Introduction And Chronology

Abstract Britten’s writings in this period are unlike anything he later penned. Unbridled by lasting fame and public expectations, and buoyed by his well-developed sense of ambition and destiny, his essays attack any number of shibboleths and errant knights. In this, of course, if Auden was not always standing at Britten’s shoulder, he was at least sharpening his pencil. Even when American domicile and war had intervened, when Britten’s absence from England provoked censure and outrage in bodies ranging from the Royal Philharmonic to the Musical Times, when his artistic colleagues Auden and Isherwood were under fire in the Spectator and the House of Commons, he kept up his attack on the musical and political complacency of the country he had left behind. His defence of Mahler (Essay rn) is on one level a remarkably prescient piece about a composer whose true worth would really only be discovered once the LP record had eclipsed its short-breathed predecessor in the early 1950s, but on quite another level it is an attack on English concert programming, on the narrow-minded subscription to a symphonic canon defined to a large extent by Brahms’s death in 1897. To Britten, those who sought a broader definition, such as the BBC’s Edward Clark (Essay 2, the second of four essays written by the jobbing composer to supplement his meagre income), were fighting the same battle that he and his fellow artists (more commonly writers than musicians) were fighting. His piece on ‘England and the Folk-Art Problem’ (Essay 8) draws battle lines-admittedly not of his own authorship (English pastoralists had long been slogging it out with Teutonic infiltrators)-which he fervently believed would define the future of British music. Moreover, the Auden poem quoted at the end of the article represents Britten’s artistic creed in this period: