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Britten’s Century
There Was (1980), and appeared the same year as Christopher Headington’s short monograph (1981), which left him free to talk about Britten’s sexuality.xxii This Kennedy did sympathetically. ‘There should perhaps be no more prejudice against homosexuality than against someone’s being left-handed, but there is.’ As for the effect of his homosexuality on his music, we have the reference by so close a friend and colleague as Hans Keller to ‘the enormous creative advantage of Britten’s homosexuality: however little Britten may have been alive to the fact, his psychosexual organization placed him in the privileged position of discovering and musically defining new truths which, otherwise, might not have been accessible to him at all.’xxiii Kennedy does not attempt to place Britten in a wider political or artistic context, and having divided the book into two parts – life then works – he gets through the narrative at quite a lick. But he is careful about the episodes he relates, employing a sceptical newspaperman’s eye, writing of Britten’s periods of insecurity, quoting from bad reviews as well as good. By including W. J. Turner’s coruscating review of Lucretia in the Spectator (‘rotten with insincerity and pretentiousness’, Turner then owning up to ‘reluctant admiration for so much musical cleverness whose purpose remains neither intelligible nor sensible … I was bored’), he paved the way for his own critique.xxiv The flaw in Lucretia to Kennedy is ‘the comparative failure to involve the audience in Lucretia’s tragedy’: Except at the very end, she is an unapproachable symbol rather than creature of flesh and blood … One observes her fate with a detachment unthinkable in the case of Grimes. It is an essay in evocative sonorities rather than as a stage drama that The Rape of Lucretia commands profound admiration.’xxv Though Kennedy does not extrapolate from this remark a broader observation about Britten’s trouble creating successful female characters, it demonstrates his perceptiveness. At the end of his life Britten entrusted his publisher at Faber Music, Donald Mitchell, with the task of writing his official biography. I had originally discussed with Britten the character of the book that I would write about him, in response to his invitation, in the summer preceding his death in December 1976. We talked
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