His master's voice
Rupert Christiansen
PETER PEARS by Christopher Headington Faber, £20, pp. 351 41 am sensitive and not a fool singer', the young Peter Pears reflected in 1936. 'How wrong it is for fool singers to win.' But win they do, and the sort of introspec- tion and intensity that his art embodies its responsiveness to text, its fine colour- ings, its blazing individuality — remain the rarest of musical qualities, caviar to the general. What makes Pears unique, how- ever, is the way that through a period of 35 years he inspired a major composer to write for his voice: not even Clara Schumann can be said to have matched the effect, emotional and creative, that Pears had on Benjamin Britten.
Such a phenomenon may be theory- defeating and reason-defying, but there must be more to say about it than Christo- pher Headington exposes in this pleasant and competent biography, with its self- confessedly 'friendly' approach. Later this year, it will be followed by Humphrey Carpenter's fuller-scale biography of Britten and further crucial volumes in Donald Mitchell and Philip Reed's epic edition of his correspondence. As a taster, Headington has done a very decent job, but as one reads it one can't help thinking of the darker and infinitely more complex story which is surely about to emerge.
Yet there is no avoiding the fact that Pears' was 'an essentially happy nature' and his life one that ran steadily in a single, rel- atively constant direction. He was born in 1910, into an upper-middle class Home Counties family (the received pronuncia- tion of the surname as 'Piers' is inexplica- ble) and became a jolly Lancing schoolboy, with a penchant for cricket as well as music. There is actually nothing at all remarkable to report of his first 25 years,
apart from a couple of terms at Oxford camping it up in the post-Brian Howard era (he failed Mods and left Keble abrupt- ly). The quaint picture of his early days as a freelance tenor in London is more amus- ing, but only when the diffident figure of Britten quietly emerges from the Fitzrovian crowd in 1937 does the barometer begin to rise.
Following a chaste London flat-share in 1938, the relationship was physically con- summated during the couple's controver- sial American exile in the early years of the war. From the beginning, the dynamics were fixed: breezy Pears dominated ner- vous Britten. Singer clucked like a mother hen over composer. 'Promise to obey?' he wrote, commanding medication when Brit- ten was ill. 'Oh! I do hope we'll never be in quite such a dilemma as Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman get themselves into in Casablanca.' How innocent is all this? 'Peter never let him grow up', was the view of one friend, and Britten certainly remained almost chillingly in thrall to Pears' nannying: 'What you think or feel is really the most important thing in my life', he claimed in 1966. The only glimpse we have of any counter-current is of a dinner party at the Harewoods where Pears, irri- tated by Britten's table manners, flings a glass of wine in his face. Otherwise the cosiness of the bond comes to seem as much suffocating as heartwarming.
Headington scarcely tries to explain how Britten and Pears operated creatively, and the book offers little insight into the tailor- ing of the great canon of operatic roles, from Peter Grimes to Aschenbach in Death in Venice. Did Pears literally stand over Britten when he was composing 'for' him? Or was the influence more general than specific, with Pears' vocal idiosyncrasies assuming a Platonic significance? The illu- minating remark of Britten's sister Beth, to the effect that 'there was something about the timbre of Peter's voice that reminded Ben of his mother', is not quoted.
Elsewhere Headington skids light- footedly over the sticking-points in the story. The break with Sadler's Wells after Peter Grimes; the row with Glyndebourne; Britten's increasing paranoia, which Pears' whisperings exacerbated; the muck-up of Aldeburgh after Britten's death, mostly caused by widow's waywardness; the even more delicate question of Pears' sexual wanderings — too much tact is deployed here, and too much space devoted to holi- day diaries and other trivia ('not surprising- ly, he did not smoke', 'he liked an early morning "cupper" ' etc.)
One can't complain that Headington has refused the fashionable role of posthumous assassin: Pears was plainly an honourable enough man. But without the ballast of a more critical consideration of his artistry -
without so much as a discography or list of repertoire — the impact that this portrait of a supreme no-fool singer leaves is sadly and misleadingly faint.
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