Few music lovers in Britain will have been unaware that
yesterday marked the centenary of the birth of Benjamin Britten. Even from the remote outpost of former
empire, thousands of miles from the UK, where I’m currently based, distant echoes
of Britten celebrations reached me - by courtesy of the inbuilt radio of my
Smartphone which, from the day I bought it, has saved my sanity more than once
with its ability to pick out the great radio stations of the world. An eight hour time difference, the need to
sleep and the obligations of a full working day meant that, unfortunately, all
I heard of what BBC Radio 3 was putting on for the day were small trailers, but
even that was better than the soprano sax hideously wailing a kind of moronic
keening vaguely related to once beautiful Christmas Carols which invades every
corner of my hotel. One trailer included
the phrase; “Benjamin Britten was England’s greatest composer”.
Long gone are the days when a Radio 3 commentary offered mildly
scholarly information delivered with impersonal authority. In place has come a colloquial chattiness
which places personal opinion over factual statement. I have to admit I quite like it, even if I
still yearn for the days of Patricia Hughes and the sense of unambiguous superiority
she brought to the role (if she said it, it HAD to be true). So when a voice on Radio 3 tells me that “Benjamin
Britten was England’s greatest composer”, I don’t accept this as fact but
rather as a statement of opinion. In my
lectures, talks and writings I frequently do exactly the same thing; make a
bald statement of apparently unarguable fact so outrageous and extreme that
those who hear or read it are driven to question it and, hopefully, create an
argument during which ideas are shared and opinions formulated or
modified. It matters to me that people
think and talk about music, and argue over it; it keeps it alive and fresh in
people’s minds, and shows that it still matters to us. Told that “Benjamin Britten was England’s greatest
composer”, I immediately start to dispute the statement.
Very few composers in history have polarised opinions among
music lovers more than Britten. There
are those who regard him as, unquestionably, one of the truly great composers
of the last century, and others who find in his music nothing of any interest
or value. A discussion in a bar after a
concert (in which the Cello Symphony had been performed) led one of those
present to challenge us to “show me one real tune Britten ever wrote”, claiming
that all good melodies in Britten came from other composers (Folk Song
settings, Purcell Variations, Frank Bridge Variations, and so on). Britten is either regarded as “great” or “terrible”,
and comparatively few people seem to take the middle ground.
Putting my cards firmly on the table, I must say that Britten is by no means a composer whose music I consistently like or even admire. I cannot find it in me to enthuse over the War Requiem or Albert Herring, while most of the purely instrumental works leave me cold; the fact that I once attempted to foist the dire Prelude and Fugue on a Theme of Vittoria on an unsuspecting audience sends me into a cold sweat. I recognise the touches of genius in Peter Grimes and the Sinfonia da Requiem, although neither work is one for which I have any affection, but I do profess a personal liking for the Rejoice in the Lamb, the Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge and many of the folk song settings. Generally, though, I look with indifference on the 105 CDs I have in my personal collection which feature Britten, and rarely, if ever, taken them off the shelf purely for listening pleasure. Personal dislike is one thing, and mine certainly has no bearing on whether or not Britten was “the greatest English composer”. But the very fact that someone went so far as to make that claim has me trying to find an alternative name to knock Britten off that elevated perch.
What of Elgar?
Certainly his Enigma Variations and
Cello Concerto have far wider appeal
and seem to get far more frequent performances than any orchestral work by
Britten, while The Dream of Gerontius certainly
gives the War Requiem a run for its
money. And while we can dismiss a lot of
Elgar as being too flavoured by English patriotism to have much relevance to
the international music-loving public, that same charge could certainly be
levelled against at least some of Britten’s music (notably Gloriana). Evens pretty
split there, I think, and I would not like to argue the case for Elgar too
strongly, much as I prefer a lot of his music to Britten’s.
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Elgar made it on to British bank note |
There are many who would (and do) proclaim William Byrd as “the
greatest English composer”. The trouble is,
his music resonates only with a relatively small and select group of musicians,
and while wide appeal does not, in itself, confer greatness, it has to be taken
into consideration.
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Purcell made it on to a postage stamp |
So what about Henry Purcell?
Frequently Britten is listed as “the greatest English composer since Purcell”, implying that the two are, at the very least, on a par with each other. I would be more willing to press Purcell’s claim, not least because Dido and Aeneas has to be in a league of its own in the opera house, while even Britten held that great tune from Abdelazar in high esteem. Purcell has certainly achieved a greater level of popularity in our own time than almost any other English composer, appearing on a postage stamp and actually making it into the rich tapestry of recent fiction (Diana Norman’s 1994 romp through 17th century London – The Vizard Mask - has Purcell hovering there in a delicious cameo role) and his death - interestingly exactly 218 years before Britten was born - has spawned at least as many legends and conspiracy theories as Mozart’s (I particularly like the story of his wife locking him out of the house overnight and emptying a chamber pot over him – causing him to die from exposure). The trouble with Purcell is that his genius was rather stifled by the constraints of his age, and the passage of time has led to much of his original music surviving only out of its proper context. And you can’t fairly judge a composer for good or ill on those terms.
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It appears the greatest achievement of any humn being in the field of music was written with the Left Hand |


We tend to gloss over a whole host of significant composers
in our desire to find the “greatest”. Vaughan
Williams once carried that label in many people’s eyes, and there are still
those who have a profound passion for his symphonies (a passion I, for one,
find utterly unfathomable), while for me the really great English symphonists were
Bax and, especially, Stanford. The
latter may have been Irish, and his symphonies rather more flavoured by Brahms
than we could overlook, but his contribution to English music was certainly more
deep-seated and profound than Britten’s.
A fellow university student urged me to seek out the Symphony in G minor
by Moeran, proclaiming it “the greatest ever English symphony”, and for a time
I agreed. In fact, I only came to see
its flaws when an incredibly dire performance of it was given by the Malaysian Philharmonic
Orchestra under Kevin Field, and I began to see that it was a work which relied
on an incisive conductor, a cutting-edge orchestra and a sympathetic audience to
bring out its glories. And that rather diminishes
its stature as a work of universal greatness.
Some of the greatest music by English composers certainly
eclipses even Britten at his finest.
Holst brought something extraordinarily visionary to music with The Planets. Did any composer ever show
such a natural affinity with a specific geographical location in his music than
Herbert Howells? Could any composer
elevate the mundane to the ethereal through a few simple bars than Delius with
his “The Walk to the Paradise Garden” near the end of his great opera A Village Romeo and Juliet?
These are all examples of great music by English
composers. But does this really get us
closer to deciding which composer was really the greatest of them all?
Of course, it’s not just a pointless exercise, it is also a
hugely stupid one. Does anybody ever ask
who was the greatest German composer, the greatest Austrian composer, the
greatest Italian composer, even the greatest French composer? No. To
ask such a question, and certainly to attempt to answer it, is to belittle the
whole nation’s music. Britten was unquestionably
a superb composer, possibly even a great one, but he would be the last person
to diminish all the other composers from Tallis to Tippett by singling one out
as special. Over the last 700 years
England has bred marvellous composers – there are plenty of them at work at the
moment – it would be a devastating indictment on those centuries of achievement
to suggest that in all that time, only one truly great one has emerged.
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