Introduction: Britten and British Music

Summary

4 December 1976. The day Benjamin Britten died came near the end of a year whose most memorable musical event, for me, was the Boulez-Chéreau centenary Ring cycle at Bayreuth. Boulez's own Rituel: In memoriam Bruno Maderna (1974), first performed in London in April 1975, was just one imposing example of a contemporary modernism remote from what seemed to have been Britten's increasingly cautious and constrained output even before illness began to take its toll. Apart from Boulez's own immediate contemporaries – Stockhausen, Berio, Ligeti – younger composers as different as Steve Reich and Peter Maxwell Davies were becoming increasingly prominent. And among older composers none was more celebrated, at least in Britain, than Michael Tippett, completing a new opera, The Ice Break, at the time of Britten's death which reinforced the evidence that he had ‘moved with the times’ since 1960 to an extent that Britten had not.

Even in 1976 it was possible to step back and observe that, while Britten was not to be counted among the radical spirits of the time (proof: Boulez did not conduct him) British music did not appear to be evolving in a way that attracted the conductor's unreserved interest: in the event it would be Birtwistle rather than Maxwell Davies whom Boulez would prefer. Nevertheless, it is safe to conclude that Boulez's resistance to Maxwell Davies – if such it was – was not on account of the judgement that his music had gone into reverse and was adopting Britten-like techniques. Whether or not it was a simple matter of Boulezian alarm bells being set off by Maxwell Davies's Stravinsky-like relish for allusion, parody which seemed to equate transformation with distortion, and embracing expressionistic extravagance more wholeheartedly than Boulez the composer could ever find acceptable, the evidence is clear that even in 1976, contemporary music was continuing to explore a variety of alternatives to one-style-fits-all avant-gardism. In the longer term, composers born around the time of Britten's death – in Britain, Joseph Phibbs, Huw Watkins and Tarik O’Regan are examples – would move closer to Britten than to Boulez when laying the foundations of their own means of expression.