Genteelly clearing the decks
Jonathan Keates
BENJAMIN BRITTEN'S OPERAS by Michael Wilcox Absolute Press, £6.99, pp. 96 All works of art, no matter how long ago they were created or how fragmentary our knowledge of their creators, are nowadays held to contain a subtext, rather as one might expect all decently constructed houses to possess electrical wiring, main drainage and a damp course. What you see, in terms of a painting, a novel or a film, is not the half of what you get, and the critic incapable of transmogri- fying the apparent simplicities of plot, character and image into the most complex of semaphore systems is scarcely deemed worth his salt.
More often than not the exercise is rewarding, . occasionally it seems otiose, now and then purely idiotic. I remain unpersuaded, for instance, that The Impor- tance of Being Earnest is the sort of Bacon- ian cryptograph, interwoven with leering secret messages about Oscar and Bosie and the love that dare not etc, which certain contemporary analysts are anxious to make it, all that stuff about Bunburying notwith- standing.
From time to time, however, an artist seems to court intrusion by these truffle- hounds and Jack Russells precisely because of his own or his friends' eagerness to sup- press an inconvenient truth. The irresistible impression of Benjamin Britten, even before Humphrey Carpenter's notoriously uncomfortable biography, was that of someone whose homosexuality might not have mattered quite so much, whatever the legal sanctions in force against it for most of his life, had he, Peter Pears and their circle not muffled it under thick dust- sheets of English bourgeois embarrass- ment.
Ferreting out the gay subtexts of Britten's operas as Michael Wilcox has done in this monograph (part of a new series dedicated to exploring the 'often unexpected ways in which homosexuality has informed the life and creative work of gay and lesbian artists') thus seems a per- fectly pardonable indiscretion. Given that the various dramatic works, including Noye's Fludde and Curlew River, can be seen as a comprehensive shop-window dis- play of their composer's contorted sexuali- ty, it seems rather surprising that nobody has attempted the task before. Boys, in one form or another, provided a leitmotif in successive librettos, and at least some of the admiring audience of Peter Grimes at its Sadler's Wells premiere in 1945 must have realised that what the piece concealed in the way of allusion to Ben's private pas- sions was potentially as shocking as the world of murder, guilt and insanity it brought onto the stage.
Pears's attempt at damage limitation in a subsequent radio broadcast, pleading implausibly against received ideas of Grimes as a sadist — 'men are frequently brutal when infuriated' — found its counterpart in Britten's deliberate attempt, among the later operas, to defuse the erot- ic charge of their climaxes. Wilcox singles out The Rape of Lucretia as a case in point, noting the composer's own experience of sexual abuse by one of his schoolmasters. The worst of such failures of nerve in the cause of genteel repression occurs in Billy Budd, where instead of realising the crucial confrontation between Billy Budd and `Starry Vere' towards the opera's close, Britten feebly substitutes an interlude of 34 orchestral chords.
Acknowledging the homosexual under- tow was easier in a piece such as Albert Herring, where the apparently innocent tale of a virginal village lad, looking after his mother's grocery business, who is turned into a drunken King of the May, can be seen as masking a whole series of coded nudges. Prelapsarian Albert, ripe for a fall, is not as other men. The sounds of jingling keys and whistling in the dark, not to speak of Albert's 'Swan Vestas! Swan Vestas! Open your mouth, shut your eyes, strike the match for a nice surprise', are all borrowings from the world of nocturnal cruising in the brave old days of crimi- nalised queerdorn. What really happened to Albert that night on the road to Campsey Ash is summed up in his wanton- ly inviting, 'Have a nice peach!' to the children the morning after.
Wilcox is more convincing here than in suggesting that the raddled, venomous Elizabeth I in Gloriana is Britten's self- portrait as the mean queen dumping successive favourites. The inevitable conclusion, however, is that Death in Venice, significantly labelled 'an evil opera' by Pears, was the composer's long-delayed `coming out', its portrayal of Aschenbach's death as Tadzio gambols on the beach foreshadowing Britten's own demise soon afterwards. Wilcox's book is a rational, appreciative essay which seldom overstates its case. The does-it-really-matter? brigade who are always up in arms when an artist's homosexuality is disclosed or dissected will loathe it. I can't help recalling, with a wry smile, Michael Tippett's amusement at an unintentional double-entendre in Billy Budd — 'Clear the deck of seamen!' Ah, if only they could.
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