The Dark Side of Benjamin Britten

2013 is the centenary year of Benjamin Britten's birth and it seems that it is open slather on his character. Everyone is having a 'go' and I find it all fascinating. I have been fascinated by Benjamin Britten ever since I saw his Opera 'Gloriana' at Covent Garden in 1953, Coronation year when I was just 10. I still have the programme.

You either seem to hate Britten or love him, there is no middle way. Books and biographies official and unofficial have been published each with more startling revelations than the past, unknown young loves appear mainly male and little boys are interviewed on their relationships with the composer. There is one particularly vicious web site that is quite outspokenly hostile and even a TV documentary on Britten's failure as a composer. The list goes on and on and yet Britten is still an enigma. What exactly makes the man tick?

I have been a bystander on the Britten scene since 1953 but to my surprise, in 1958 I became more than a bystander as I was employed by the English Opera Group to play Mrs Sem in the first production of Noyes Fludde. Unknown to me  I was a success and became a Britten favourite. Unusual as I was a girl and for the next five years I was part of Britten's scene, not Aldeburgh's scene as the Aldeburgh set did not see me but I was there and I got to know Britten rather well.

It has taken me years to piece my experiences together but as everyone else has had a go perhaps it is my turn and this is how I explain the dark side of Benjamin Britten. Well at least it is food for thought and you never know I could be right.

The key to Britten's major work is his sexuality. It dominates everything he wrote.

Benjamin Britten the son of a Lowestoft dentist was a talented child who had the misfortune to be born into the middle class in 1913. This meant that at an early age he would be shoved off to an English Upper-Class boarding school, all male of course and from then on deprived of all-female company. The male precept of the period was 8 is a good age to cut the umbilical cord. Britten never recovered.

The British Public School of the 1930s has a lot to answer for. Boys who are segregated from the opposite sex and who have no other way of meeting girls fall in love with masters and other boys. This is a common occurrence and when the boys grow up usually they meet young girls of eighteen and all is well and put all that behind them.

Britten didn't. The young adolescent girl meeting period was left out. Britten was unlucky because he did not go to university but a music college and girls were not around as orchestras liked boys!  Then he was attractive and was taken up by the WH Auden set and was probably bewitched by them. Gays definitely have more fun. Being a wonderful pianist he was soon captured by a tenor Peter Pears. Singers at that time were always on the lookout for an accompanist as it is cheaper and oh so useful and Pears never let go.

There is no doubt that Britten was unsure of his sexuality at that time and really for the rest of his life. Although bombarded by his gay peers he refused at first to submit and it was only after a few years and much courtship that Pears got to do the deed in the USA. Pears was gay and had many partners and this is when it is thought he gave Britten syphilis. Once Pears had Britten, Britten was trapped.

Up until 1964 homosexuality in the UK was a crime even with consenting adults in private. You went to prison if you got caught and many did. Pears had this hold over his partner. If you leave me I tell! They were stuck with each other. Unlike a marriage, there was no divorce. Britten and Pears had to live together whether they liked each other or not.

Artists write about what they know so Britten wrote about the darker side of male relationships. All his operas are centred on this theme. It is as if he were taking revenge on the all-male world in which he lived and thrived for preventing him from experiencing heterosexual love which he craved but has never consummated

Every part Britten wrote for his supposed lover Pears was a villain or a simpleton, a tyrant, a child abuser, a closet paedophile, a traitor. If Britten loved Pears he had a very strange way of showing it in the parts he wrote for his paramour. In the first opera, Peter Grimes is a child abuser and murderer and the list gets worse and worse.

It has only just been admitted that the partnership was more of a business arrangement than a love match. For long periods Britten and Pears lived separate lives only coming together when work called. I could have told you that.

It is in his masterpiece 'The Turn of the Screw' a novella by Henry James that the key to Britten's sexuality is revealed. It is there for all to see. 'The Screw' is based upon the sexual choice a male child is forced to make. The child has to choose between the homosexual love of a manservant and the heterosexual love of a naive, sexually innocent governess. The child cannot choose and loses his life either physically or metaphorically.

For child insert the name, Britten. It is Britten's problem. Britten is known to be bisexual although this is not widely appreciated. Many musicologists feel that Britten reached his peak with this opera and decline set in ever after. Britten's 'Screw' is a masterpiece to homo/ hetero erotic love with a dose of paedophilia included. Never has the seduction of a male child sounded so good. It is beautifully and touchingly described and remember artists write about what they know. Britten knew.

From then on the Britten and Pears romance faded. Peter went on to other loves and Britten became celibate and bitter. The eroding partnership was never made public. Britten never came out in his lifetime. He wanted to be considered normal and he would have sued anyone who said otherwise. It was only three years after his death that Pears made the announcement.

Personally, I think Britten came to loathe Pears and that is why the parts for Pears got progressively nastier till the last opera 'Death in Venice'a cruel depiction of a dying man lusting after a young pubescent boy when Pears went on record as saying that 'Ben is writing an evil opera and it is killing him.' 

It is not known if Britten ever experienced physical heterosexual love. He never got the chance. Britten was too well guarded. Britten certainly loved Galina Vishnevskaya and I know he liked me a lot and although Rita Thompson will never admit it Britten liked her too, banishing Pears to the USA.

Britten always loved looking at young boys whether he followed through is not known.  Maybe his young groomed conquests are just too nice to say but if my experience is anything to go by Britten would have controlled himself. It is as if he had the classic Peter Pan complex about being a young boy forever and never grew up and pleasing himself by inviting children to the wonderful world of 'Aldeburgh Never Never Land' to make an opera. A case of arrested development pas excellence.

There is no doubt Britten loved men but he could have loved women too if given a chance, he wasn't and he made do with young boys.

My theory is that Britten's main tragedy is that of Miles in his masterpiece. Britten was just unable to choose and for him he had to live on in bitterness and disillusionment wondering what he had missed, hating his partner and taking horrible revenge by writing despicable roles for him for the rest of his life and regretting that he was never able to write an opera about heterosexual love.

I liked the man. He was one of my admirers, a notch on my belt, he had everything I wanted but too old. Pity he did not meet me when he was 19 or even 30! But it was too soon for me and too late for him. But Britten did give me my career and place in posterity and for that, I am extremely grateful.

Britten, Sexuality and The Turn of the Screw - Janette Miller

      Queer pitch: Is there such a thing?

Does a composer's sexual identity influence their music?

          Rolf Hind examines what it means to be a queer composer. UK Guardian

Nice picture of Britten and Pears to illustrate the article by Rolf Hind but nowhere does Britten appear in the actual text itself. Britten was an enigma. Britten never came out during his lifetime and would have sued anyone who said he was gay.

Many of his friends and colleagues who knew him well, Graham, Reiss, Duncan, Katherine Mitchell and myself consider Britten to be bisexual. He was confused about his sexuality all his life and could never choose. Pears, Auden and others chose for him and Britten was always a good little boy.

It is only now that I am approaching the end of my life that I feel I must write for posterity what I have known for years. Humphrey Carpenter, Britten's official biographer, told me that I had to do this.  I was to write down everything. He was going to do this for me but he died before it was published. I have his letters.

Because Britten was stuck for a young Flora I got to know him very well. He liked me and  I liked him. I was 19 and it was allowed. Britten admired me and I  admired him.  Britten went out of his way to get to know me. Nobody noticed at Aldeburgh. It was as if I didn't exist until one night Peter Pears noticed and after that it was difficult but not impossible to be alone with Britten as Pears was  always there! But that is another story.

In Britten's masterpiece, The Turn of the Screw Britten explores the theme of the choice of sexuality with considerable insight. It is as if Britten were Miles who cannot choose between the heterosexual love of The Governess or the homosexual love of Peter Quint both of whom Miles loved and at the same time hated to hurt in any way. At the end being forced to make the choice kills him. Britten never did make the choice himself. That is why this work is so compelling on all levels.

Never has the music of a homosexual lover sounded so enticing as the music Britten writes for Quint when wooing Miles and never has Britten written such beautiful arias as he did for The Governess in The Tower and Letter scenes. The song Malo he wrote for Miles too poignantly illustrates the dilemma Miles/Britten finds himself in when forced to choose.

The drama of this opera is mirrored in the cast. Britten loved  Peter Pears/Quint but he also loved Miles/David Hemmings and he loved The Governess/Jennifer Vyvyan. Little importance is given to this remarkable woman in Britten's life but she had a hand in the completion of The Screw. It was at her suggestion that Britten ended the opera with Miles's song Malo. She told me.

How do I know this? In later years I played Flora. Flora is the forgotten character of The Screw but just as important as the other three. She is bisexual if the ghosts are real. Flora is loved by both Quint and Miss Jessel. James in his novella is at pains to point this out. The difference is Flora accepts the situation and gets on with life. Miles was never able to do this and it kills him. Britten admired Flora. The music he gave her to sing is adult and difficult, too difficult for the child. It needs someone special and Britten knew I was special.

The interesting deviation from the plot was in the novella when the great confrontation with Quint comes and The Governess forces Miles to say his name, in the book Miles shouts Peter Quint you devil and then adds the word Where? Britten deliberately left this word out.  In fact, in the opera, it could be said that Miles may have chosen The Governess. The Earl of Harewood noticed this too and confronted Britten about it as to whether the ghosts were real. Britten is said to have said One must take a stand! What the stand was we shall never know. Years later as I corresponded with Pears. I like him too, and asked him often Pears would never reply.

Did Britten really love Pears? We shall never know. They had their rough patches in their relationship. When I was at Aldeburgh was one of them. Never once did Britten cast Pears as a lover. When a nice heroic part, like Mr Noye, came up Britten gave it to someone else. The rest are murderers, child molesters, rapists, tyrants and simpletons.

So it is right that Britten is not included in the article even though the omission is possibly accidental. Sadly Britten may never have known heterosexual love. The women he chose and I was one, were all remarkable and unattainable, I was too young and wise. As Lord Harewood told me I was lucky to come out unscathed but Britten was always the perfect English gentleman and years later I married a Miles very like Mr Britten so who knows. The women are there and documented if you look and Pears was a jealous lover and guarded him well. The women, me too, all knew our place in the scheme of things. We were there but out of sight.

We were all exceptional. Believe me, I was exceptional! At the age of 19, I could have danced the lead role in Swan Lake and sung Erwartung. I had already won the Production Prize at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama and I disliked Puccini and Brahms! I knew most of Britten's music having attended one of the first performance of Gloriana at Covent Garden in 1953. I also like fast sports cars and Gaudia Bretska. I gave way to Galina Vysnevskya, the Russian Opera star and wife of Rostropovitch the cellist. When Britten visited Russia for Christmas it was not Rostropovitch that Britten went to see.

In The Turn of the Screw  Britten says it all about his sexuality if you care to look. I should get a PhD for this!

Alan Bennett makes GCSE List with History Boys

Having just watched Alan Bennett's The History Boys on the BBC this week I can see why it is a chosen play. I was so impressed I watched it twice.

Being of another age and a girl I went to school but received no education. I wanted to take GCE English literature but three weeks before the exam I did not even know what the set books were. Then I met a teacher like Hector who saw I had potential and in three weeks taught me the three books one of which was The Selected Poems of Thomas Hardy. She told me that these poems would be with me for life and I still quote them from memory. She was right.

This woman was my entire education. She taught me the love of literature and poetry but more importantly how to learn and question in just ten days. She was appalled at my spelling and said it was a mark off for every mistake!The way she interpreted the love poems written by a man in his seventies has left a lasting impression. She said it was impossible to complete the three books and I never read the complete novel The Rover by Conrad but she handed me the crib and said get as far as you can. I should not do this under any other circumstances.

I was bright! Although I was actually working at the time, a yes I was a professional child actor, I just did it. I took the exam. The only girl in my school to do so.When the results came up I had 87% but as Mrs Payne for that was her name, gave them to me she said. Pity about your spelling. We shall never know your true academic worth! This mattered not to me as I knew I was not going to be one as I was going to be famous on the stage. In some ways I did achieve this!

I married an Oxford educated GP Miles RC Heffernan so I know all about Oxford. Alan Bennett got it absolutely right in his play. My husband said at Oxford some entrants only write a page of the exam and yet still gain entry. I felt like the boy who was good at sport and became the builder. I think had I received the education these boys got in Sheffield I too might have made Oxford. Watching made me realise how poor my faith school convent education was. Oh to have lessons like that! To have the confidence that those boys had to answer back and be accepted. This quality is also bestowed at Eton. I have never had this ability. Bennett's Sheffield school maybe more imaginary than real, I suspect.

However I was lucky. I have Oxford although second hand. My husband once said only go for the best as life is too short for the second rate and he was right. I had a crash course in the best for which I am extremely grateful.

That is why I am delighted Alan Bennett is included as it might encourage teachers to be more courageous and pupils to see what they should be getting. Strangely I featured in the life of Benjamin Britten and in a book published for his centenary my essay on Britten  first published in the Times is immediately after Alan Bennett's! Our education could not be more different both of us were outsiders but at least he had the advantage of being working class and a man. I am working class too although I don't sound it but a woman. Big difference. Thanks to Mrs Payne, Benjamin Britten and my husband I survived my education but think what I might have achieved had I been educated?

PS Forgive the typos as my spelling has not improved!

Welcome 2014 Janette Miller in Auckland

2013 has been an exceptional year for me! Quite unexpected and in some ways unbelievable. At the ripe old age of 70 when one's life is supposed to be over and there is nothing left to which to look forward a year pops up and delivers some of the goals that you thought you had missed arrives by magic without you doing a thing.

I have two blogs, one for my family Janette Miller's Strange Life, where I can reminisce  about the past without boring my family stiff, I get very few views but it is good social history and one day a great grandchild might, just might be interested.

This blog is where I get things out of my system so I can be a bit grumbly on occasions, a bit like the character Victor Meldrum who finds life in his mature years unbelievable! This year I shall try to be more positive if I can so I shall take this opportunity of saying just why 2013 has been so strange and yes exceptional and none of it was of my making.

Putting aside that access to enough B12 healed my compromised nervous system and why UK doctors fail to give patients enough injections of a vitamin necessary to do this I shall never understand. The fact that my garden has been ravishing thanks in part to a glorious summer here in Auckland and I watered it, my year has been exceptional because of the patronage and friendship of one man who 56 years ago saw in a tiny 14 year old, mousy, formally uneducated child something that made her special to him.
Although none of us knew it in 1958 this man who at 44 was famous but not a superstar has gone on to icon status and taken all of us who he favoured along with him. 2013 was the centenary of Lord Benjamin Britten's birth and as one of the few left standing who worked with him and knew him I became part of these festivities without lifting a finger.

Nothing could be stranger than finding oneself part of such an illustrious scene 56 years on. If I had been told then that a tiny part in a children's opera would lead to my place in posterity I should never have believed it or that I should have to wait all that time for recognition that what I was asked to do by Britten was quite extraordinary. It still is.

Again this recognition is reinforced because at the time of the actual broadcast of  Britten's masterpiece Peter Morley's 1959 The Turn of the Screw for Associated Rediffusion which was even then an artistic triumph in public was for me a personal family disaster.

Far from my family being proud that their 16 year old relative had the honour of being in this prestigious production my family who gathered expectantly to watch their relative at 11 pm on Xmas Eve  1959 on UK TV hated it. They hated it. They watched in total silence and I could feel the atmosphere going from bad to worse. At the end of Act 1 a stunned family audience were speechless. No applause, no we are so proud of you, just silence. My aunt who was there with a male cousin from Argentina who I only met twice in my life, was shocked. Her grim face said it all.

Nobody said anything. It was after midnight and the TV and tape recorder that had been my Xmas present were turned off. I dared to ask if my family enjoyed it and my aunt speaking for all of them said NO! It was like a funeral. What should have been a joyous occasion was like a funeral. Although my mother had prepared a delicious after viewing meal nobody stayed to eat it. Coats were brought and they all went home. My mother and father too were very subdued about the performance. No praise of any sort was given and we went to bed.  They all returned for a repeat performance for  Act 2 with a similar reaction! Three months later my father wiped the tape as he needed it for his amateur radio.

And yet Britten knew what I had done for him was exceptional. Flora for that was my part, is the hardest role to cast in the opera. It is hard to grasp that casting a girl singer for this role in the 1950's could be so difficult but Britten found it impossible. He had had no idea of how to write for a girl child. Boys yes, he did it all the time but a girl? There were just no little girls who sang in the 1950's. Britten had searched for a child since 1954 and never found one. Henry James' had described Flora as An old, old woman, consequently Britten who was working with an adult Flora made no concessions  and Flora's aria is one of the most difficult to sing in the entire opera as it is high, uses intervals singers hate and orchestrally exposed.  It is terrifying. Britten was brilliant at casting and he knew that for The Screw to succeed theatrically it had to have a child not an adult pretending to be a child. He was so determined to do this that after the original Venice production he would not allow The Screw to be performed again until he found a Flora. He had already auditioned 40 little girls and gave up hope. The Screw remained on the shelf. And then as if by magic I turned up.

Britten knew I was special. He went out of his way to get to know me and help me. He watched me grow up.  I think I may have been the only girl of 19 he ever got to know. Unknown to me I became a favourite. He was so kind. I was given seats for opera's. Invitations to swim, rides alone in the car. He was interested in what I was doing and talked freely as one does to a colleague. I was privileged to be mentored by such a man. I was around Aldeburgh for 5 years and as I grew our friendship deepened.  I knew first he was fond of me as Jennifer Vyvyan told me "Ben is so fond of you Flora", they called me Flora.

My family ensured that I really never enjoyed the success of The Screw.

So it has been somewhat gratifying to discover that the British Film Institute has remastered the iconic recording and shown it  in London to great acclaim in 2013. I am told the print looks magnificent and I am in it. The TV cameramen made me look so beautiful.

Today my family would have been flabbergasted. They were so wrong and so unkind that night 56 years ago. When the BBC asked me recently what my family reaction was the interviewer was shocked. That bit got cut out of the interview. But I do find it incredible that that performance that was just at the start of my career should give me my posterity. I am there in Britten's first TV production for all time for this will always be preserved as it really is his masterpiece. I have been so fortunate. 2013 will be hard to replicate and in fact I don't need to.

The Singer's Revenge Garageband

Pity the poor professional singer.  Theirs is an unhappy lot and although instrumentalists, composers, accompanists are given every help possible the singer is left to make the best of a very difficult job. In the musicial stakes the ordinary professional singer comes off worst.

Since the advent of new modern instruments the orchestral tuning has got higher and higher. If Mozart, Bach and Beethoven were alive today they would never believe their ears as the pitch of the modern orchestra has gone up and Up and UP. Modern steel frames and strings have made this possible. Also some instruments do not like certain keys and pitches and all tuning revolves around the oboe.

Consequently the keys that singers are expected to sing in has gone up and Up and UP too. Unfortunately when they invented  modern strings and frames they did not invent steel human vocal chords as well. In Mozart's time a choir of sopranos would not be expected to sing above a G above the stave (G4 in Midi terms) but today the poor things have to reach for a top B Flat below top C. A Queen of the Night in Mozart's Day would have sung a Top C (C5) but today modern sopranos have to sing a top E (E5). Sopranos who can do this are as rare as a Unicorn.

For most of my professional life I have been at the mercy of instrumental musicians,composers and producers who never keep their word. I know how high I can sing . I have a breathtaking top B (B4) and a non existent Top C. Whenever I went for a job I would tell the management that and all promised to have the part taken down. On this provision I accepted the jobs only to find the producers broke their word. Even Benjamin Britten broke his word. I had to sing the Top C and I can just about make it but not in the way It ought to have been sung. I would have been sensational with a Top B preferably flat for those not so brilliant days that all singers have and the audience would never have known. It would have sounded glorious.

The reason was expense. The producers found that writing the re-orchestration and copying  was a just too expensive or the key that it had to be transposed into was difficult for the orchestral players to cope with. I missed out to my detriment.

Then the orchestra's are mean and  will not rehearse with the singers. They want to be paid a performance fee if a singer wants to rehearse and obviously the management won't stand for it. Many a time my first sing through with the orchestra was on the first night. I used to go to their rehearsals and sometimes I was appalled at what I was supposed to sing to.

Composers and pianists look after themselves. There are certain keys they find difficult and so instead of modulating into a difficult key the song is just left to languish in one ordinary key for convenience. Even if you ask for a semitone modulation if it hits a difficult key like B Major with lots of sharps and double sharps you can forget it. Many pianist can only play from music and cannot transpose at sight so one has to sing songs in uncomfortable keys for the singer but easy for the pianist. Life is just not fair.

Wrong notes are a singer's nightmare too because it is the singer who takes the blame. A poor pianist can wreck a singer's performance with a handful of wrong notes.

All pianists are the same. Some like Benjamin Britten who actually played for me at a huge concert hated rehearsing. He left it too late to have a complete run through. He also would not transpose a part for me although he knew it was too high and he had promised to do so. My husband could only play from sheet music and I had to sing Schubert in some horrible keys for me but OK for him. He could, bless him, play a handful of wrong notes in the difficult bits but we never sang in public which is just as well. When he died I lost my accompanist and I resigned myself to never singing again.

Six years after his death it happened. I had played with Garageband on and off and I wanted a certain tune. I discovered I could write it out quite easily and then I had an idea. Why not write out my accompaniments? It was a revelation. Not only could I write out my accompaniments but I could choose my key and eventually I learned to orchestrate and now even do four part Harmony. My lessons of 50 years ago have come in useful.

I could sing every day with a sympathetic accompanist. No wrong notes, tempo of choice and best of all key of choice even if it is C Sharp minor. For the first time I learned to sing as I like to sing. From hating my voice I now started to like it. To my surprise I like the way I sing and my voice improved by not being forced. I enjoy recording. I don't have to shout to fill a 3000 seater theatre. That I still have a voice is a miracle. 

I can also sing music that no pianist wants to play as it is too hard like Cantaloupe's Songs of the Auvergne. Tried unsuccessfully to get a pianist to play this for years.

So singers learn a Midi programme like Garageband and give yourself the chance you deserve. No more expensive pianists, no more worrying about rehearsals, sing anything you want with a full orchestra and enjoy.

Memories of Basil Coleman opera director pas excellence

I learned today of the death of Basil Coleman, the brilliant opera director who was a favourite of Benjamin Britten and directed many of his operas including the one that has had a profound influence on my life The Turn of the Screw which premiered in Venice in 1954. Many musicologists consider this work to be Britten's masterpiece and certainly Basil Coleman's input must have contributed to this ground breaking production.

It seemed I had the good fortune to be directed by Coleman for the 1961 Aldeburgh production of this work. I played Flora. I wish I could say that this had been a happy experience but for me at 18 it was one of the most difficult productions I have ever been in.  Aldeburgh was not the place for a young girl alone. Aldeburgh just did not understand young girls and in fact I was just ignored.

My problem was that I was not Coleman's choice of a Flora. I was Britten's and Coleman had to make do with me. Britten and Coleman had very different ideas as to the importance of Flora. Britten realised that Flora is not just a side kick of Miles but a person in her own right. Coleman dismissed Flora and wanted all the focus to be on the boy.

I had already played Flora for the famous Associated Redifussion
1959 performance on British Television which had been a great artistic triumph. I was Britten's choice, Britten knew I understood Flora. Now I was 18 Britten and I talked about Flora for hours.

It was not that Basil did not like me personally he just did not want me in his production and made me feel inadequate. He told me that I had to take a back seat, that in the TV production I had moved to much and he did not want me distracting from the boy in anyway. I was a professional and I did exactly what I was told.

At Aldeburgh I was given virtually no rehearsal. The boy's scenes were rehearsed daily while mine were left alone. What Basil didn't know was that I was a Britten favourite. It seems now that I was the only 18 year old girl in that category and I told Britten. He was furious and came down to rehearsal, played for me and saw I was rehearsed.  To see Britten taking such an interest in me had not been anticipated. The sight of Britten publicly driving me home alone in his car took them all by surprise. This came as a shock.

Aldeburgh could be unwittingly cruel. On the day of the first performance I was walking down the high street and a bicycle fell on my foot. The brake handle went right through it like a nail and I could see it sticking out the other side. With great presence of mind I pulled it out, like an arrow. It did not bleed immediately and it did not hurt so I walked across to the Jubilee Hall where the first person I encountered was Basil Coleman.

I told him what had happened. He was talking to Stephen Reice the manager and they were having a heated conversation about should Flora look at the Ghost! This was the one direction that seemed to change everyday as everyone except me was allowed to have an opinion. Britten directed me to look at the ghost and Coleman wanted the opposite.

Instead of looking at my foot which was now starting to bleed profusely these two men marched me up onto the stage and redirected the scene. After five minutes they were satisfied and Basil looked at my bleeding foot and said "Oh look Janette is bleeding all over the floor cloth. I think you should get that looked at" and both men left me.

I found the local GP who said it was nasty and that tomorrow it would hurt. I refused a tetanus jab because of the side effects and I walked the miles home. In the evening a car was reluctantly sent with a furious Mrs Reice who was not amused. She felt I should have cycled  I did the performance with out a limp and in fact no one ever knew. I have the scar till this day.

Britten again was not amused at the change of direction behind his back and I was back to looking at the ghost the next performance. Britten tended to the view that the ghosts were real.

When I did get to see the long lost TV production I was terrified of seeing my performance and how distracting I had been. I was in for a shock. Far from fidgeting I had had long periods of absolute stillness. Basil had been wrong. He had seen what he wanted to see not the reality.

I did meet him again in the BBC club when he was directing Billy Budd.  I was working  in a play He got a surprise to see me there and he looked slightly embarrassed and guilty. He knew he had given me a hard time. Directors can. We parted friends and in fact I learned from this experience. Always try to be the director's choice.

Another Benjamin Britten surprise - Syphilis! Whatever next?

2013 is definitely going to be the year of Benjamin Britten. Every week there seems to be some new revelation and each one gets worse. The latest is in the new biography by Paul Kildea published on 7 February 2013 and shock, horror it appears that Britten was suffering from tertiary syphilis although he did not know it. I wonder? Evidence seems a bit flimsy. Maybe they should exhume him and find out. Poor Ben!

By accident I got to know Benjamin Britten. I met him when I was 14 at an audition for the first Noyes Fludde in 1958. I was a girl and Britten had difficulty finding girls who could sing. I could.  Britten was searching for a Flora for his opera The Turn of the Screw based on the novella by Henry James. He had looked since 1953, auditioned over 40 little girls and could not find one. The first production had a small adult which he found unsatisfactory as a young Flora is essential if the horror of the story is to be at its maximum consequently I was precious and always he treated me as an adult.

I think Britten knew that his reputation would always be open to speculation after his death and I think it horrified him as he desperately wanted to be considered normal but like everything he got used to it. Britten seemed to envy me my normality. I found this strange as  to me he had everything. Aldeburgh Festival looked so amazingly traditional Upper Class prim and proper but Britten knew one day this mirage would disappear. It has.

The tragedy for Britten is that it is not the homosexuality or the tertiary syphilis that is the problem today but Britten's liking for young boys which in his day was not considered a sin at all but will possibly be his current downfall. Today Britten would have kept this passion to himself. Many of us enjoy gazing at beautiful bodies. Look at the bookstands.  This is not a sin. Britten liked looking at young boys which is. Now thanks to the Roman Catholic Church and Jimmy Savile this is totally unacceptable. I find this unacceptable too and yet at the time in 1959 colleagues laughed at it. Sir Charles MacKerras, the conductor got hauled over the coals for a unwise but true remark!

Artists write about what they know and consequently all Britten's operas and especially his major works are on these dark forbidden subjects. Britten knew all about  the struggle between heterosexuality and homosexuality and he wrote about it. The Turn of the Screw which is considered by many to be his masterpiece and which I had the good fortune to be in, is all about this conflict. Like Miles Britten may have experienced the struggle between the love of a boy for either a man or a woman. Like Miles he could never choose which he liked the best. Maybe Britten only experienced male love although he was curious about the other as I know from my own limited experience. I do appear to be the only 19 year old girl with whom he had a relationship and actually took home in his sports car.

Male seduction of a young boy has never sounded so beautiful as in The Screw and this is Britten's gift to music but because of the Savile affair this opera is now unmentionable in the centenary year because of its unfortunate subject!

Britten never came out during his lifetime. Britten said on many occasions to colleagues that he wanted to be normal. If anyone had hinted Britten was gay while he had been alive Britten would have sued. Britten was definitely gay but he was also bisexual and this has to be taken into account when trying to understand his strange character. It never is. Like Flora's personna this trait is never addressed and it should be.

Gradually over the years I have found out what was kept from me while I was at Aldeburgh.  I await Paul Kildea's book for further revelations. Maybe now I should write one of my own!

The Brilliant Benjamin Luxon Baritone

I would just like to pay tribute to Benjamin Luxon baritone. I really only discovered him as an artist recently and I think he has become one of my favorite singers ever. As an artist he is magnificent. He is a wonderful singer and has a sensitivity and empathy for the works he sings that I find exciting and pleasurable. So many singers just rely on a beautiful voice and don't sing. To sing you need to use your entire body and mind and Luxon does. Luxon is intelligent.

Ben Luxon was a student colleague of mine when we were both at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in the 1960s. He was the boyfriend of my best friend Lilian Newman and I am afraid to say to me just another student. He was mildly good looking but as I was barely 18 and he was much older and I mean much older! He was 24! I never gave him a thought. Perhaps I was mistaken there!

He came from Cornwall and I came from Devon and I recognized immediately the bond that binds all those who hail from the West Country. He had that earthy attractiveness that exudes from men from that part of the world and which is so attractive. Ross Adkins of BBC World Have Your Say has the same attractive earthiness.

That being said I did not find him at that time attractive at all and I don't think I ever heard him sing. When I left college I never thought about him again even though he joined Britten and The English Opera Group. I too had worked for Benjamin Britten but became disillusioned by his strange behavior and I gladly left Britten behind although he gave me the major kick start to my career for which I shall be forever grateful. Britten did the same for Ben.

Britten went on to star Luxon in Billy Budd and write Owen Wyngrave for him. Britten too was attracted by Luxon's rough ancestry. I often wondered at the time what Ben Luxon must have thought of Britten as the whole set up was very strange! 

I then married and left for New Zealand which was very isolated in 1970s and 1980s and Ben was lost completely so it was with tremendous pleasure that I rediscovered my long lost acquaintance a couple of months ago and have been catching up on YouTube ever since.

Bravo Ben! You are a true star. Thanks for some lovely singing. I was very stupid not to have taken more notice of you at the time! 

How to Suffer Successfully the Artist's Lot

In Alain de Botton's excellent book How Proust can change Your Life there are a few lines to which I can sadly relate.

It is the Incomprehension of Friends. 

A characteristic problem for geniuses. When Swann's Way was ready Proust sent copies to his friends, many of whom had difficulty opening the envelope.
'Well my dear Louis, have you read my book?' Proust recalled asking the aristocratic playboy, Louis d'Albufera.
'Read your book? You've written a book?' answered his surprised friend.
'Yes of course Louis, and I even sent you a copy.''
'Ah my little Marcel, if you sent me a copy, I've certainly read it. Only I wasn't sure I had received it.'

Another recipient a Madame Gaston de Caillavet was more grateful. She wrote and thanked the author for his gift and in the warmest tones praised the  passages pertaining to First Communion. She reread them often, she said, as it reminded her of her own experiences. If she had read the book she would have noticed that there was no such religious ceremony in it.

Although I am no genius it appears that I have a similar problem. For years I have been writing a novel. It is about the world that I know intimately,  the  world of Benjamin Britten and the Aldeburgh set. Although I was young and a girl and never included as part of the scene nevertheless I was an observer of what went on and in fact I got to know Britten very well. I was 18 and he was 40. He liked me and I liked him. I was intelligent and sharp intellectually. I must have been different. I was no little boy, quite the oposite. His relationship with his partner  Peter Pears intrigued me and his attitude to me surprised me.

I often wondered what would have happened if Britten had been allowed to meet girls of his age when he was 18.  When he was alone with me which was very rarely but enough to get to know him, he behaved as if he were 18. Sadly now I think I was the only 18 year old girl he ever drove home alone. Ah if he had been 18 and not 40 with a partner in tow things might have been different.

So I have written a what if? I am no Jane Austin or Charlotte Bronte or even Agatha Christie but I wanted to know if my effort was readable so I sent a pdf of what I consider an interesting chapter to my friends. Although the book is complete fiction this chapter told of my audition for the greatest living British composer of the age. It was quite an audition. I was 15, a girl and a ballet dancer!

It was only four pages. I sat back and waited. I heard nothing! I eventually bucked up courage and asked one. She was dismissive. 'I am just not interested in that kind of thing' was all I got. Another said that my sentences were too long! It would have been a good criticism if I had actually written a Proustian sentence but I my style is economic with words. I couldn't write a long sentence if I tried.

Another dear friend said he just hadn't found the time. A great disappointment as being in the profession I should have valued his opinion. I thought all would appreciate the comedy of my situation as it is such an insight to a great man.  I was mistaken. Proust and I have much in common.

It seems it is impossible to get one's friends to read one's work.

Perhaps I should put this chapter up on my blog to see if I get any interest. I should warn you the subject matter is delicate but this chapter other than the incongruity of the tale is perfectly innocent.

Tomorrow perhaps?