Literary Britten

If the citations in this book are any guide, Britten scholarship is moving decisively away from the concerns of the pioneering generation born in the late 1920s and 1930s, with their quest for insights resulting from close attention to what is apprehended by the ear and detectable in the score: the index shows that Peter Evans’s The Music of Benjamin Britten (London, 1979) is accorded just two references, both very much en passant, and Arnold Whittall none at all, though his The Music of Britten and Tippett (Cambridge, 1982) and an article on Owen Wingrave appear in the bibliography. The other seminal figure of that generation, Donald Mitchell, fares much better (there are fifteen mentions of him), largely because of references to early volumes of Letters from a Life, which he co-edited. Perhaps this merely reflects the book’s particular slant: according to the editor, it ‘offers a snapshot of the lively diversity of current thinking on Britten, from a fresh, literary perspective’ (p. 7), employing literature and history scholars as well as musicologists. There are, though, passages where one is conscious that one or more of the earlier generation have addressed the matter in hand with greater sophistication and depth, and one wonders whether their work had been sufficiently taken on board before some of the chapters were embarked upon. The book is published with a subvention from the AMS 75 PAYS Endowment. The American Musicological Society website says this is intended ‘to facilitate the publication of original and significant research’, and, while this certainly describes some of the chapters, others tell us too much of what we know already. The problems here are of genre and audience: is this book intended as a Companion, in which the distillation of previously aired statements and arguments, repackaged for a broader audience, would be appropriate; or is it—as the AMS support would suggest—intended as primary research?

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