Minton, A Surrey Landscape, 1944. Pen and ink on paper, 54.5 × 74.8 cm. London: Arts Council Collection, Southbank Centre. Photo: Southbank Centre.

cornerstone of the Romantic repertoire, and a second performance of Britten’s Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo.35 These juxtapositions created, in the unlikely circumstances of the evacuated galleries, a Gesamtkunstwerk of English neo-Romanticism. The Serenade, which took shape during a period when Britten was convalescing in March and April 1943, shifted far away from the Mahlerian admixture of rage and ironic sentimentality adopted in the Sinfonia da Requiem, and from the self-conscious artistry of the Michelangelo settings. It is, instead, the grateful song of a returned exile, a prodigal son seeking reconciliation with the genius loci, source of his musical inspiration. In 1945, Britten and his librettist Montagu Slater would give the words ‘I am a native, rooted here’ to the troubled protagonist of his opera Peter Grimes, with whom – in this regard, as many others – the composer clearly felt a close affinity. The exchange, between Grimes and Captain Balstrode, a plainspoken retired skipper, is instructive: [BALSTRODE] Grimes, since you’re a lonely soul Born to blocks and spars and ropes Why not try a wider sea With merchantman or privateer? [PETER] I am a native, rooted here. [BALSTRODE] Rooted by what? [PETER] By familiar fields, Marsh and sand,

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Ordinary streets, Prevailing winds. 36 Grimes’ deepest allegiances were to the subject matter of Romantic (and neoRomantic) painting; landscapes of association. Perhaps the same could be said of Britten, in retreat from the Audenesque ‘wider sea’ of America. While the demands of his career in London made a pied-à-terre in the capital a necessity, Britten immediately moved away from the war-shattered capital to the home he had bought in 1937, the Old Mill in the relative pastoral tranquility of the tiny hamlet of Snape, near the fishing village of Aldeburgh in the county of his birth and upbringing, Suffolk. On buying the Old Mill before leaving for America, he had written: ‘the county is grand – none in England like it – & I feel I’m infinitely wise in choosing this place.’37 A photograph taken by Enid Slater in 1944 places Britten’s body strategically between the fabric of the mill and the landscape (plate 7). It is an astute essay in neo-Romantic self-fashioning. The composer is deep in thought, his hooded eyes fixed on a (to the viewer) invisible landscape to the left of the image, while before us a prosaic, pale scene of winter fields, barns and hay-ricks can be discerned. The composition insists that Britten belongs to this landscape as surely as the century-old fabric of the mill; he penetrates its mysteries and is an emanation of its spirit. The aristocratic novelist and music critic Edward Sackville-West, the same year, expanded upon this point in an article for Horizon, describing the ‘intense Englishry of Britten’s imaginative background’ as follows: Born and brought up in East Anglia, he has retained an exclusive love of that severe but indeterminate landscape – the enormous skies, the huddled villages, and pointing trees, the sudden sails and osier-secret rivers, of that deeply eroded coast. With his tight hair, bird-like profile, weatherbeaten blue eyes and athletic hands, he suggests suitability to that world.38 Yet despite all attempts to bind Britten’s body to the land, the photograph’s sharp focus in the foreground, in contrast to the hazy registration of the distant landscape,

9 John Constable, Stratford Mill, 1819–20. Oil on canvas, 130.8 × 184.2 cm. New Haven: Yale Center for British Art (Paul Mellon Fund). Photo:Yale Center for British Art.

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has the effect of bifurcating the image. The result recalls a Victorian studio photograph with painted background, opening the possibility of an estrangement of body and landscape, and even suggesting that the relationship contained elements of makebelieve. Kitty Hauser has noted that although the neo-Romantic landscape (as seen in this photograph of Britten) tends to be depopulated, a pressing theme in many texts and images of the time is ‘the vulnerable body and its quest for a home’.39 The composer himself stands here for that vulnerable social body in uneasy relation with the evacuated landscape. An alternative strain in neo-Romantic imagery solves the problem of the alienated figure noted by Hauser, by indulging the fantasy of a total embrace of the social outcast by an opulent English landscape. John Minton, for example, in a luscious and richly detailed pen drawing, A Surrey Landscape, 1944 (plate 8) presents a self-consciously Palmerian idyll in which wholeness is restored. The addition of a couple of young male figures suggests that in his version of pastoral, homosexuality is naturalized within an idyllic framework – a significant, if fragile, queering of the Romantic heritage. Lived realities were very different, as Minton tacitly accepts by allowing a jagged, fallen tree (itself a familiar trope of Romantic painting) to interpose itself between the viewer and the site of fulfilment. Returning from exile to an uncertain future, Benjamin Britten must have been aware that the bonds between nation, region, man and music may not be as secure or as supportive as an initial reading of Enid Slater’s photograph might suppose. Nonetheless, Britten experienced his return to Snape as a veritable homecoming and immersed himself in literature pertinent to the locality. While writing the Serenade, the composer was avidly reading a book on the life of a fellow man of Suffolk, John Constable, who featured prominently in John Piper’s British Romantic Artists. This was likely C. R. Leslie’s Memoirs of the life of John Constable, RA, which had appeared in a new edition in 1937.40 Britten and Pears deeply admired the artist, and with increasing prosperity after the war, Peter Pears would purchase in 1946 a Suffolk Landscape with a Cottage attributed to Constable (‘they showed it to everyone who came to the house’, recalled Eric Crozier41 ). Many of Constable’s letters contain phrases calculated to appeal to the neo-Romantic Britten, notably the widely quoted dictum: ‘Still I should paint my own places best; painting is with me but another word for feeling, and I associate my “careless boyhood” with all that lies on the banks of the Stour.’42 It was perhaps Constable’s nostalgic portrayal of boyhood, and with the countryside as a child’s playground, that appealed to Britten. An identification with, and an eroticized fascination for, pre-pubescent boys is a theme running through many of Britten’s compositions, and consideration of issues of sexuality and desire has increasingly come to dominate recent discussion of Britten’s work.43 Pears wrote to Britten around 1950 of having seen ‘the most gorgeous Constable – “Boys fishing near Flatford Mill”’ (plate 9).44 The refuge of the English countryside, refracted through Romantic painting, offered an idyll of escape from what Auden called ‘the attractions and demands of disorder’, real engagement with adult world of modernity, with its entanglements of sexuality, urban life, politics and war. Auden attributed Britten’s ‘attraction to thin-asa-board juveniles ... sexless and innocent’ as a symptom of an unhealthy escapism, detrimental to the fulfilment of Britten’s potential as ‘the white hope of music’.45 Whatever the merits of Auden’s case, Britten ignored it, and relations with the poet cooled. Britten’s return from America to England and to Snape brought him back into proximity with the intermingled idyll of rural life and of boyhood which, in pristine or defiled form, so preoccupied his creative imagination. Constable and the other Suffolk painter admired and collected by Britten and Pears, Thomas Gainsborough, also offered – at a distance of time – a model of © Association of Art Historians 2011

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artistic identity and professional practice with which Britten could identify. In British Romantic Artists, John Piper found Gainsborough’s late landscapes notable (in phrases reminiscent of William Blake) for ‘vision and experience finding a particular outlet’.46 Yet Gainsborough was also highly successful in cultivating patrons and gaining access to the highest echelons of society. The eighteenth-century painter’s love of rural solitude and his keen appreciation of music were well known, but his wish ‘to take my Viol da Gam and walk off to some sweet Village where I can paint Landskips and enjoy the fag End of Life in quietness & ease’ had not prevented him from enjoying a fashionable existence as the most sought-after of Georgian portraitists.47 Constantly in touch with London and the musical world, as the gentleman-painters Gainsborough and Constable had been with the art world in their own time, Britten and Pears would live in Aldeburgh for the rest of their lives, simultaneously parochial and international figures. Despite the prevailing cultural attitudes to homosexuality in post-war Britain, Britten successfully cultivated precisely the aura of ‘Bourgeois Convention’ against which Auden had warned. Like Gainsborough and Constable, he maintained throughout his life a rigorous work discipline and a dislike of the bohemian, and successfully courted acceptance by the British establishment, culminating in a peerage in 1976.48 Britten and Pears created, in 1948, the annual Aldeburgh festival, a hugely successful combination of concerts, recitals, lectures and exhibitions, that has had the paradoxical effect of earning for the obscure Suffolk town, chosen initially for its sturdy provincialism and respectability, the reputation of an international artistic centre. To this day the Maltings at Snape, the concert hall and rehearsal complex converted by Britten and Pears from a traditional agro-industrial building (built to convert barley to malt for brewing) in a peacefully situated village a few miles inland from Aldeburgh, institutionalizes a neo-Romantic aesthetic in its architecture, art collections and programming. Pastoral

The Serenade is constructed in seven short movements, each of which is a setting of a poem, framed by the prologue and an epilogue that repeats the same music, though with the horn player offstage. Britten, always fastidious in his choice of literary texts, set poetry ranging from the anonymous fifteenth-century Lyke Wake Dirge to Tennyson’s ‘Blow Bugle Blow’, published in 1847.49 None of the texts dates from the twentieth century, and a second Tennyson setting Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal was completed but cut from the score before the first performance, perhaps partly because its inclusion weighted the selection too heavily towards the Victorian.50 It was from the Romantic period that two of the most ambitious settings were drawn; William Blake’s The Sick Rose from Songs of Experience and the sonnet To Sleep by John Keats, and this alone signals the work’s affiliations with neo-Romanticism. Formally, the Serenade is exquisitely balanced, with paired movements giving it a symmetrical shape. Framed by the identical Epilogue and Prologue, the first and sixth sung movements (Pastoral and Sonnet) are meditative and lyrical, the second and fifth (Nocturne and Hymn) are lively, extravert movements with the character of a scherzo, and at the core of the piece lie two linked movements of visionary intensity and extreme darkness (Elegy and Dirge). As Imogen Holst recalled, Britten was careful to achieve a degree of unity, despite the diversity of literary styles represented: He had devised his own text for [the Serenade], choosing some of his favourite poems about evening, by poets as seemingly far apart as Blake, Ben Jonson and Keats. With great skill he managed to bring the contrasting poems together © Association of Art Historians 2011

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into a continuous song-cycle, so that the verses, in belonging to his music, also belong to each other.51 The Serenade’s dedicatee Edward Sackville-West, with whom Britten had collaborated on a radio drama, The Rescue, in 1942, noted perceptively: The subject [of the Serenade] is Night and its prestigia: the lengthening shadow, the distant bugle at sunset, the Baroque panoply of the starry sky, the heavy angels of sleep; but also the cloak of evil – the worm in the heart of the rose, the sense of sin in the heart of man. The whole sequence forms an elegy or Nocturnal (as Donne would have called it), resuming the thoughts and images suitable to evening.52

10 William Blake,‘Blasted Tree and Flattened Crops’, illustration to Ambrose Philips’s ‘Imitation of Eclogue 1’, from Robert John Thornton, The Pastorals of Virgil with a Course of English Reading, third edition, London, 1821, facing page 15.Wood engraving, 3.6 × 6.8 cm. New Haven:Yale Center for British Art (Paul Mellon Collection). Photo:Yale Center for British Art.

The opening movement, titled Pastoral, is a setting of Charles Cotton’s poem ‘Evening: Quatrains’ of 1689. It is an extended conceit which plays on the effects of the shadows thrown by the setting summer sun; ‘The shadows now so long do grow, / That brambles like tall cedars show.’ These are the prestigia, or conjuring tricks, to which Sackville-West refers, played by the evening light, and perhaps Britten was reminded of what Piper had called ‘[m]ysterious shadows shortening before the rising full moon’ in Palmer’s Cornfield by Moonlight, with the Evening Star.53 In this opening section, the vocal part and horn share a descending arpeggio of Db major which traces the arc of the slow, measured fall of the sun in the evening sky. But as in his settings of folk songs, Britten sets this straightforward melodic line against quite different music – rhythmically and tonally contrasted – in the strings. There is no sense of dissonance between these two discreet elements, but rather an effect of chiaroscuro in which two different tonal shadings complete a harmonious sonic picture. While the tenor and horn never move faster than a pensive quaver, the strings move twice as fast, with an evocative but gentle breathing figure suggestive perhaps, of the swaying of grasses or the movement of trees in the breeze. These opening passages for the strings adapt a rhythmic figure whose ‘short-long pulsation’ echoes the opening motif of the prologue, one of many devices by which Britten achieves unity across his composition.54 The movement is tripartite in form, and this opening section ends with the comic image ‘Molehills seem mountains, and the ant / Appears a monstrous elephant.’ The horn’s hitherto mellifluous tone shifts suddenly, with a drop to a low C, with fortepiano emphasis, to point up the grotesque swelling of ant to elephant. A lighter tone marks the central section of the movement, with the strings adopting a delicate pizzicato figure while the tenor depicts the shadow thrown by ‘A very little flock’ which through the play of light ‘Shades twice the ground that it would stock’ while the shepherd boy, his light step captured by the upper strings, appears in shadow ‘a mighty Polypheme’. Here, the horn reaches a low Db, which it reiterates until the end of the movement. In Christopher Palmer’s perceptive reading, ‘it has followed the sun to the rim of the horizon and can sink no further without, as it were, falling off the rim of the world.’55 Britten’s musical imagination responded to the poem’s explicitly visual effects, crepuscular colouring and lengthening shadows, which are also the essence of so many of Samuel Palmer’s pastoral works. As Phoebus, the sun god, ‘dipping in the west / leads the world the way to rest’, the voice and horn articulate valedictory falling 142

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sequences, and the movement resolves in Db, the major key long portended by the horn’s pedal note. Cotton’s rich observation of natural phenomena, and of country people among them, recalls in Britten’s evocative setting the ‘Ancients’ (as described by John Piper in 1942) spending ‘the summer nights in the open air’. Samuel Palmer’s art is filled with images of trance-like sleepers and nocturnal wanderers amid mysterious shadows. Palmer’s work from the 1820s and early 1830s, and particularly that produced at Shoreham in Kent, for about a decade from 1825, became influential on current artistic practice in the 1930s and 1940s, largely as a result of an exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1926 which revealed for the first time work from the artist’s own collection, bequeathed to his son A. H. Palmer.56 In the catalogue to the 1926 exhibition, the younger Palmer noted that ‘The strong appeal of the Shoreham pictures is largely due to his intense affection for the cool, quiet, close of the day, and what perhaps he loved even more, “perfumed and enchanted twilight”.’57 Twilight, its beauties and its discontents, was a key Romantic theme embraced by the neoRomantics of the 1940s; it is the lifeblood of Britten’s Serenade. The 1926 exhibition was a great popular success, but by then the revival of Palmer’s critical fortunes was already under way. Two years earlier, when a group of printmaking students at Goldsmith’s College, among whom the most talented was Graham Sutherland (just a decade older than Britten), had begun to look at Palmer’s work in the Tate Gallery. ‘I liked Palmer drawings of the early years’, recalled Sutherland, ‘because as a young man I was drawn to a strongly romantic and, so it seemed, independent approach to nature.’58 Palmer’s long residence in Shoreham may suggest an intimate familiarity with the daily tasks of the seasons, an adoption of the rhythms of rural life and labour. But the pastoral is essentially an urban genre in which the glories of the simple country life are implicitly or explicitly contrasted with the urban circumstances of the poet or painter and his audience. Samuel Palmer was no exception. He was born in London in the year of the Battle of Trafalgar, 1805, the son of a literary but absent-minded bookseller. Palmer developed the self-confidence to adopt a radically unconventional style through interactions with two dominant, though dissident, artistic personalities of the era.The first, the landscape and portrait painter John Linnell, was a radical nonconformist who believed that in nature lay overwhelming evidence of the glory of God and whose early work, uncompromising in its realism, contravened pictorial conventions. Linnell spent his career negotiating between two poles, that of the unflinching realist of Kensington Gravel Pits of 1812 (Tate), which pictured rough gravel diggers in an anti-picturesque urban hinterland, painted directly from the motif with uncompromising veracity, and that of the religious mystic who saw in the traditional agriculture of the English countryside a promised land.59 He became Palmer’s patron and also his father-in-law. Above all, Linnell despised conventionality. ‘It pleased God’, Palmer later wrote, ‘to send Mr Linnell as a good angel from heaven to pluck me from the pit of modern art.’60 Perhaps the greatest favour Linnell did to the young artist was to introduce him to William Blake, by this time marginalized from London’s artistic culture and desperately poor, from whom the prosperous Linnell had himself commissioned major work. Linnell also encouraged his friends and acquaintances to support Blake. One commission came from Linnell’s family doctor, Robert John Thornton, who first met Blake in September 1818. Thornton was a distinguished botanical writer and the author of a pioneering, and lavishly illustrated, work of natural history, The Temple of Flora.61 Blake provided wood engraved illustrations to Thornton’s The Pastorals ofVirgil, with a Course of English Reading,Adapted for Schools, a textbook based on the translation of Virgil’s Eclogues.62 These tiny works proved transformative for Palmer: © Association of Art Historians 2011

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… they are visions of little dells, and nooks, and corners of Paradise; models of the exquisitest pitch of intense poetry. I thought of their light and shade and, looking upon them I found no word to describe it. Intense depth, solemnity and vivid brilliancy only coldly and partially describe them. There is in all such a mystic and dreamy glimmer as penetrates and kindles the inmost soul, and gives complete and unreserved delight, unlike the gaudy daylight of this world. They are like all that wonderful artist’s works the drawing aside of the fleshly curtain, and the glimpse which all the most holy, studious saints and sages have enjoyed, of that rest which remaineth to the

11 Samuel Palmer, Coming from Evening Church, 1830. Mixed media on gesso on paper, 30.2 × 20 cm. London:Tate Britain. Photo: © Tate, London 2010.

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people of God. The figures of Mr Blake have that intense, soul-evidencing attitude and action, and that elastic, nervous spring, which belongs to uncaged immortal spirits.63 I’ll return to these images, and offer a contrary reading in the context of Blake’s own work, later. But for Palmer, they seemed like a manifesto for a new form of landscape art, simple in technique but rich in imagery and sacramental in spirit, and opened up the possibility of abandoning conventional forms of representation altogether. Most direct in its influence over Palmer was the image of a cornfield (plate 10), the progenitor of the landscapes in which Palmer’s pastoral vision was at its most sustained, and particularly of Cornfield by Moonlight with the Evening Star. Unlike the fierce realism of Linnell’s earlier landscapes (which revel in ‘the gaudy daylight of this world’), Blake’s woodcuts seemed to Palmer to enshrine a burnished poetic idyll of rural life.Yet there was sufficient connection with the country scenery that Palmer saw about him at Shoreham to allow Blake’s images an after-life in close observation of the Kentish countryside. In a forcefully written and influential article, ‘Samuel Palmer: The Politics of an Artist’ in Horizon magazine in 1941, the poet and literary anthologist Geoffrey Grigson presented a challenging account of Palmer’s work, which both affiliates him with key aspects of neo-Romanticism and offers a stinging critique of Palmer’s reactionary, High Tory politics. Grigson published, for the first time, a fragment of Romantic verse by Palmer which – though perhaps awkward in style – is wholly consonant with the familiar poems selected by Britten for the Serenade, and echoes the mood of Cotton’s ‘Evening: Quatrains’: And now the trembling light Glimmers behind the little hills and corn, Ling’ring as loath to part; yet part thou must And though than open day far pleasing more (Ere yet the field and pearlèd cups of flowers Twinkle in the parting light;) Thee night shall hide, visionary gleam That softly lookest through the rising dew.64 Clearly in thrall to the beauties of Palmer’s pastoral works, Grigson, however, makes an unexpected move. In what is effectively a pioneering essay in the social history of art, Grigson locates Palmer in relation to a vivid sketch of the broader cultural context of his period: ‘He grew up in the turbulent and uneasy peace, when, after 1815, all the hammers of change were sounding, building and breaking, and when reform was threatened, in Church and State, institutions which, Palmer felt, contained the essence and goodness of life.’65 Grigson is eloquent in his descriptions of the individual works, but mounts a critique of the artist’s fervent opposition to the 1832 Reform Act and his religious revivalism – that (in Palmer’s own words) of a ‘crinkle-crankle Goth’.66 This, again, raised significant political questions for the artist in 1941; was an evocative art rooted in local vernacular traditions a reactionary irrelevance, or a patriotic necessity? For Britten, the problem might be rephrased: how could a critique of war be articulated from a position of neo-Romantic veneration for national traditions, especially when those traditions were in imminent danger of extermination? Britten’s strongest political statement – ‘I disbelieve profoundly in power and violence’ – indicated his lifelong affiliation to radical, and even Marxist, © Association of Art Historians 2011

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ideas.67 Yet after a flirtation with socialist realism in the 1930s, his aesthetic choices did not explicitly indicate an affiliation with radical politics. Was Grigson, then, right about Palmer? Many of the Shoreham works, such as Coming from Evening Church, 1830, do indeed seem to represent more a social than a natural idyll (plate 11). A group of entranced, passive villagers, the vicar following from behind, emerge under the harvest moon from evensong. The framing trees form a Gothic arch, which rhymes with the curiously distended shape of the downland hills and the architecture of the village church. These loyal feudal subjects are the inhabitants of Palmer’s pastoral locus amoenus, creatures of a literary mind rather the laborers of the Kentish village where (as Grigson attested) enraged mobs burned hayricks as part of the so-called ‘Captain Swing’ Riots. Subsequent work by Eric Hobsbawm and George Rudé has revealed that the region of Kent surrounding Shoreham was severely affected by arson attacks throughout September 183068 – precisely the moment implied by the late summer foliage of Coming from Evening Church, which is inscribed ‘Painted 1830 at Shoreham Kent’, and (if the widely accepted, but conjectural, dating is correct) just before the moment that same year depicted in Cornfield by Moonlight with the Evening Star. The Swing Riots protested against the high price of wheat, the capitalization of farming after the Enclosure Acts, and the erosion of traditional privileges such as gleaning, as agriculture became modernized. David Bindman has revealed that one attack was on the farm of a Mr Love, who was well known to Palmer. The riots were blamed by Palmer on ‘agitators’, and he was indeed utterly horrified by the debate about political reform, passionately opposing the ‘Jacobinical hyenas’ who planned to expand the franchise to expand the propertied urban constituencies and allow the broad middle class to vote. The artist even published a splenetic anonymous pamphlet denouncing Reform to the electors of West Kent (known to Grigson only through reviews, but published by Bindman in 1985) – who seem to have taken no notice.69 The chasm separating the sacramental vision of rural England in his imagination and his art from the turbulent, unstable England of the agricultural and industrial revolutions came painfully into view. For the neo-Romantics of the 1940s, Palmer’s position – dramatized by Grigson –

12 Samuel Palmer, Study for Eclogue VI: ‘Till Vesper Bade the Swain’, 1879.Watercolour, 12.7 × 19.2 cm. London:Victoria and Albert Museum. Photo: Victoria and Albert Museum.

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forcefully raised the question of the political valency of pastoral, its relation to the actualities of rural life, and the role of the artist in a time of national crisis. Nocturne

13 William Blake, frontispiece, plate 29 in Experience, from Songs of Innocence and of Experience (Copy L), 1789–94. Relief etching printed in darkbrown with pen and black and watercolour, 18.1 × 12.7 cm. New Haven:Yale Center for British Art (Paul Mellon Collection). Photo:Yale Center for British Art.

Palmer’s sense of political and social collapse undoubtedly contributed to the transformation of his art in the mid-1830s. Added to this was the personal tragedy of the death at nineteen in 1861 of his son Thomas More Palmer, whose juvenile poetry the father believed to bear the stamp of genius. Retreating from the radical individualism of his period in Shoreham, in the Victorian years after 1837 Palmer cultivated a richly chromatic watercolour style.The topography of his work shifted from Southern England to the campagna, the landscape of Claude Lorrain and Virgil and the literary locus of the pastoral. In his last two decades, Palmer worked intensively on pastoral subjects from Milton and especially from Virgil, of whose Eclogues he made a free, though inspirational, translation, with the intention of publishing an illustrated edition.The sumptuous watercolour of a sunset subject, Study for EclogueVI:‘TillVesper Bade the Swain’ (plate 12) with pastoral music playing as the last rays of the sun catch the cyprus trees and a distant fortress, typifies Palmer’s later manner. It is this later Palmerian pastoral, technically sophisticated, atmospheric and opulently Victorian in tone, that resonates with the only movement of Britten’s Serenade to take a post-Romantic text, his setting of Tennyson’s ‘Blow Bugle Blow’ from The Princess (1847). Indeed, a kinship between Palmer’s later works and Tennyson’s poetry was intuited by F. G. Stephens as early as 1881, in contrast to what Stephens saw as the ‘Keatsian’ poetry of the Shoreham work.70 Britten probably knew the poem from Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch’s Oxford Book of EnglishVerse,71 but he had to handle Victorian poetry gingerly, since it was still the butt of mockery from ageing British modernists of the Bloomsbury Group and the Sitwell circle, among whom could be numbered some of the young composer’s most ardent devotees. Significantly, Britten titled his setting of Tennyson Nocturne, focusing attention on the darkness at its end, rather than the spectacular sunset which is evoked at its opening. The imagery of a huntsman’s bugle call echoing across the valleys at nightfall with the ‘purple glen replying’ – a Palmeresque phrase – served Britten’s purposes in the Serenade well. The colours are livid rather than burnished, redolent more of the sublime than the pastoral – the ‘long light shakes across the lakes / And the wild cataract leaps in glory’. These very words had offered an earlier British composer, Frederic Delius, a text, or perhaps a pretext, for a gloriously chromatic, decadent a capella setting for chorus in 1923, complete with wordless imitation horn-calls and echo effects.72 Britten, however, grasped the opportunity presented by Tennyson’s words for brilliant fanfares. These begin in the strings, and build steadily as the horn’s joyful, echoing triplet figure rises from a tremolando chord surely redolent of the rippling waters of the lake. His setting is, as its first interpreter, Peter Pears, remarked, ‘full of starry glitter and the last flashes of the sun’.73 Tennyson’s 147

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exuberant panorama of the landscape soon reveals, however, that the sunlight, like the echoes of the bugle, will soon fade, and again a picturesque scene turns to darkness. The splendour of the sunset, it turns out, is only momentary, and after it, ‘dying, dying’, comes darkness. The climax of the movement is reached at the moment that the rays of the sunset, like the bugle’s call, fail: ‘O love, they die, in yon rich sky / They faint on hill or field or river.’ This is the only point in the Nocturne where a firm statement of the root-position triad of the chord of Eb firmly anchors the music tonally, as the voice is instructed to declaim exultantly (esultante). At this point, as with his setting of Cotton, Britten follows the structure of the text, and introduces a contrasting central section. In the middle stanza, Tennyson moves from a realist to a visionary mode, hearing in the bugle’s echoes ‘the horns of Elfland faintly blowing’. The horn player repeats his fanfare but this time with the mute, taking us to the fairyland into which Britten would return in his opera A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1960). The fanfare motif which opened the movement with such flourish returns in the last three bars as the palest of echoes, played pianissimo by only three soli first violins, accompanied by pizzicato violas. Elegy

14 William Blake,‘The Sick Rose’, plate 48 in Experience, from Songs of Innocence and of Experience (Copy L), 1789–94. Relief etching printed in darkbrown with pen and black ink and watercolour, 18.1 × 12.7 cm. New Haven:Yale Center for British Art (Paul Mellon Collection). Photo:Yale Center for British Art.

After this moment of richly upholstered Victorian exuberance, Britten’s Serenade turns deadly serious. The third sung movement, Elegy, sets William Blake’s ‘The Sick Rose’ from Songs of Experience. Blake’s concepts of innocence and experience exemplify the ‘Contrary States of the Human Soul’, and it is significant that Britten sets aside Blake’s poetry of childlike innocence, despite his particular gift for creating a sound-world redolent of infancy exemplified by the brilliant choral setting of ‘Sound the Flute’ from Songs of Innocence in the composer’s later Spring Symphony (1949). As depicted in Blake’s frontispiece (see plate 3), in the state of Innocence, the pastoral shepherd-poet, singer of the songs, is an embodiment of creative freedom, unimpaired by social rules and regulations, a cherub flying gleefully above his head. With Experience, however, and the limitations of knowledge, come systems like that of Newtonian gravity; in the frontispiece to Songs of Experience the hapless putto duly crashes out of the sky and lands flat on the shepherd’s head (plate 13). Death replaces life, the earthbound blots out the celestial. Experience is the world of political economy and the darkness of the modern city – a world all too familiar to William Blake of Lambeth, peopled by victims of its darkness such as the weeping chimney sweep who appears in Songs of Experience.74 It was among these dark poems, conveyed through Blake’s relief-etched handwriting in small pages where text and image blur together, that Britten encountered The Sick Rose: O Rose, thou art sick. The invisible worm That flies in the night

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In the howling storm: Has found out thy bed Of crimson joy: And his dark secret love Does thy life destroy.75

15 William Blake,‘The Blossom’, plate 20 in Innocence, from Songs of Innocence and of Experience (Copy L), 1789–94. Relief etching printed in darkbrown with pen and black ink and watercolour, 18.1 × 12.7 cm. New Haven:Yale Center for British Art (Paul Mellon Collection). Photo:Yale Center for British Art.

In Blake’s original presentation of the poem, in one of his ‘illuminated books’, word and image are inseparable (plate 14). This poem is ‘contrary’ – a balancing opposite – to the exquisite The Blossom in Songs of Innocence (plate 15), where joyful putti play on stylized petals which leap upward with the Gothic ‘flaming line’ that Nicholas Pevsner celebrated in his lectures of 1941–42 on The Englishness of English Art, a masterpiece of neo-Romantic writing.76 In both The Blossom and The Sick Rose the subject is an emblem of natural beauty, and Blake called upon his knowledge of medieval manuscript illumination in designing these tiny plates in which text and image become a single unified statement. There is no doubt that Britten would have been aware of the illuminated version of the poem; many facsimiles were available, and a fine hand-coloured copy of Songs of Innocence and Experience, now at King’s College, Cambridge, was in the possession of Britten’s friend E. M. Forster.77 While the Blossom is purity itself, however, the Rose is barbed with ferocious thorns and even the bloom itself is sick – a worm is gnawing at its core. The sexual implications of the deep-red rose are clear; it is a bloody orifice unwillingly penetrated. The frank symbolism of the poem and illustration bring to the surface of Britten’s work the issue of sexual violence and even sexually transmitted disease. Hideous, worm-like pests, modern equivalents of the babwins in the marginalia of Gothic manuscripts, infest the sorry plant, which bends double in misery. A tiny female figure, arms spread wide in anguish, is climbing out of the rose – perhaps the pure spirit of the flower – while a massive worm slithers past her, a phallic symbol of invasion and corruption. A caterpillar, or ‘cankerworm’, climbing up the left side of the composition, is in the process of devouring a pale leaf (perhaps an echo of the Clarissa’s denunciation of her suitor: ‘Thou pernicious caterpillar, that preyest upon the fair leaf of virgin fame’)78 . It is not solely animal pestilence, nor even the metaphoric presence of rape, however, which blights the rose, but a broader problem; the psychological agony of modern humanity oppressed by the legal and social burdens of the hypocritical moralism. As well as a worm, the tiny figure of a grieving woman kneels amid the thorns on the rose’s bent-over stem. Blake, surely, is adducing guilt as one of the most pernicious effects of experience – the invisible worm that invades the bed of joy and feeds on shame. Blake’s plate, barely four inches tall, enshrines within it beauty and horror, ecstasy and violence, all of them contained within the rhythmic, circular motion of the composition. Blake’s coruscating critique of hypocrisy and guilt, articulated more vividly through the visual than the 149

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verbal text, forced Britten to move beyond ‘Bourgeois conventionalism’ and produce a setting of exceptional originality. The slow, seventeen-bar instrumental introduction to The Sick Rose is among the composer’s finest achievements. The lower strings offer a syncopated figure marked sonore, repeating bare fifths E and B natural, in a rhythm that suggests the deep breathing of one who sleeps, the basses perforating the texture with a pizzicato low E perhaps alluding to an uncertain heartbeat. From the shadows of this ambiguous accompaniment emerges a long threnody for the solo horn which is, for the first time in the Serenade, chromatic, exploring in particular the bitterness of the falling semitone, the sound of the worm turning at the heart of the rose, souring the harmony. The horn’s opening gesture is to provide a third in the chord of E, a falling semitone, concert-pitch G# to G natural, creating a shift from E major to E minor. In the first few bars the horn has traversed all twelve notes in the scale, though this is no Schoenbergian Tonreihe or tone row, whose function is structural, but rather a highly expressive, wordless song of experience, a deadly aria. After a momentary pause, the horn’s solo meditation ends with a pianissimo entry on a concert-pitch F, at the very top of the instrument’s range, which, redolent more of cry of pain rather than joy, swells to fortissimo and drops a foreboding semitone to a scorching E natural. Only after this formidable introduction does the tenor give Blake’s two brief stanzas in ‘an intensely concentrated arioso’.79 For Britten, this movement forces the unwelcome revelation of the darkness at the heart of the natural idyll, and more broadly a recognition of the impossibility of a pastoral wholeness in the modern world. It darkens the mood of the entire Serenade, implying a new maturity and directness in Britten’s output. This new mood was timely, and can be felt in the work of Sutherland, Piper and Moore of the same period. The ‘invisible worm’ might stand as a metaphor for the poisoning of the possibility of natural wholeness under circumstances (such as Blake and Britten both knew) of modernity and of war. Britten’s personal circumstances, moreover, and his conflicts over his own sexuality – in the words of a friend ‘the sin he felt he’d committed’ – were clearly suggested by the phrase ‘dark secret love’.80 The movement ends with the horn once again exploring a harmonic and perhaps also a moral ambiguity, wavering from major to minor in an eerie effect, quite unprecedented, created by moving the hand in the instrument’s bell, creating a glissando from the open sound of the instrument to the harsh, silvery hand-stopped note a semitone lower. The full and horrific implications of this falling semitone are revealed in the next movement, Dirge, based on an anonymous fifteenth-century poem reputedly ‘sung in north Yorkshire while carrying a corpse across the moors to the nearest burial ground’.81 Sackville-West wrote of ‘the cloak of evil ... the sense of sin in the heart of every man’. The Gothic – perhaps Brontë-esque – spectacle of a humble funeral cortège moving across the dark moorland, and the threat of divine judgement (‘The fire will burn thee to the bare bane’), bring forth from Britten a remarkable musical invention, and a move away from evening pastoral to the darkest hours of the night, illuminated only by ‘fire and fleet and candle light’. Opening with the interval of the semitone from the previous movement, the tenor intones ‘This ae night, This ae night’, beginning a modal six-bar ostinato in G minor, which is repeated nine times with only the slightest variation, the verses often connected by an agonized upwards glissando of a full octave. Beneath this funereal chant, a malevolent fugue develops whose traversal of keys begins in Eb minor and moves only intermittently into consonance with the tenor’s incantation. For the dedicatee of the Serenade, Edward Sackville-West, this moment conjured imagery of Walpolean gothic vividness: ‘Death approaches in the rusty armour of an uncouth but strict fugue.’82 The disturbing counterbalance between the voice’s chant-like incantation and the orchestra’s © Association of Art Historians 2011

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16 Robert Dunkarton after Philip Reinagle and Abraham Pether, The Night Blowing Cereus, 1800. From Robert John Thornton, New illustration of the sexual system of Carolus Van Linnaeus: comprehending an elucidation of the several parts of the fructification; a Prize dissertation on the sexes of plants; a full explanation of the classes, and orders, of the sexual system; and The Temple of Flora, or Garden of Nature…, London: Printed by T. Bensley, 1807, plate 29. Colour mezzotint, hand finished, 48.6 x 36.6 cm. New Haven: Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library,Yale University. Photo: Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

frenzied and unstable accompaniment creates an uncanny effect, and it has produced radically divergent interpretations. For Humphrey Carpenter, the tenor’s repeated line ‘suggests no ordinary night fears experienced by a restless sleeper, but a fear of mortal judgement’, while for Arnold Whittall, the vocal line is ‘disturbingly detached, mindlessly self-absorbed, and seemingly unaffected by the Totentanz around it’.83 These two readings seem to suggest that within the Serenade can be found both Blake’s and Palmer’s versions of pastoral; aspects of the tormented, acutely self-aware shepherdpoets of Blake’s Virgil are balanced by moments when we share the trance-like state of the figures in Palmer’s landscape, the expressionless worshippers trudging away from the church after evening service, or the shepherd in Cornfield by Moonlight with the Evening Star, blythely unaffected by the ‘baroque panoply of the starry sky’. But there is little of Palmeresque lyricism in the very Blakean climax of the Dirge, which is reached with the sudden entry of the horn, emitting a grotesque, whooping parody of a © Association of Art Historians 2011

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hunting-call with a leaping interval of a fifth. The tenor strains to articulate the words ‘To purgatory fire thou com’st at last’ over the horn’s agitated repetition of a concert pitch G in quavers, triplets and quintuplets, mimicking the unearthly sound of the last trumpet. Blake versus Palmer

17 William Blake,‘Sabrina’s Silvery Flood’, illustration to Ambrose Philips’s ‘Imitation of Eclogue 1’, from Robert John Thornton, The Pastorals of Virgil with a Course of English Reading, third edition, London, 1821, facing page 15.Wood engraving, 3.3 × 7.6 cm. New Haven:Yale Center for British Art (Paul Mellon Collection). Photo:Yale Center for British Art. 18 William Blake,‘Thenot and Colinet’ (frontispiece), illustration to Ambrose Philips’s ‘Imitation of Eclogue 1’, from Robert John Thornton, The Pastorals of Virgil with a Course of English Reading, third edition, London, 1821, facing page 13.Wood engraving, 6.2 × 8.7 cm. New Haven:Yale Center for British Art (Paul Mellon Collection). Photo:Yale Center for British Art.

With the gnawing evils of Blake’s Songs of Experience and the hellfire of the Dirge we are far from Samuel Palmer’s exuberant valley of vision, his ecstatic rejection of modernity and blithe disavowal of contemporary political and social reality. Benjamin Britten draws from Blake the pastoral’s dark side, the fear of night, and the alienation of the individual, phenomena of the modern city rather than the timeless countryside. This demands a re-examination of those ‘little nooks, and dells and corners of paradise’, Blake’s Virgil woodcuts, whose numinous presence liberated Palmer from conventional art-making. The illustrations to Thornton’s Virgil are, indeed, objects whose power belies their dimensions and their origins as illustrations for a simply produced little Latin primer, and the circumstances of their production must be briefly reconsidered here. Blake was an odd choice for this commission, with which he was extremely uncomfortable from the start. Robert John Thornton seems to personify all that Blake found unacceptable in the modern world, both scientist and classicist. Trained as a physician, he produced between 1797 and 1807 A New Illustration of the Sexual System of Carolus von Linaeus, a treatise in three parts, which concluded with the magnificent The Temple of Flora, Or, Garden of Nature.84 This contained elaborate hand-coloured prints after drawings by a number of professional artists depicting plants, usually in a landscape setting. Spectacular though these images might appear, with heroic plants, often set against a picturesque landscape background, rearing up to an apparently enormous scale (plate 16), they are ultimately botanical illustrations whose function is to represent precisely the physical constitution of the plant, the very antithesis of Blake’s visionary, anthropomorphizing treatment of flora, as in The Sick Rose or The Blossom (see plate 15 and plate 16). The pioneering natural scientist and the radical, visionary printmaker were bound to collide. Horrified by the raw primitivism of Blake’s contribution, Thornton added a note tartly remarking that these illustrations ‘display less of Art than Genius’, correctly implying the absence of a commercial wood-engraver’s slick technique.85 Despite their classical heritage, Blake’s images clearly represent not the campagna of Virgil, but rather a distinctly English landscape. The Englishness of the Virgil illustrations partly reflects Blake’s commitment to vernacular forms of landscape and representation (as, for example, in his magnificent engraving of Chaucer’s Canterbury Pilgrims, seen against the Kentish Downs, a scene to which Powell and Pressburger returned in 194486 ), but it also directly reflects reference in the text he was assigned. This was not Virgil’s own, but an imitation of the First Eclogue by Ambrose Philips, a relatively obscure member of Joseph Addison’s circle in the early eighteenth century, reproduced in Thornton’s 152

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19 William Blake,‘A Rolling Stone is Ever Bare of Moss’, illustration to Ambrose Philips’s ‘Imitation of Eclogue 1’, from Robert John Thornton, The Pastorals of Virgil with a Course of English Reading, third edition, London, 1821, facing page 16.Wood engraving, 3.3 × 7.8 cm. New Haven:Yale Center for British Art (Paul Mellon Collection). Photo:Yale Center for British Art. 20 William Blake,‘Musicians in front of Menalcas’s Mansion’, illustration to Ambrose Philips’s ‘Imitation of Eclogue 1’, from Robert John Thornton, The Pastorals of Virgil with a Course of English Reading, third edition, London, 1821, facing page 16.Wood engraving 3.3 × 7.8 cm. New Haven:Yale Center for British Art (Paul Mellon Collection). Photo:Yale Center for British Art.

book as a translation exercise for students.87 Philips’s text, replete with self-serving references to the poet’s own travails, transposes the Eclogue to England, and alludes to places Philips’s own career had taken him. Thus, the River Severn appears under the idyllic guise of ‘Sabrina’, and Blake offers a distinctively English rendering of the scene with rolling hills, cloudy sky and a thatched cottage (plate 17). The main argument of Ambrose Philips’s Imitation, not present in Virgil’s original, concerns the need for shepherds (emblematic of poets, and by extension, artists and musicians) to seek patronage from a patron, a Menalcas, and to live a life of tranquil conformity to the status quo. Divergence from this pattern, so the poet’s argument runs, will yield only psychological havoc and professional failure. These ideas were the very antithesis of Blake’s essentially Romantic world-view, and his images function as a thoroughgoing critique of Philips’s argument rather than simple illustrations of the poem. Blake clearly sympathizes more with the agonized young shepherd Colinet who wishes to change the world, than with his older and wiser colleague, who propounds adherence to the establishment (plate 18). A further layer of references in the Virgil illustrations links them to Blake’s ruminations on his own, ultimately unhappy, period of rural retreat at Felpham in Sussex, under the patronage of William Haley, beginning in 1800. Blake began his only extended period outside London in a state of imaginative exuberance similar to that of Palmer in Shoreham: ‘Heaven opens here on all sides her Golden Gates’, Blake wrote that year, ‘her windows are not obstructed by vapours.’88 Yet before his return to London late in 1803, Blake had fallen foul of his patron, and entered a period of creative malaise. One plate depicts a the figure of Colinet, Philips’s melancholy poet, trudging along a road by a milestone marked ‘LXIV miles to London’, the distance of Felpham from the capital (nearby Chichester Cathedral spire can be seen in the engraving). By the end of his time at Felpham, Blake had been arrested on charges of espionage under wartime statutes – yet another, unexpected, strand in the web of linkages between war and the pastoral.89 Unlike Palmer, or Britten, then, Blake’s visionary imagination was rooted in the city and – despite his frequent financial misfortunes – the freedom from older patronage systems allowed by the modern art market. As noted above, the visual source for Palmer’s harvest moon is found among Blake’s plates (see plate 10).Yet looked at in its original context, this compelling orb is revealed as no peaceful evening moon, but an eclipse of the sun, a macrocosmic manifestation of Colinet’s extreme anguish: at the ‘curs’d hour’ of his birth, ‘the Moon by witchcraft charm’d, foreshadow’d /Through a sad eclipse, a various train of woes.’ Blake’s engraving allows a thick disc of oily ink to blot out the sun, allowing only a thin, scimitar-shaped patch of white to obtrude. Thenot adds: Sure thou in hapless hour of time wast born when blighting mildews spoil the rising corn, or blasting winds o’er blossom’d hedgerows pass, to kill the promis’d fruits, and scorch the grass;

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or when the moon, by wizard charm’d, foreshows, blood-stain’d in foul eclipse, impending woes. – Untimely born, ill luck betides thee still. – 90 The tree’s form, like a human torso bent to breaking point, its scaly bark evoked with tiny flicks of the graver. The crops are ruined, flattened by wind and rain, and the distant hills take on the unnatural appearance of a great, slimy serpent. This is no nook of paradise; it is a rendering in the macrocosm of the hellish interior world of the frustrated and unsuccessful artist, the countryside as a landscape of alienation. Moving further in the direction of critique, with heavy irony Blake presented the happy resolution of Ambrose Philips’s Imitation, in which the shepherd-poet finds his patron and enters into happy servitude, as a prison sentence (plate 19). Blake seizes on Philips’s use of the proverb ‘A rolling Stone is ever bare of Moss’ – intended to caution poets against excessive travelling in search of experience – and subverts it in an engraving depicting a naked, classical figure hauling a huge roller over the lawns of an eighteenth-century English country house. The rolling stone, in this case, is surely dragged by the poet or artist, trapped within the class structures of Georgian England, tending smooth lawns laid down by Capability Brown. Despite its simplicity and small size, this image articulates a vivid critique of the underlying logic of the pastoral, which (in Philips’s Augustan reading), though seeming to advocate the simple, rural life, ultimately endorses an aristocratic world-view, a changeless politics and an adherence to the status quo. Blake anticipates in these tiny illustrations a series of arguments to be made famous in 1935 by William Empson in SomeVersions of Pastoral (a central work of criticism of the 1930s which Britten and Pears must have known, or at least known about from Auden) in which the pastoral is interrogated in relation to questions of social class.91 Even the demeaning labour of the gardener, however, could hardly be worse than Blake’s in producing pastoral imagery for Dr Robert John Thornton, playing the patron’s tune (‘For him our yearly Wakes and Feasts we hold’), like the strange band of hack musicians and dancers, an impassive Palladian façade behind them (plate 20).92 Are they, one wonders, playing a serenade? William Blake’s introduction of radical dissonance into the pastoral, his ardent political critique of its underlying social and ideological structures, and his insistence on linking it to contemporary social realities, were lost on Samuel Palmer, who had an ear only for the pastoral as ‘mystic and dreamy glimmer’. 1945: Peter Grimes, Neo-Romantic Hero

While Britten was negotiating the aesthetics and politics of the pastoral in the Serenade, he was preoccupied by a major dramatic work, first conceived in 1941, that would reach the stage a month after VE day, on 7 June 1945. Once again, the premiere of a piece by Britten, deeply concerned with life in the country, took place among bombsites. By the spring of 1945, the ‘War Damage Maps’ had been inscribed with neat circles where V-1 and V-2 rockets had fallen, adding 8,938 deaths to the total. The score of Peter Grimes is deeply rooted in the culture of English Romanticism, and the representation of landscape – or, rather, coastline and seascape – plays a crucial role. But the opera offered no pastoral balm, steadfastly refusing to refresh the ‘dream remote from the cares of the common day’. Grimes explored the darker aspects of the neo-Romantic sensibility, allowing Britten to reveal not so much the picturesqueness as the complexity, the incipient violence and intolerance, of the English village and its surrounding land and seascapes. So vivid and immediate was Britten’s musical portrayal that Peter Grimes, a story of early © Association of Art Historians 2011

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21 Kenneth Green, The Borough, 1945 (restored in 1995 by William Hargreaves). Set model for Peter Grimes. Aldeburgh: Britten-Pears Library. Photo: Britten-Pears Foundation.

nineteenth-century Suffolk, became a compelling, and sickening, parable of modern society. The initial idea for the opera was generated by an event which has all the hallmarks of neo-Romanticism: in California in 1941, Britten, deeply disenchanted, chanced upon a copy of the BBC magazine The Listener. It included the text of a radio talk by E. M. Forster on ‘George Crabbe, the Poet and the Man’. The transcript opened portentously: ‘To talk about Crabbe is to talk about England’. In an uncanny pre-echo of Britten’s self-fashioning on his return as a figure both national and parochial, the early nineteenth-century poet is also described by Forster as ‘provincial and I am using provincial as a word of high praise’.93 Remarkably, Forster’s article describes precisely the topography with which Britten had already chosen to identify himself, the Suffolk Coast at Aldeburgh, within walking distance of the Old Mill. There was no hint of Palmerian ecstasy in the text, however. Aldeburgh, in Forster’s account, is the very reverse of picturesque: … a bleak little place: not beautiful .... Near by is quay, beside an estuary, and here the scenery becomes melancholy and flat; expanses of mud, saltish commons, the marsh-birds crying.94 Crabbe left Aldeburgh, and ‘did well for himself’, Yet he never escaped Aldeburgh in the spirit, and it was the making of him as a poet, Even when he is writing of other things, there steals again and again into his verse the sea, the estuary, the flat Suffolk coast, and local meanness, and an odour of brine and dirt ... he belongs to the grim little place, and through it to England.95 Emerging most vividly from Forster’s discussion is Crabbe’s poem The Borough in which appears Peter Grimes, ‘a savage fisherman who murdered his apprentices and was haunted by their ghosts’.96 Peter Pears found a copy of Crabbe’s poem in a bookshop in San Diego or Los Angeles, and the couple gradually developed the idea for an opera. Montagu Slater, a leftist writer and editor, author of plays entitled Stay Down Miner and Easter, 1916, was drafted to fashion a libretto.97 As in Crabbe’s original, the landscapes of Suffolk play a key role. The orchestration of the vocal sections of the work is highly © Association of Art Historians 2011

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original, influenced by Broadway theatre and Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess in flight from the opulence of Wagner and Strauss, its textures much lighter than in most twentiethcentury opera. But at the work’s core lie six purely orchestral interludes, depictions of the sea.98 The effect of these interludes on the original audience is clear from Desmond Shawe-Taylor’s review: The curtain drops, and the flat, salty, windy coast is magically evoked in an orchestral interlude: bare grace-noted minims on the higher strings, clean arpeggios on the harp, soft chords on the brass. It looks so simple, that innate pictorialism of Britten’s, which we have already admired in the Serenade, and now it serves so well the broader needs of opera. When the curtain rises we see only what we have already heard.99 Occasional echo may be heard in these interludes of Debussy’s La Mer and The Sea, the orchestral tone poem by Britten’s teacher Frank Bridge which had ‘knocked sideways’ the eleven-year-old composer in 1924. Nonetheless, they are masterly, spare renderings of the sea coast, in which the natural world – as in Blake’s Virgil illustrations – comments on the psychological condition of the protagonists, especially Grimes himself. Working in a neo-Romantic lineage, reaching back through Forster to Crabbe, a contemporary of Blake, Britten was able to entwine the emotional turmoil of the individual with the landscape – sometimes turbulent, sometimes impassive – to create a national opera, a portrayal of early nineteenthcentury England that seemed vividly contemporary in 1945. To speak of Peter Grimes is to speak of England. The designs for the first production, by Kenneth Green, like aspects of the libretto that reflected Montagu Slater’s Marxist affiliations, seemed closer to some of the social realist projects with which Britten had been affiliated in the 1930s (such as the GPO film unit documentary The Night Mail, 1936, directed by John Grierson), than to the neo-Romantic, mystical tone of much of the score of Peter Grimes. In the hands of Eric Crozier, the production aimed … at a selective realism in the scenery and costumes that would convince our audience of the truth of the place and people .... For me a particular quality of the opera is that it is rooted in the natures of ordinary people.100 Crozier and Green drew attention to precisely the aspects of social life that Palmer, and after him Piper and Sutherland, deliberately avoided: In Crabbe’s time, the Borough was a tumble-down, filthy, haphazard little town, dependent on fishing and boat-building for its livelihood. Many of its population lived in squalor and poverty. People and buildings were bleak and unlovely. This general wretchedness must be reflected in the stage settings and costumes of the opera.101 The small and crowded stage of Sadler’s Wells emphasized the airless and claustrophobic environment of the Borough (plate 21). Despite its commitment to social realism, however, the visual impact of Green and Crozier’s work – particularly the street scene in the Borough, the setting for Act III – closely resembles that of John Piper’s dark drawings of English villages and stately homes made at this time. It also recalls watercolours made for the Recording © Association of Art Historians 2011

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Britain project, the Pilgrim Trust’s attempt to create a modern ‘Domesday Book’ which focused on historical and picturesque rather than contemporary sites.102 Muted colours including an extensive use of black, low lighting, and a sharp focus on architectural details, such as the flints in the wall of the Boar Inn, in particular recall Piper’s reverent treatment of vernacular architecture. The sea, a profound presence in the opera, remains invisible, but Britten paints a vivid, neo-Romantic image of it with the orchestra alone. The character of Grimes in Britten’s opera retains something of the volatility and roughness of Crabbe’s original, but he is transformed into a visionary, an aspect of his character that emerges early in the opera in his entry towards the end of Act I, with the words ‘What harbour shelters peace?’, a great arc of melody opening with an upward interval of the ninth, often associated in Britten’s work with yearning or longing.103 There follows a visionary arioso, opening with a long passage on a repeated E natural, high in the tenor’s register: [PETER] Now the great Bear and Pleiades where the earth moves Are drawing up clouds of human grief Breathing solemnity into the deep night. The response of the villagers (‘He’s mad or drunk’) to Grimes’s existential musings underlines his identity as the misunderstood social outsider, sharing a trope of artistic identity with Blake’s Colinet – and, perhaps, with Britten and Pears as they saw themselves in 1945. At such moments as this arioso in Act I, Grimes emerges as a true poet, a ‘Byronic hero’, whose fishing voyages offer a parable of the human lifejourney.104 Yet overall, however, Grimes is an unsympathetic character: fanatically seeking financial rewards that will buy social acceptance, he pushes his apprentices too hard, leading ultimately to their deaths. Britten’s mastery of dramatic writing for voice reveals and develops the tensions between these aspects of Grimes’s personality using purely musical means. The inhabitants of the Borough, meanwhile, with the exception of the widowed teacher Ellen Orford, are portrayed consistently as small-minded, venal and hypocritical. Their sea-shanty ‘Old Joe has Gone Fishing’, at the conclusion of the first scene of Act 1, is used to break the awkward silence after Grimes’s ‘Great Bear’ soliloquy, and to prevent a fight after Boles remarks, ‘His exercise is not with men but killing boys.’ The shanty drowns out the sound of the storm which is surging in the orchestra, yet it is couched in an awkward, jerking rhythm of 7/4 (broken up into 2+2+3 crotchets). Quite unlike Vaughan Williams’s use of folk tunes – by turns melancholy, nostalgic or boisterous – in this case the tune, not ‘collected’ but invented by Britten, seems overwrought and fractious. Old England is no reassuring place of escape, but a seething cauldron of bitterness and resentment. The villagers overlook Grimes’s misdemeanours until, provoked by his lack of regard for village proprieties, they finally pursue the fisherman in a righteous posse, hounding him, eventually, to commit suicide. Imogen Holst recalled of the first performance on the small stage of Sadler’s Wells: The music stretched beyond the boxed-in sides of the stage, and when the hostile crowds in the wings called out ‘Peter Grimes’ .... Peter Grimes!’, their voices sounded as if they were coming from far along the coast. In the terrible man-hunt, the poor demented fisherman seemed to grow in stature until he was no longer a separate individual ... [but was] bearing the burden of all the © Association of Art Historians 2011

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other outcasts who are rejected by their law-abiding neighbours because they are different from other people.105 Britten had succeeded in collapsing the distance between Georgian Suffolk and wartime London, allowing Grimes to stand for the individual (in Peter Pears’s phrase) ‘at odds with society in which he finds himself’ at all times.106 This is the central theme, too, of Michael Tippett’s oratorio A Child of Our Time (1939–41), at whose premiere in 1944 the soloists included Peter Pears and Joan Cross, who played Grimes and Ellen Orford in the first production of Britten’s opera. Certainly this was in part a response to Britten’s own situation as a homosexual, as a conscientious objector, and, perhaps, as an artist under wartime conditions.The nineteenth-century parochial Suffolk setting seems quaintly archaic at the opening, but it is transformed, by the end of the opera, into a place of immediate reality. While retaining a profound sense of locality, and initiating a completely original style of vernacular opera to evoke it, Britten had stripped neo-Romanticism of its Palmeresque effulgence, and revealed, from within the harsh realities of country life, an epitome of contemporary social relations. Peter Grimes was the first work to appear on the restored stage of Sadler’s Wells, which had been hit by a bomb in 1940. It was a brave choice on the part of the management, led by Tyrone Guthrie and Joan Cross, which met with resistance by musicians and by many members of the establishment.Yet the opera production was a triumph, hailed as a masterpiece by critics and understood by its audience as timely and immediate work. ‘By the time you are done with the opera – or it is done with you’, concluded Edmund Wilson, on seeing the Sadler’s Wells production, ‘you have decided that Peter Grimes is the whole of bombing, machine-gunning, mining, torpedoing, ambushing humanity, which talks about a guaranteed standard of living and does nothing but wreck its own works, degrade or pervert its own moral life and reduce itself to starvation.’107 Pastoral and War

In the Serenade, we have seen Britten negotiate this dual valency of the pastoral; Blake’s revelation of darkness and political reaction at the heart of the genre, its conservative implications, and Palmer’s creative misreading of Blake, which licenced a poetic

22 Graham Sutherland, Pastoral, 1930. Intaglio print on paper, 13.0 × 19.0 cm. London: Tate Britain. Photo: © Tate, London 2010.

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23 Graham Sutherland, Thorn Trees, 1945. Oil on cardboard, 108.6 × 101.0 cm (support). Buffalo:Albright-Knox Art Gallery. Photo:Art Resource, NY.

lyricism perversely at odds with the realities of rural life.Yet Britten’s relationship to the pastoral in the late 1930s bore the imprint of a broader cultural trend. Writing in the 1970s, Michael Tippett, the composer and a close friend of Britten, went to the very heart of the matter, finding the prevalence of pastoralism after 1918 to be inextricably bound up with the experience of war: With hindsight …, the pastoral idyll in the twentieth century can now be seen as an essential psychological counterbalance to the horrors of the trenches, replacing them with an arcadian ideal. Churchill, haranguing Siegfried Sassoon for his pacifism, declared – War is the normal occupation of man, but then added – War, and gardening. These opposite poles seem to be deeply embedded in the English sensibility.108 For artists responding to the horrors of the trenches (experienced first hand by Moore, who was gassed at Cambrai, but also deeply influential on Piper, who lost a brother at Ypres), the visionary, Palmeresque aspects of pastoral offered a welcome solace. Even before the 1926 Samuel Palmer exhibition, the metaphor of rural England as a garden of delight was in the ascendant. Graham Sutherland, as a student printmaker, turned to Palmer’s example, producing celebratory, escapist works like the etching Lammas (1924) and he, like Palmer a century earlier, deployed a wilfully © Association of Art Historians 2011

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24 Paul Nash, Totes Meer (Dead Sea), 1940–41. Oil on canvas, 101.6 × 152.4 cm. London:Tate Britain (Presented by the War Artists Advisory Committee 1946). Photo: © Tate, London 2010.

anti-modern iconography.109 An untroubled Palmerian rather than a critical Blakean pastoral had the upper hand in the 1920s and 1930s, a heyday for middle-class motor tourism in the home counties, and the pastoral and the picturesque merged into a genre that combined commercial graphics with neo-Romantic historical associations. Sutherland himself made boldly composed posters for Shell encouraging day trips to the country. But even in his early work, Sutherland was also teasing out the ambiguities of the genre. In Pastoral (1930) (plate 22), a fastidiously wrought etching, a Palmerian richness of natural observation is pitted against a surrealistic hauntedness attaching to Blake’s blasted oak. The impression is of a suburban setting, muchfrequented, rather than the fastness of the countryside. Britten might well have seen this troubling print, which was represented in Edward Sackville-West’s collection. As war threatened again, the authorities deployed pastoral imagery to foster nationalist sentiment; but, at the same time, artists such as Sutherland darkened their view of the pastoral, shifting from potentially twee rustication to embrace the expressionistic aspects of Blake and Palmer, and bringing forth in their new work a menacing rather than reassuring environment. Remarkably, given the severe restrictions on printing in the wartime, a colour monograph on Sutherland by Sackville-West appeared in 1943, the very year of Britten’s Serenade. While acknowledging that Blake and Palmer were ‘the focus of Sutherland’s deepest admiration’,110 Sackville-West emphasized ‘Sutherland’s obsession with darkness ... a bass octave of so fuliginous an obscurity’, the darkness seen in the Devastation series, but one for which Sackville-West employed a musical metaphor.111 By the end of the war, Sutherland had come to overwrite pastoral imagery with a more conventional iconography of suffering in Thorn Tree (1945–46), a vegetal Gesthemane in which the warm thickets of Palmer’s England have developed the jagged edges of Blake’s sick rose and the crown of thorns is imprinted on the very fabric of the English countryside (plate 23). Sutherland’s agonistic reworking of the pastoral was suggested – perhaps demanded – by seeing photographs of the mass graves at Belsen, published in 1945.112 Landscape painting provided at least one vivid echo of the First World War in responses to the Second. In 1918, Paul Nash in We Are Making a New World (London, © Association of Art Historians 2011

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Imperial War Museum) had offered a shattered anti-pastoral, bereft of life, a blasted reworking of the main elements of the English landscape tradition – trees, valley clouds, herbage – in which brown and red replaced green and blue and in which barbed wire mocked the forms of vegetation. Nash returned to the theme at the beginning of the Second World War, presenting once again a lifeless landscape in Totes Meer (plate 24). The subject, chronicled with matter-of-fact precision, is a dump near Cowley filled with the carcasses of German planes shot down in the Battle of Britain. The wreckage overwhelms the landscape of Oxfordshire, which is reduced to a distant, dun-coloured backdrop. Above this depopulated rural dystopia, presiding over the folly of war, against the evening sky, is a thumbnail moon. Nash invokes here both the sceptical presence of Blake’s malignant eclipse from Thornton’s Virgil, and – with intense irony – invokes the archetype of the south-country nocturne, Palmer’s Cornfield by Moonlight, the golden wheat transformed now into the lifeless sand, and the silvery moonlight echoed by the gleam of the wrecked Messerschmitts. Sonnet and Epilogue

25 John Craxton, Dreamer in Landscape, 1942. Ink with pen and brush and chalk on paper, 54.8 × 76.2 cm. London:Tate Britain. Photo: © Estate of John Craxton.

Returning, in conclusion, to that first performance of the Serenade in 1943, we encounter again the paradoxes implicit in the wartime pastoral. Though the length of the piece – 23 minutes or so – is short, the distance traversed is lengthy. As the evening magic of the Pastoral and darkness of the Elegy and Dirge are consigned to memory, Britten inserts a brilliant scherzo movement, Hymn, its exuberant writing for horn in 6/8 time recalling the swift rondos of Mozart’s Eb horn concerti, works which had already established Dennis Brain as a concert soloist. Britten sets Ben Jonson’s Hymn

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to Diana, an elaborate tribute to Queen Elizabeth I in the guise of the moon goddess from Cynthia’s Revels, or The Fountain of Self-Love (1600). Jonson’s Hymn to Diana, the huntress, is in part a paean to the good government of Elizabeth I – ‘state in wonted manner keep’ – but pays more attention to the Queen’s shimmering presence at evening masques and entertainments. The quicksilver music, moving from a firmly established Bb major to the brightness of D major, captures the glow of the moon, ‘seated in thy silver chair’. A note of darkness is sounded – ‘earth let not thine envious shade/Dare itself to interpose’, marked by the metallic sound of a ‘hand-stopped’ sforzando (harshly accented) Bb in the horn part, a semitone fall from a series of twenty E naturals, which recalls the falling semitone motif of the Elegy. But dark memories are swept aside, and the light of the moon is triumphant – ‘Thou that mak’st a day of night’ – and the closing moments of the movement refer back to the sportive and youthful Britten of the Simple Symphony (op. 4, 1933, using fragments written when the composer was ten years old). With a cascade of notes (‘Excellently bright’) that tested even Pears’s vocal agility, the movement trips lightly to an end. The final sung movement of the Serenade returns to the calm, Palmerian mood of the Pastoral. After the virtuoso display of the Hymn, the horn is silent throughout the Sonnet, and the player leaves the stage. Capturing the rapturous tone of Keats’s sonnet To Sleep, written in April 1819, the setting is marked by a Schubertian sensitivity to the text, making it a homage to two glorious boys of the Romantic era. The opening line, ‘O soft embalmer of the still midnight’ emerges from a pianissimo chord with solo ’cello supporting three divisi viola lines. The trancelike atmosphere is sustained, as the singer is carried to the verge of sleep; yet the image of the ‘passèd day’ intervenes, ‘breeding many woes’. Here the world of Blakean Experience invades the drowsy tranquility: ‘Save me from curious Conscience, that still lords / Its strength for darkness, burrowing like a mole’. Here, in a moment of explicit word-painting, Britten again has recourse to the falling semitone that has come to symbolize the sickness at the heart of the rose, a sickness that is psychological and political, wrapping guilt and war, the lack of imagination and of compassion, into a single malign motif. The insistent, repeated ‘burrowing’ of this figure of darkness has been interpreted as an explicitly sexual reference;113 but, like Blake’s moon within Palmer’s Cornfield, it is perhaps a more general symbol of the poisoned condition of human society, especially in wartime, and the deceitful chimera of the pastoral idyll, even in the landscape of dreams. Here, one final visual comparison seems apposite. John Craxton’s pen and ink drawing, Dreamer in a Landscape of 1942, which had been reproduced in Horizon that year, pictures a young male figure – the age of conscripts then being sent to war – against a densely wrought landscape (plate 25). Craxton had read Grigson’s article on Palmer in 1941, and marvelled at the Ashmolean pen-and-ink drawings (see plate 4).114 Dreamer in a Landscape adapts Palmer’s evocation of the opulence of the natural world. Perceived through the troubled mind of modern youth, however, the vegetation takes on a muscular, animated quality; fecund, but unsettling. As with Britten’s pastoral writing, the impact of modernism, though held at arm’s length, is palpably present. Picasso’s stylizations of the female body from around 1930, so significant for Moore, surely shaped Craxton’s rendering of the limbs and roots of trees.115 Behind it all, in the distance, is Palmer’s moon, its silver light rendering every leaf shiny and lustrous.Yet the trail of citations leads through Palmer’s misquotation to the Blakean origins of this emblem; and the anguished poet of the Thornton Virgil whose accursed existence is symbolized by the eclipse of the sun. It is from this world of dreams that we hear the distant sound of the horn repeating © Association of Art Historians 2011

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the music of the Britten’s Epilogue, as if in echo, from offstage. Lulled, finally, to the verge of sleep, the listener relives the sounds which opened the Serenade in the light of the intervening music – songs of innocence and experience.The reassurance of the tonic and the ‘natural’ dissonances are held, still, in an immutable balance. In 1944, Sackville-West wrote of Britten: ‘the source of music within him is pouring itself out just at the moment when this country sorely needed a new composer of genius who should unite a first class professional equipment with a vision of sensuous beauty untarnished by experience.’116 Undoubtedly his sense of a return to real connection with the genius loci stimulated Britten’s remarkable imaginative achievements in the war years.Yet it is precisely his ability to achieve a creative tension between an enthralled, Palmerian opulence and the dark cynosure of Blakean Experience – the tarnish to which Sackville-West alludes – which identifies Britten’s wartime work as a numinous contribution to neo-Romanticism, embedded at the core of a cultural matrix extending beyond music and text into the realm of the image.

Notes Parts of this text were delivered verbally in the lecture series In the Company of Scholars at Yale University, in honour of Paul Mellon’s centenary in 2007; another version was presented as one of the Slade Lectures at Cambridge University in 2009. I am grateful to Alain Frogley, David Peters Corbett, John Wells and an anonymous reader for Art History for their comments on earlier drafts and to Robin Holloway,Tom Ashley and Gill Plain for illuminating discussion of the music and its contexts. My father first heard the Serenade on 78rpm recordings in the 1940s, and shared the piece with me at an early age; I remain grateful for that, and for Derek Glenton’s gift of a recording.

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Ann Saunders, ed., The London County Council’s ‘Bomb Damage Maps’, London, 2005. Wigmore Hall appears on map 61. David A. Mellor, ed., A Paradise Lost:The Neo-Romantic Imagination in Britain, 1935–55, London, 1987; Stuart Sillars, British Romantic Art and the Second World War, New York, 1991. [Kenneth Clark], Recent Work of Graham Sutherland, exhibition catalogue, Rosenberg & Helft Gallery, London, 1938, n.p., quoted Martin Hammer, Graham Sutherland: Landscapes,War Scenes, Portraits, 1924–1950, London, 2005, 78. Clark, Recent Work of Graham Sutherland, quoted Hammer, Graham Sutherland, 78. E. H. Ramsden, New Movements in Art: Contemporary Work in England, exh. cat. London Museum, London, 1942, 1, quoted Margaret Garlake, New Art, New World: British Art in Postwar Society, New Haven, 1998, 85. See Stephen Pettitt, Dennis Brain:A Biography, London, 1976; Tim Barringer, ‘Dennis Brain’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography http://www. oxforddnb.com/view/article/32034, accessed 19 August 2009. Brain initially used a narrow-bore horn made in France by Raoux, following his father and grandfather, both of them notable exponents of the instrument. After changing to a German-made Alexander horn in 1951, Brain’s tone was notably richer, but the effect of the Prologue and Epilogue of the Serenade seems slightly diminished. A comparison of the first recording of the piece, made in 1944 with the Boyd Neel String Orchestra conducted by the composer, recording with the Promenade concert performance of 30 July 1953 and the commercial recording with the New Symphony Orchestra conducted by Eugene Goossens, reveals pitching closer to even temperament in the later recordings using the Alexander horn. See Béla Bartók, ‘The influence of peasant music on modern music (1931)’ in Béla Bartók: Essays, ed. Benjamin Suchoff, London, 1976, 340–4. The drawings were commissioned by Kenneth Clark as Chairman of the War Artists’ Advisory Committee. See Henry Moore:War and Utility, exh.cat., Imperial War Museum, London, 2006.

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Griselda Pollock memorably paraphrased modernism’s ‘avant-garde gambits’ as ‘reference, deference and difference’ in Avant-Garde Gambits, 1888–1893: Gender and the Colour of Art History, London, 1992, 12–14. For a telling analysis, see Wilfrid Mellers, Vaughan Williams and the Vision of Albion, London, 1989, 176–86. The Symphony is closely related to the ‘Morality’ Pilgrim’s Progress, as Michael Kennedy explains in A Catalogue of the Works of RalphVaughan Williams, 2nd ed., Oxford, 1996, 206–7. Vaughan Williams is quite specific in a footnote in the score; the composer asked that ‘the passage should be played on a true Eb trumpet (preferably a natural trumpet) so that only natural notes may be played and that the Bb (seventh partial) and Db (9th partial) should have their true intonation’. Ralph Vaughan Williams, Symphony No. 3 (1924), revised edition, London, 1952, 41. At the end of the movement, a long, meditative solo is given to the horn (1 bar after L). Vaughan Williams insists: ‘It is essential that this passage be played on a real F Horn and only natural notes be used, to secure the true intonation of the Bb (7th partial) and the D (9th partial).’ Vaughan Williams, Symphony No. 3, 48–9. Mellers, Vaughan Williams and theVision of Albion, 89. See ‘Cowpat music’, Michael Kennedy and Joyce Kennedy, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Music, Oxford, 2007, accessed 19 August 2009. Britten did arrange many folksongs for voice and piano, drew on fishermen’s songs for Peter Grimes and, at the end of his life, wrote a folk song suite, A Time there Was. But Vaughan Williams, Gustav Holst, Percy Grainger and others were far more deeply involved with the collecting and arranging of folksong. Ralph Vaughan Williams, ‘Should music be national?’, in Vaughan Williams, National Music and Other Essays, Oxford, 1996, 1–11. See T. Sturge Moore, ‘Samuel Palmer’s Happiest Designs’, Apollo, 1936, 329–35. See also William Vaughan, ed., Samuel Palmer, 1805–1881,Vision and Landscape, London, 2005, 87–93. Cornfield by Moonlight was also selected as the cover for a long-playing record of the work, conducted by the composer, that was released by the Decca record company in 1964. The Land of Beulah in Pilgrim’s Progress is the place of heavenly joy where pilgrims wait until they are called to the celestial city. See Commemorative Catalogue of the Exhibition of British Art, Royal Academy of Arts, London, 1934, cat.no. 883, 204. In addition to the examples discussed below, for visual references to this work see for example Russell Drysdale, Darling Point Sydney, 1953, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne and John O’Connor, Moon and Round Pond, 1960, Royal Academy of Arts, in Tim Barringer, Opulence and Anxiety: Landscape Paintings from the Royal Academy, Compton Verney, Warwickshire, 2007, 124–5. John Piper, British Romantic Artists, London, 1942. The general editor was W. J. Turner, who himself published a book on English Music in the series in 1941. The series had begun in the early 1930s, but was greatly expanded during the war years. Subjects ranged widely from British Botanists and British Butterflies to the Women’s Instiute, but

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there was an emphasis on subject matter valued by neo-Romanticism, such as Wild Flowers in Britain (Geoffrey Grigson, 1944), Roman Britain (Ian Richmond, 1947) and EnglishVillages (Edmund Blunden, 1941). See Simon Martin, ‘The balm of culture: Romantic art and literary publications of the 1940s’ in Simon Martin, Martin Butlin and Robert Meyrick, Poets in a Landscape:The Romantic Spirit in British Art, exh. cat., Chichester, 2007, 83–114. Paul Banks and Philip Reed, Painting and Music, exhibition catalogue, Aldeburgh: Britten-Pears Library, 1993, 6. See also John Piper, ‘Designing for Britten’ in David Herbert, ed., The Operas of Benjamin Britten, London, 1979, 5–7. Palmer was a Londoner, born in Surrey Square, Newington, London, and his family moved to Houndsditch in 1817, and his widowed father moved thereafter to Bloomsbury. Samuel Palmer’s choice to move out of London to Shoreham, in about 1825, marked a deliberate rejection of the urban in favour of the rural. Piper, British Romantic Artists, 30. On Piper at Lullingstone see David Fraser Jenkins, John Piper:The Forties, London and New York, 2000, 42. Piper, British Romantic Artists, 31. See Nanette Aldred, ‘A Canterbury tale: Powell and Pressburger’s film fantasies of Britain’ in David Mellor, ed, A Paradise Lost, 117–24. See Raymond Monelle, The Musical Topic: Hunt, Military and Pastoral, Bloomington, IN, 2006, and Robert C. Cafritz, Lawrence Gowing and David Rosand, Places of Delight:The Pastoral Landscape, exh. cat., Philips Collection, Washington, DC, 1988. For a discussion of this issue see Humphry Carpenter, Benjamin Britten:A Biography, London, 1992, 259. Virgil Thomson, review of ‘Paul Bunyan’, NewYork Herald Tribune, 6 May 1941. William Glock, ‘Contemporary music in wartime’, Horizon, 4: 22, October 1941, 237. W. H. Auden, ‘Libretto: Paul Bunyan’, in David Herbert, ed., The Operas of Benjamin Britten, London, 85. Auden to Britten, 31 January 1942, quoted in Donald Mitchell and Philip Reed, eds., Letters from a Life:The Selected Letters and Diaries of Benjamin Britten 1913–76, vol. 2, London, 1991, 1015–16. Mitchell and Reed, Letters from a Life, 2, 800. Peter Evans, The Music of Benjamin Britten, Oxford, 1979, 1996, 61. Britten’s post-war work, including the War Requiem, will be discussed in detail in my forthcoming book, Broken Pastoral:Art and Music in Britain from the Gothic Revival to Punk Rock. See Suzanne Bosman, The National Gallery in Wartime, London, 2008, 35–53 and 91–9. At the end of December 1939, the Pilgrim Trust had appointed a Committee for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA), the direct progenitor (in 1945) of the Arts Council of Great Britain. See Brian Foss, War Paint:Art,War, State and Identity in Britain, 1939–1945, New Haven and London, 2007, 20. The Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo had been completed in 1940; the first performance was at Wigmore Hall on 23 September 1942. BrittenPears Library, Published Works Database: http://www.brittenpears. org/?page=research/catalogue/detail.html&id=116. Accessed 7 August 2009. Herbert, The Operas of Benjamin Britten, 99. Diary, 29 June 1937, quoted Carpenter, Benjamin Britten, 107. Edward Sackville-West, ‘Music: Some aspects of the contemporary problem II’, Horizon, x: 55, July 1944, 70. Kitty Hauser, Shadow Sites: Photography,Archaeology and the British Landscape, 1927–1955, Oxford, 2007, 16. Memoirs of the Life of John Constable, R.A., by C.R. Leslie, R.A.; edited and enlarged by the Hon. Andrew Shirley, London, 1937. Quoted Carpenter, Benjamin Britten, 257. John Constable to Rev. John Fisher, 23 October 1810. The most reliable version is R. B. Beckett, ed., John Constable’s Correspondence, Ipswich,1962–1970, vol. 6, 77. See, for example, Carpenter, Benjamin Britten; Susan Seymour Carpenter, The Operas of Benjamin Britten: Expression and Evasion, Woodbridge, 2004; Philip Brett, Music and Sexuality in Britten, ed. George E. Haggerty, Berkeley, CA, 2006. Peter Pears to Benjamin Britten, n.d., c. 1950, quoted Carpenter, Benjamin Britten, 257. The work in question was either the rather dismal

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oil painting titled Boys Fishing near Flatford Mill, c. 1813, in the Fairhaven Collection (whose authenticity has been questioned; see Graham Reynolds, The Early Paintings and Drawings of John Constable, New Haven, 1996, 180), or Stratford Mill, 1820, sometimes known after 1840 as TheYoung Waltonians. The finished painting (now London, National Gallery) and full-size sketch (now Yale Center for British Art) were both in private collections in 1950. The large sketch, bought by Walter Hutchinson of Hutchinson & Co. in 1946, was sold again in 1951, and it seems most likely that this was the work to which Pears refers. See Graham Reynolds, The Later Paintings and Drawings of John Constable, New Haven, 1984, 43–5. Mitchell and Reed, Letters from a Life, vol. 2, 1015–16. Piper, British Romantic Artists, 12. Thomas Gainsborough to William Jackson, in John Hayes, ed., Letter of Thomas Gainsborough, New Haven, 2001, 68. On Britten’s working methods, see Philip Reed, ‘Finding the right notes’, in Paul Banks, ed., The Making of Peter Grimes, Woodbridge, 1996, 79–115, especially 83 where Banks notes that ‘The fundamental pattern of Britten’s working methods hardly ever strayed from the disciplined routine adopted in early manhood.’ There is no doubt that Britten’s literary taste was greatly influence by that of his friend W. H. Auden (at least until 1943), and Peter Pears ‘supplied Britten with suggestions for most of his texts, if not with the texts themselves’. See Boris Ford, ‘Introduction’, in B. Ford, ed., Benjamin Britten’s Poets, Manchester, 1996, ix. Benjamin Britten, Works forVoice & Chamber Orchestra, London, 1999, 172–82. Imogen Holst, Benjamin Britten, London, 1966, 39. Edward Sackville West, ‘Music: Some aspects of the contemporary problem III’, Horizon, x: 56, August 1944, 115. On Sackville-West, see Michael de-la-Noy, Eddy:The Life of Edward Sackville-West, London, 1988. Sackville-West’s The Rescue was published in 1945 with illustrations by Henry Moore. See David Mitchinson, ‘Introduction’, in Henry Moore: War and Utility, exh. cat. Imperial War Museum, London, 2006, 7. Piper, British Romantic Artists, 32. Daniel Rodriguez, ‘A melodic analysis of Benjamin Britten’s Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings, op. 31’, 1993. ETD Collection for University of Texas, El Paso. Paper AAIEP04421. http://digitalcommons.utep.edu/dissertations/AAIEP04421. Accessed 7 July 2009. Christopher Palmer, ‘The orchestral song-cycles’, in Christopher Palmer, ed., The Britten Companion, Cambridge, 1984, 318. See Colin Harrison, ‘The artistic rediscovery of Samuel Palmer’, in William Vaughan ed., Samuel Palmer, 1805–81:Vision and Landscape, London, 2005, 55–61. A. H. Palmer, Catalogue of an exhibition of drawings, etchings & woodcuts by Samuel Palmer and other disciples of William Blake, London, 1926. Graham Sutherland, quoted Douglas Cooper, The Work of Graham Sutherland, London, 1961, 7; see also Colin Harrison ‘The artistic rediscovery of Samuel Palmer’. On Linnell’s attitudes to landscape, see Tim Barringer, Men at Work:Art and Labour inVictorian Britain, New Haven, 2005, ch. 2. A. H. Palmer, The Life and Letters of Samuel Palmer, London, 1892, 14. Robert John Thornton, The Temple of Flora, or, Garden of Nature, London, 1807. See Gerald E. Bentley, Stranger from Paradise:A Biography of William Blake, New Haven, 2001, 388–9. See also Annabel Patterson, Pastoral and Ideology:Virgil toValéry, Berkeley, CA, 285ff. A. H. Palmer, The Life and Letters of Samuel Palmer, 15–16. Quoted Geoffrey Grigson, ‘Samuel Palmer: The politics of an artist’, Horizon, IV: 2, November 1941, 318. Grigson, ‘Samuel Palmer’, 319. Grigson, ‘Samuel Palmer’, 320. Murray Schaeffer, British Composers in Interview, London, 1963, 117. See E. J. Hobsbawm and George Rudé, Captain Swing, London, 1969. See David Bindman, ‘Samuel Palmer’s An Address to the Electors of West Kent, 1832, rediscovered’, Blake:An Illustrated Quarterly, XIX/2, 1985, 56–68 and Bindman, ‘The Politics of Vision: Palmer’s Address to the Electors of West Kent, 1832’, in Vaughan, Samuel Palmer, 29–32. F. G. Stephens, Notes by Mr F.G. Stephens on a Collection of Drawings, Paintings and Etchings by the Late Samuel Palmer, London, 1881, 15–16. See also William Vaughan, ‘The Lonely Tower (c.1865–81)’ in Vaughan, Samuel Palmer.

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71 A 1927 edition of this much-reprinted collection was in the library Britten and Pears amassed at Aldeburgh. See Ford, Benjamin Britten’s Poets, 287. 72 Even earlier, Ralph Vaughan Williams had published a setting of the poem for solo voice and piano. ‘The splendour falls’, published 1914 (voice and piano), first published in TheVocalist, May 1905. 73 Peter Pears in Hans Keller and Donald Mitchell, eds., Benjamin Britten:A Commentary on His Works from a Group of Specialists, London, 1952, 67. 74 Britten would set The Chimney Sweeper in Songs and Proverbs of William Blake, op. 74, 1965. 75 Quoted from Robert N. Essick, ed., William Blake: Songs of Innocence and Experience, San Marino CA, 2008, 121. For the slightly variant version that Britten set, see Ford, Britten’s Poets, 104. 76 The lectures, given at Birkbeck College, were later reworked as the Reith Lectures in 1955. See Nikolaus Pevsner, ‘Blake’s flaming line’, in The Englishness of English Art, London, 1956, 117–46. On Pevsner, see William Vaughan, ‘Behind Pevsner: Englishness as an art-historical category’, in David Peters Corbett et al., The Geographies of Englishness: Landscape and the National Past, 1880–1940, New Haven, 2002, 347–68. Pevsner’s allencompassing The Buildings of England, which champions the vernacular and the architecture of the village and small town, is also entirely consonant with neo-Romantic thought. 77 The provenance of the Forster copy of Songs of Innocence and Experience is given in Andrew Lincoln, ‘Introduction’, in A. Lincoln, ed., William Blake, Songs of Innocence and Experience, Princeton, NJ, 1991, 23–4. Britten had known Forster since the 1930s, but their close friendship dates from after 1944. Forster did, however, attend the National Gallery recital of 22 October 1942, and wrote to Britten to ask him for a copy of the texts. See Mary Lago and P. Furbank, eds, Selected Letters of E.M. Forster, vol. 2, Cambridge, MA, 1985, 207. Jacob Bronowski’s influential and widely-reviewed William Blake:A Man without a Mask, London, 1943, which appeared late in 1943 (or perhaps in January 1944 according to the inside title page), was the latest of many studies to draw attention to the interplay between image and text in Blake’s books indicating the timeliness of Britten’s selection of The Sick Rose. 78 Samuel Richardson, Clarissa (1748), quoted Essick, William Blake: Songs of Innocence and Experience, 122. 79 Edward Sackville-West, ‘Music: Some aspects of the contemporary problem III’, 115. 80 Ronald Duncan, quoted Carpenter, Benjamin Britten, 186. 81 Ford, Britten’s Poets, 102. 82 Edward Sackville-West, ‘Music: Some aspects of the contemporary problem. III’, 115. 83 Carpenter, Benjamin Britten, 186; Arnold Whittall, The Music of Britten and Tippett: Studies in Themes and Techniques, Cambridge, 1982, 81. 84 See Charlotte Klonk, Science and the Perception of Nature: British Landscape Art in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries, New Haven, 1996, 37–65, and Thornton, The Temple of Flora. 85 ‘The Illustrations of this English Pastoral are by the famous BLAKE, illustrator of Young’s Night Thoughts and Blair’s GRAVE; who designed and engraved them himself. This is mentioned as they display less of art than genius, and are much admired by some eminent painters.’ Robert John Thornton, The Pastorals ofVirgil with a Course of English Reading,Adapted for Schools: In which all the Proper Facililties are given, enablingYouth to acquire the Latin Language in the shortest Period of Time, 3rd edn., London, 1821, opposite p. 13. 86 William Blake, Canterbury Pilgrims, engraving, 1809–10. See David Bindman, William Blake: His Art and Times, New Haven, 1982, 157–8. See also Nanette Aldred, ‘A Canterbury Tale’, in Mellor, A Paradise Lost, 117–24; and Stella Hockenhull, Neo-Romantic Landscapes:An Aesthetic Approach to the Films of Powell and Pressburger, Newcastle upon Tyne, 2008. 87 It was first published in Tonson’s Miscellany in 1708. See M. G. Segar, ed., The Poems of Ambrose Philips, Oxford, 1937. 88 Letter of 2 October 1800, quoted in G. E. Bentley, Jr, The Stranger from Paradise:A Biography of William Blake, New Haven and London, 2001, 214. 89 See Bentley, Jr, The Stranger from Paradise, 202–66. 90 Ambrose Philips, ‘Imitation of Eclogue I’, in Thornton, The Pastorals of Virgil, 13. 91 William Empson, SomeVersions of Pastoral, London, 1935. Auden cites Empson in his lecture on ‘As You Like It’; see Arthur Kirsch, ed., W.H. Auden’s Lectures on Shakespeare, Princeton, NJ, 2002. Furthermore, Auden met Empson in 1938; see Stuart Christie, ‘“A Further Reservation in

Favour of Strangeness”: Isherwood’s queer pastoral in The Mortmere Stories and “On Reugen Island”’, Modern Fiction Studies, 47, 4, Winter 2001, 800–30. 92 Bindman titles this plate ‘Menalcas watching women dance’, but since the two main seated figures hold musical instruments, it seems more likely that the unseen patron is looking on imperiously from the shelter of his stately home. David Bindman, The Complete Graphic Works of William Blake, London, 1978, 109. 93 E. M. Forster, ‘George Crabbe: The poet and the man’, in Philip Brett, Benjamin Britten: Peter Grimes, Cambridge, 1983, 4. 94 E. M. Forster, ‘George Crabbe’, 3. 95 E. M. Forster, ‘George Crabbe’, 4. 96 E. M. Forster, ‘George Crabbe’, 4. 97 See Donald Mitchell, Britten and Auden in the Thirties, 2nd edn., Woodbridge, 2000, 76. See Montagu Slater, Stay Down Miner, London, 1936. Britten was considering writing ‘music for it’, presumably incidental music for a stage or radio production. 98 These were published separately as Four Sea Interludes from Peter Grimes, op. 33a, first performed at the Cheltenham Festival on 13 June 1945. 99 Desmond Shawe-Taylor, ‘Peter Grimes: A review of the first performance’, 1945, in Brett, Benjamin Britten: Peter Grimes, 153. 100 Eric Crozier, ‘Notes on the production of Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes’, in Paul Banks, ed., The Making of Peter Grimes, Woodbridge, 1996, 8. 101 Crozier, ‘Notes on the production of Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes’, 10. 102 See for example, Raymond T. Cowern, ‘Thatching at Cavendish, Suffolk’, in David Mellor, Gill Saunders and Patrick Wright, Recording Britain:A Pictorial Domesday of Pre-war Britain, exh. cat, Victoria and Albert Museum, Newton Abbot, 1990, 143. 103 See Hans Keller, ‘The story, the music not excluded (1952)’, in Brett, Benjamin Britten: Peter Grimes, 110–11. 104 E. M. Forster, ‘George Crabbe’, 105 Holst, Benjamin Britten, 39. 106 Peter Pears, ‘Neither a hero nor a villain’, Radio Times, 8 March 1946, 3, quoted Seymour, The Operas of Benjamin Britten, 41. 107 Edmund Wilson, ‘An account of ‘Peter Grimes’ from ‘London in Midsummer’, in Brett, Bejmain Britten: Peter Grimes, 162. 108 Michael Tippett, ‘Holst’, in Tippett on Music, ed. Meirion Bowen, Oxford, 1995, 74. See also David Jablonsky, Churchill, the Great Game and Total War, London, 1991, 69. 109 See Malcolm Yorke, The Spirit of Place: Nine Neo-Romantic English Artists and their Times, London, 1988, 112–13. 110 Edward Sackville-West, Graham Sutherland, 9. 111 Edward Sackville-West, Graham Sutherland, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1943, 9. 112 See Yorke, The Spirit of Place, 132–3. 113 Carpenter, Benjamin Britten, 187. 114 Horizon, V: 27, March 1942. See Anne Anderson, Robert Meyrick and Peter Nahum, Ancient Landscapes: PastoralVisions, Woodbridge, 2008, 81. 115 See for example: Pablo Picasso, Nude Standing by the Sea, oil on canvas, 1929, New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art. 116 Edward Sackville West, ‘Music: Some aspects of the contemporary problem III’, 118.

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