Literary Britten: Words and Music in Benjamin Britten's Vocal Works ed. by Kate Kennedy

Abstract

Reviewed by: Literary Britten: Words and Music in Benjamin Britten's Vocal Works ed. by Kate Kennedy Kevin Salfen Literary Britten: Words and Music in Benjamin Britten's Vocal Works. Edited by Kate Kennedy. (Aldeburgh Studies in Music, no. 13.) Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell, 2018. [xx, 405 p. ISBN 9781783272853 (hardcover), $99; ISBN 9781787442566 (e-book), price varies.] Illustrations, music examples, list of contributors, bibliography, index. In her brief introduction to Literary Britten—a collection of eighteen essays by prominent Britten scholars as well as academics whose careers have not been devoted to the erstwhile Baron of Aldeburgh—Kate Kennedy explains that "this book has chosen to move away from the theoretical debates concerning the relationship between words and music" (p. 5) and that it hangs together as "a snapshot of the lively diversity of current thinking on Britten" (p. 7). It may also point to a chameleonic quality in the composer, some capacity of his work to permit starkly contrasting views. Kennedy describes Britten as "one of the most literary composers" (p. 8), although what evidence supports this comparative assertion, echoed in the blurb on the back cover, never makes an appearance. More literary than who? we are left to wonder. And why does it matter if Britten wins this contest? Does being "most literary" make him top boy or enough of a brainbox to boost his canonical status, to give him a slab in the Westminster of the imagination? These are lines of thinking that the volume's editor and writers generally do not pick up: to explore what being "literary" meant in and beyond Britten's creative life and evolving circle of collaborators, and [End Page 123] what significance that should have for a twenty-first-century academic readership. Throughout the volume, the editor has used a light hand, letting writers be who they will be, which is why the argument for a "literary Britten" can never coalesce. Nominally divided into two major sections—"Perspectives" and "Studies," with one focused on broad issues and the other on specific works—"slippage" between these modes abounds, which further blurs the book's overarching focus. The architecture merely provides a place to put things, and so, as with many essay collections trailing the composer's centenary in 2013, Literary Britten's success depends not on the structure of the volume or on its editor but on the writer of each chapter. The first goes to Mervyn Cooke, who summarizes Britten's relationships with his librettists, observing along the way that Britten initially worked with fiercely independent ones (W. H. Auden, Montagu Slater, E. M. Forster) and gradually shifted to ones who were more "practical"—malleable, one might say (Myfanwy Piper, William Plomer). Although there is little new information here, Cooke's narrative has authority and serves as an effective entrée to the field because of his special place in the history of Britten studies. In "Britten, Auden and the 1930s," John Fuller draws on a lifelong history of reading and listening to give a rich sense of Auden's significance for the composer, though the finest quality of the chapter might be that it embodies an erudition and facility with unexpected connections that approximate Auden's, a kind of anachronistic example of what being "literary" might look like in Britten and Auden's circle of the 1930s. The third chapter marks a noticeable shift toward smaller claims, smaller gains. Nicholas Clark, as librarian with the Britten–Pears Foundation and series editor for Aldeburgh Studies in Music, has, like Cooke, earned a broad brush, and he does make some expansive claims: he proposes a view of evil in the operas Turn of the Screw and Owen Wingrave to compare with Henry James's "vision of evil," a distillation aided by consideration of James's oneact play "The Saloon." Clark also suggests an important point about "being literary": it permits, perhaps demands, the fruitful interplay of texts, which in turn necessitates that the scholar do more than say "x short story begat y opera." When we consider such textcomplexes, we begin to piece together the rich life of the mind that a volume called Literary Britten might have aspired to depict. Kate...