4 - Britten and Stravinsky

Summary

That Britten engaged with such a towering twentieth-century musical phenomenon as Igor Stravinsky is hardly surprising. Even Cecil Gray, whose A Survey of Contemporary Music Britten read with enthusiasm in 1932, prefaced a by no means positive assessment of Stravinsky's music with the observation that:

Whatever one's personal opinion may be concerning the intrinsic value and ultimate significance of his music, it must be admitted that he is to a greater extent than any other living composer the embodiment of the artistic ideals and aesthetic convictions which are most characteristic of our age.

By 1930 most commentators on the composer concurred with the related viewpoint that ‘there are very few composers who have not fallen under the influence of this powerful … creative art … With his mighty and masterful hand he has frequently turned the course of his creative art and together with it turned the whole musical world.’ Stravinsky was thus the sole Russian highlighted in the first symposium on Britten's music, in 1952, as a significant assimilated influence in terms of instrumental technique, orchestral texture and rhythm. The connection was seen in terms of an obvious corollary between ‘Britten's own search for a European stylisation and Strawinsky's patent and potent Europeanism’, coupled with the ‘extraordinarily powerful appeal to Britten's imagination’ of the composer's ‘essentially extrovert personality’. A greater appreciation of Britten's earlier works would now lead one to make a more nuanced assessment, recognising that powerful external influences such as this tended to reflect and develop existing features of his musical language, such as his acute appreciation of individual timbres and preference for a clear orchestral texture. Moreover, in a discussion of the wider Russian influences on Britten there is something of an irony in that Stravinsky spent Britten's entire creative life in exile from Russia, and that his personal relationship with Britten had conspicuously deteriorated by the 1960s. Given that the musical influence of Stravinsky on Britten has received the most consistent attention of all his Russian connections, particularly in Peter Evans's landmark study of 1979, it is more illuminating in this case to consider why the relationship between the two composers took the unpredictable and ambiguous form it did, both personally and musically.