5 - Hospitality and Politics

Summary

Britten's five visits to the Soviet Union between 1963 and 1971, constituting in total a period of over seventy days spent mostly in Russia but also in Soviet Armenia and Latvia, represent the outcome of a unique combination of personal, political and musical factors. Closer analysis of these, and how they developed and changed over this eight-year period, suggests a more complex political reading on both British and Soviet sides than that of those who take at face value the atmospheric accounts – particularly of his extended fourth visit to Armenia and Russia in the summer of 1965 – by those who were present. This is, perhaps, particularly the case inside Russia, where Britten's first-hand engagement with its artistic elite, and his genuine pleasure at spending time in the country and meeting those who appreciated his music, continue to generate interest and admiration, while those who recalled these visits fifty years later – such as Galina Vishnevskaya, and the Armenian composers Edward Mirzoian and Alexander Arutiunian – still did so with evident affection, perhaps choosing to play down the political realities involved, at some times more explicitly than others, in orchestrating the visits at every stage.

The Pre-1960 Context

Britten's first-hand engagement with the Soviet Union was only made possible by the death of Stalin in 1953 and the ‘thaw’ which took place two years later, following Khrushchev's partial denunciation of the former leader. In that year Cecil Parrott, the music-loving British Minister in Moscow, recognised the unique opportunity in concluding that

conditions are very favourable at the present moment for the visit of an English musician to the Soviet Union … He might be a composer, in which case he need not necessarily conduct; his visit would at any rate serve as an excuse for the performance by the Russians of some of his works. Many of the Soviet composers lamented to me that the good relations that they had had with English musicians had been broken off for a number of years. I suggest that … the sending of one composer here, purely to take up the threads again and to talk about English music would do an enormous amount of good.