Britten and W. H. Auden: from Paul Bunyan to Hymn to St Cecilia

All the odder this, as in one respect, at least, Britten and Auden were astonishingly well matched: each possessed a prodigious technical virtuosity which enabled him to turn his hand virtually to any form of verse or music. Whether it was popular song, parody, or the most elaborate and complex of inventions (whether the linguistic means were words or notes), both Britten and Auden, seemingly at the drop of a hat, could summon up the appropriate ‘voice’.

Auden also encouraged Britten, who had difficulty in freeing his feelings sufficiently to allow him to give physical expression to his sexuality, in accepting his homosexuality. Auden, who had no such problem, clearly led the attempt to ‘unfreeze’ the young composer, to argue him into accepting his own sexual constitution, and more importantly, perhaps, to learn to love and to give himself as part of that experience.

A Blossoming Partnership

The partnership blossomed professionally and personally. In 1936, Auden selected and contributed to the text for Britten’s major orchestral song-cycle, Our Hunting Fathers, premiered at the Norfolk and Norwich Festival, and the following year they collaborated on two BBC radio features, Up the Garden Path, deemed a considerable success by the composer, and a major piece entitled Hadrian’s Wall in which Auden’s script combined poetry, prose and quotation.

Britten’s evidently substantial score is now lost but for a single voice part of his ‘Roman Wall Blues’, a setting of famous lyric by Auden beginning ‘Over the heather the wet wind blows’.

Also from 1937 were more Cabaret Songs for Britten and the chanteuse Hedli Anderson, as well as Britten’s first voice-and-piano song cycle, On this Island – settings of five poems from Auden’s recently published collection Look, Stranger.

In 1938 Britten contributed a substantial incidental music score for another Auden–Isherwood play, On the Frontier, a drama concerning the imaginary countries of monarchist Westland and Fascist Ostnia which were employed by the authors as metaphors for the struggle then raging in contemporary Europe between Fascism and its opponents.

In 1938, Auden and Isherwood left for the United States, where both would eventually settle, Isherwood on the West Coast and Auden on the East, though he did return to Europe fairly frequently, much later purchasing a summer home in the Austrian countryside just outside Vienna; later still he was also accommodated at Christ Church, Oxford, where he had been an undergraduate in the 1920s.

Britten followed them to America in 1939, lured by the promise of a Hollywood film which never materialised, by a sense that opportunities in Europe were limited and mindful that his beloved teacher and mentor Frank Bridge had enjoyed his greatest successes there. He was accompanied on this trip – initially, Britten thought he’d be away for about a month – by the young tenor Peter Pears with whom Britten had formed a close friendship; during this American adventure that friendship would blossom into love and a life-long commitment to each other.

Also dating from this American period is Hymn to St Cecilia for chorus, Britten and Auden’s exquisite paean to the patron saint of musicians, and a proposed Christmas Oratorio about which Britten and Auden corresponded until the mid-1940s but which was an impracticable text for musical setting, being simply far too long.

Britten did make two independent settings from Auden’s extensive text in 1944, the same year in which the poet published his entire libretto as For the Time Being.

It was long believed that the oratorio project put paid to their friendship, an idea encouraged by Pears in the years after Britten’s death. However, we now know that the two men, while never as close professionally or personally as they had once been – returning home, Britten had freed himself from Auden’s dominant influence – they still remained in touch, albeit only occasionally.