A walk through Britten’s Aldeburgh
The Times, 30/3/2013
By Simon Tait
Benjamin Britten, a local boy born just up the Suffolk coast at Lowestoft in 1913, is buried in the Lawn Cemetery under a beech tree at the church of St Peter and St Paul, Aldeburgh’s parish church, alongside his lifelong partner, Peter Pears. Their simple gravestones, designed by their friend Reynolds Stone, bear only their names and their dates, none of their honours and decorations that mean little to the community here. The flowers on the graves, though, are refreshed daily by parishioners.
The church means much more in the story of Benjamin Britten, however, and its importance to the composer goes back to the 1780s, when the poet George Crabbe was the curate there. His poem, The Borough, has as its theme a local fisherman and the death of his apprentice, and while seeking his fortune in the United States Britten was gripped by it. He returned to Aldeburgh and began to write the opera that was to make his name and link him for ever to the town.
To mark his centenary this year, the opera is to be performed in Aldeburgh for the first time, on the beach from which Grimes would have set off on his fateful voyage.
Also to mark the year, the community itself has decided to create a permanent Britten tour, complete with audio tour with pieces of his music, which is being launched by the Britten-Pears Foundation on March 28.
The parish church, where Britten and Pears gave many chamber concerts for local music lovers and where John Piper created a stained glass window in Britten’s memory, is first on the itinerary.
Peter Grimes opens in the town’s 16th century Moot Hall, still its town hall, where in 1962 Britten received the freedom of the borough.
The opera’s premiere was in London in 1945 and it was an immediate success, after which the couple moved to Crag House on Crag Path in Aldeburgh, which overlooks the sea, and it was here that he had the idea for “a modest festival with a few concerts given by fiends”, and formulated plans for the more ambitious Aldeburgh Festival, launched in 1948.
The festival’s first main venue was Jubilee Hall in Crabbe Street, named for Queen Victoria’s golden jubilee in 1887 when it was built for “concerts and dramatic entertainments provided by well-known artistes, dances for the little people on wet afternoons and the ‘grown ups’ in the evenings”. The demands of the festival led to an extensive renovation in 1959, and it reopened in 1960 with the world premiere of Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, composed to open that year’s festival.
Peter Pears was a lifelong collector of visual art. Some of his collection is on exhibition at the Red House now, and important sculpture – from Barbara Hepworth, for instance, and later from Sarah Lucas – was commissioned for the grounds of Snape Maltings. But in Aldeburgh High Street, visual art exhibitions have always been a part of the annual festival, and when he died in 1986 the Festival Gallery was renamed The Peter Pears Gallery in his honour.
In the libretto for the opera, written by Montagu Slater, the guilt-riven Grimes declares “I hear those voices that will not be drowned!”, and the artist Maggi Hambling, herself born nearby at Thorpeness, incorporated the quotation in her lonely monument to Britten, Scallop, which stands four metres high in the pebbles of the beach from which Britten liked to swim every morning.
Pears and Britten moved from Crag House, where fame had made them vulnerable, to The Red House in 1957 and lived there until Britten’s death in 1976. A large, Suffolk red brick house down a quiet lane just outside Aldeburgh, the composer found the peace he needed at the Red House and where he composed some of his best works, including Noye’s Fludde and his War Requiem. Now the home of the Britten-Pears Foundation, the Red House is currently undergoing a £4.7m redevelopment, after which the studio where Britten worked will be open for the first time, and the Britten Pears archive rehoused in a purpose built new library in the grounds. It will reopen in June.
In 1967 the main venue for the Aldeburgh Festival shifted from the Jubilee Hall to the Snape Maltings, the last stop on the tour, less than five miles west long the Alde River from Aldeburgh. When the industrial complex, where barley had been malted for hundreds of years, was closing in 1965 it was bought by Britten and Pears and converted into an 800-seat concert hall, opened by the Queen in 1967.
Aldeburgh Music, the charity which both runs the festival and owns the Snape complex, has made many subtle improvements to the site as other old buildings have become available, and is now a year-round centre for concerts, residential students and rehearsal, and it is the base for the Britten-Pears School for Advanced musical studies. Pears’s fascination with visual art and craft is also accommodated, with a kiln being built in 2009.
“I like making new friends, meeting new audiences, hearing new music” Britten said in Aspen, Colorado, 12 years before his death. “But I belong at home – there – in Aldeburgh. I have tried to bring music to it in the shape of our local festival; and all the music I write comes from it.”
