Dr David C F Wright
(1977)
Benjamin Britten was the most loathsome man I have ever met. He was arrogant, cruel, ruthless, a criminal, a pervert and a paedophile. He stole substantial excerpts of other people’s music and put his name to it. He was a very poor composer and, altogether, a thoroughly despicable individual. He upset everyone. Even his lover, Peter Pears regularly complained of Britten’s petulance. He always had to have his own way. He was never wrong. When greater musicians politely pointed out errors in his music Britten would abuse them without mercy and refuse to ever acknowledge them again. He sacked musicians from the Aldeburgh Festival, which was a yearly festival devoted mainly to his own music. He was an extreme egotist and a megalomaniac as was Elgar before him. He was insincere and a hypocrite of the most abominable kind.
He had an insatiable passion for boys especially pubescent boys. He would sleep with them. He invited groups of them to his house and demanded that they all swam naked in the pool. He would help them undress and would often swim naked with them. He wrote love letters to pubescent boys with phrases such as “All my love, love, love, my darling, darling and adorable---------“ and sign it with crosses indicating kisses. He encouraged boys to reply to him in the same fashion. But he was fickle. When he found another boy whom he had not yet fondled or seen in the nude he would often jettison some of his other boys including his current favourites to put all his attention on the new love of his life. He would often complete such a love letter with the underlined words, 'Burn this'.
He used to tell boys that he wanted to get into their anal canal and he would make make light of it. Sometimes he was so aggressive with anal intercourse that the boys screamed in pain and were sore for days.
When David Hemmings was once singing the part of Miles in The Turn of the Screw his voice broke during a performance. Britten ordered the curtain down and never spoke to Hemmings again! Yet he had declared undying love for him and slept with him although claiming it was because the boy was frightened of the dark! None of us who knew Britten were fooled by that false remark!
At one time it was said that Britten was impotent and took the feminine role in his homosexual relationship with Peter Pears. This is not born out since Britten referred to Pears’s voice as that of a soprano and how his high notes were purer than any soprano. This being so, it more that suggests that Britten served Pears.
He certainly served pubescent boys.
In today’s climate he would be convicted of being a paedophile and be on the sex offenders register and would have the populace of Britain against him. He would have gone to prison and been despised and rightly so, as he should have been at the time. But those were days of comparative innocence when no great care was exercised.
The composer, Alan Bush, who was also homosexual although he had a wife, was one of several musicians who said that he witnessed Britten fondling the crotches of choir boys and asking to see their genitals and offering them money. The composer, Ruth Gipps, fell out with Britten because she also saw and heard the same things. I have letters from men who, when they were boys, were sexually abused by Britten. My father, who was Britten’s exact contemporary and was a marine in World War Two met many fellow young men who stated that they were sexually violated by Britten and, in some cases, in a cruel and vicious way. After the war, some of these young men kept in touch with my father and wrote to him and in some of those letters they expressed their hatred of Britten because he had forced them into sexual intercourse and there was also oral sex. I have these letters.
Of course, it has to be said, that there were boys whom Britten befriended whom he did not make any efforts to abuse.
Sir Malcolm Arnold said that Britten worried him deeply both as a musician and as a man. He also said that the best work Ben wrote was a piece written ten years after his death!
So much of Britten’s work reeks of homosexuality and sadism. The Turn of the Screw tells of Peter Quint who has come back from the dead as a ghost to have his way with the boy, Miles, and to corrupt him and engage in pederasty. Billy Budd is about sailors who, being at sea for so long are sexually frustrated and realise that their urges can only be satisfied by having sex with fellow men. Death in Venice is about an artist who falls in love with a boy as Britten did when he was 20 by falling in love with a 13 year old boy, Wulff Scherchen, and writing love letters to him. Peter Grimes is not devoid of these subject matters. Britten wrote many works for boys choirs and would often say that he wanted to see what was under their cassocks. He showed pornographic literature to boys, or rather what was deemed pornographic for its time. The work Abraham and Isaac was not a religious work but an opportunity for a man to sing with a boy alto. He said to Walton, in my presence, and in the presence of others, that as Walton had never buggered a boy he had missed out of the most exciting experiences of life. He also said that bestiality was the next stage up from homosexuality and anal intercourse with boys, and that his work Our Hunting Fathers, with its ecstatic screams, was a musical depiction of a man having anal intercourse with an animal. The early work Young Apollo was composed because he had seen a work of art depicting the young god as a full frontal nude. The rushing ascending octaves represented a man running his hand up another man’s leg until it reached its goal. He later had explicit nude male sculptures in his garden at The Red House.
He was unpatriotic and a whimpering coward. He fled to America when war threatened in Europe. He did not want to be called up and, knowing that he was remarkably fit (he was a fine cricketer and tennis player) he knew he could not get out of it. He said that there was no way he or Peter would serve their country and run the risk of dying. He returned to England after the worst of the Blitz was over and because the US Army were calling up British people living in the USA. But before he came back he wrote some scathing letters and had the three splendid women who ran the CEMA, the precursor of the Arts Council of Great Britain, sacked so that he and Pears could run it and, in running it, all Britten really did was a constant self-promotion. One of those ladies was Gladys Crook and I have seen the letters Britten wrote to her and about her and they are disgusting and deplorable. His sexism and atrocious language has to be seen to be believed.
He was always causing trouble. He was commissioned to write a work for Japan to commemorate one of their anniversaries and was told by the Japanese not to include anything western or Christian in it. What he wrote was the Sinfonia da Requiem with its Catholic ritualism and this grossly offended the Japanese. He added a dedication to his parents which is insincere as he did not like his father and was often objectionable to his mother although he did have some feelings for her because she allowed him to get away with almost every indiscretion.
He was a fraud. Homosexuality was a crime until the mid 1960s and so he wrote the Rape of Lucretia shortly after World War Two and claimed that he was heterosexual. A lot of his work contains passages which he has deliberately purloined from others. One famous conductor said of his Violin Concerto that the best bit was the bit written by Prokofiev. Discerning musicians will see that a great chunk of this concerto is Rio Grande by Constant Lambert. The sentimental sarabande from the Simple Symphony is Albinoni’s famous Adagio. In this we can therefore say he was not a good composer and certainly not a great composer.
Britten once explained the Serenade for tenor, horn and strings to us. He said that the tenor part represented a liberated and virile male, namely Peter Pears, and that the horn was the penis. Therefore the work was about two men who were sexually active with each other.
Consider his operas. There is no real aria in any of them and, for a diatonic composer, there is no melody but melodic fragments. There are no fine choruses or ensembles pieces. For such a dramatic piece as Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw there is no real drama in the music, no excitement and nothing scary for the ghost story that it is. Britten was only interested in the subject matter, sexual perversion.
Edmund Rubbra found him an embarrassment and a liability, a loose canon and an emotional time bomb. He said of Britten that it was a pity that his parents never married!
Ben was a thug and a bully at school. He would beat up anyone who dared to win any competition that he entered. He did not have a normal childhood because he was not a normal boy but a nasty little upstart. He hated his father because his father tried to discipline him. Mother would not allow such correction and so Ben was a spoiled brat and he remained that all his life.
When Norman Del Mar pointed out to Britten some serious errors in the orchestration of the Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra in which, among other things, Britten wrote notes for instruments that they could not play, Britten was furious and, as far as he was concerned, Del Mar never existed. Del Mar was an exceptionally good conductor and an expert on instrumentation and orchestration and what Britten did not like was that Del Mar was right. Shortly before the premiere of a new Britten work the harpsichordist Viola Tunnard told Britten that she had just been diagnosed with terminal cancer. He retorted, “That is not my concern, just make sure you don’t die before the premiere of my new work. I can’t get anyone else at short notice.”
Although he was not a teacher he encouraged people to hero worship him and would say that some of these people followed him everywhere with a tape recorder so that they could even record him farting such was their fascination with him. He was a crude person as well as a nasty individual.
In The Turn of the Screw there is a part for a young girl, Flora. Britten insisted that both Miles and Flora wore short little white nighties and nothing else in a scene where they are jumping around and playing in bedrooms including on a bouncy bed. He was over-ruled. He learned about a large oratorio by J C Bach which had a terrible premiere so that the choirboys laughed during it and laughed so much that they wet themselves. Britten wanted to put the work on with himself conducting it himself to repeat this embarrassment as it would be a great sexual turn on for him. When, around 1958, his work for children, Noyes Fludde, was being rehearsed he spent a lot of time around the children and some of them were dressed in very short white tunics and nothing else and it was to them that he gravitated. A television documentary revealed that Sir Charles Mackerras expressed some concern about this and when Britten heard of it he called the conductor to him and rebuked him for doubting his intentions. Thereafter Britten maligned Mackerras and I heard him do so. I also heard Britten after a rehearsal of Noye’s Fludde with the children in their short tunics say atrocious things such as, “That boy has a lovely dick.” and “that little blond girl keeps showing her c*** and so she must be in the front directly in front of me as I will be conducting!”
Alan Rawsthorne, having heard this as well, eventually remonstrated with Britten about this and Britten replied, “You can’t even compose and the trouble with you is that you fart about with women! That is bloody disgusting!”
Supporters of Britten claim that he was a boy all his life and that he maintained innocence throughout his life and that his works were statements of his desire to protect children and maintain both their innocence and purity and it was not of any desire on his part to portray sexual perversions including homosexuality!
No one who knew the real Britten will believe that!
Sir Arthur Bliss was a normal man, being a married man. He said that Britten’s string quartets were awful and claustrophobic and likened listening to them to the fear of being locked in a man’s lavatory with Britten. He called them 'Britten’s Bendover Quartets'.
Like Elgar, Britten was a toady. He acted in a servile manner and fawned over people whom he could use. Britten flattered the pianist Richter and the cellist Rostropovich. He also sought a friendship with Shostakovich. He jumped on the bandwagon of those musicians in the ascendancy in order that he would share their success and indeed eventually rob them of it for his own ends. He joined himself to successful musicians to further himself and in doing so dropped other associates. It is a fact that he could not keep friends. The majority found out what a sod he was and abandoned him. Others were abandoned by him. For these very reasons his opera Gloriana was called The Twilight of the Sods and Gloriana was Britten, the biggest sod of them all.
In 1953 several composers were commissioned to contribute a variation each on the tune Sellinger’s Round. Britten was one. Humphrey Searle was another and, in fact, his variation, a splendid nocturne was the best. Britten was livid, absolutely furious, vicious and unreasonable. When he heard that Humphrey was going to turn Shakespeare’s King Lear into an opera Britten screamed at him, “ Don’t you f****** dare, I am going to do that and I will do a f****** better job than you or any other composer would do!” Humphrey, modest and courteous to a fault, did not set Lear. Neither did Britten. He set A Midsummer Night’s Dream explaining that he was fascinated with the names of two characters Puck and Bottom and you need no imagination to discover why.
He said, “I’d like to puck any bottom!”
Sir Lennox Berkeley was an admirable man and lived with Britten for a short time before the war. Because of a promise I made to Lennox I will not disclose details of what he told me. But from the 1960s onwards, Lennox was very troubled by Britten but he would say, “He is the godfather of my son, Michael!” What happened was that Lennox discovered the hidden meaning of Our Hunting Fathers and Britten confirmed it to be the true interpretation of it. “Who would write a piece about men having sex with animals complete with ecstatic screams? It is sick, really sick,” complained Berkeley sadly.
Walton also came to his senses and there are many accounts of Walton’s disgust at Britten. In a shop one day Walton saw a framed photograph of Britten and laid it face down so no one could see it. In a concert of British music, which included Walton’s Symphony no. 1, there was a performance of Britten’s Simple Symphony. “Oh no, not that damn awful piece,” complained Walton. The only other time I saw Walton angry was when someone likened him to Elgar. Walton snapped, “We ought to be glad that Elgar never wrote any music!” This famous remark was taken up by Sir Malcolm Arnold.
In fact, Elgar and Britten had a lot in common. They were both arrogant, bad tempered, ruthless, toadies, abusers, emotional thugs and sexually perverted. In Elgar’s case he always insisted that women who took part in any of his works always wore navy blue knickers and he sometimes inspected them to see that his wishes were being complied with. Elgar was bisexual and often tried to steal women from their husbands. Walton once said that the greatest composer of our time was Shostakovich and at the other end of the spectrum was Elgar, bloody Elgar!
Another dreadful work is the War Requiem which caused a lot of controversy. Since it was about World War II, or so Britten said, how could he allow a German to conduct it? Well, that may be an unreasonable objection. But what is wholly objectionable is the end of the piece which is a homosexual love duet in which a tenor and a baritone sing a phrase constantly to each other, “Let us sleep now...” The composer admitted that it was a deliberate advertisement for active homosexuality and that a man putting his penis into another man’s anus and pushing excrement uphill was ‘very exciting and tasty.’
Although it may seem unfair, it is true, that in our political climate, one can be deemed guilty by association. That if you admire Britten or his music in any way, you are condoning his sexual perversions and saying that his paedophilia and crimes against children are not important and dismiss them somewhat. As a schoolteacher of many years standing, but not a violent man, I have no hesitation in saying that I would have kept Britten away from all children and if necessary physically removed him if he approached children.
Even in the ghastly Spring Symphony Britten gets the boys to whistle but these are not the whistles of innocent boys with dirty faces as in Puccini’s magnificent opera Turandot but, as Britten said, the sexual whistles were what the boys had heard men use to signify their desire to strip the boys naked and fondle their genitals.
I know many conductors, and performers, who will not perform Britten’s music for the reasons given and I respect them for it. I will not conduct it either. One conductor who is also a doctor referred to Britten’s music as ‘filth’. Another conductor of international repute said that the music was ‘pornography’ and when he was referred to the sexual implications in the music of Berg this conductor replied, ‘Berg did not hide his sexual fantasies which are inherent in his music. He loved women and was honest about it. He was not like Britten wanting to pull little girls knickers down or measure the size of boys genitals!’
Denis ApIvor is a composer, a retired doctor and a consultant surgeon and has treated some of Britten’s sexual victims but because of the confidentiality of patients these full details cannot be revealed. Denis told us that if Britten ‘wanted an operation he would allow him to die in the medical procedure since that would not be butchery but surgery and little boys would be able to sleep at nights.’
And we have idiotic remarks like those of Michael Kennedy who write about Britten being a great composer and, by implication, a great man. Kennedy also wrote this absurd nonsense that Walton was Elgar’s successor, a remark so ridiculous and untrue that it incensed Walton!
Britten had rows with everybody. He loved upsetting people. In his twisted mind he thought it made him important. He was downright ignorant with his publishers who refused to give one of his boyfriends a job and that they were publishing ‘rubbish’ by Stravinsky before his own manuscripts.
Norman Lebrecht recalls the account of an occasion when Ben was rehearsing with an orchestra in Holland and how Britten had a fearful temper and was very frightening and intimidating to the orchestra. His anger over the most trivial things was simply terrifying.
I was present when he was rehearsing a very fine orchestra and it so happened that most of the cello section were female. There was an important section for the cellos which Britten said was being played wrongly. The leader of the cellos said that there was nothing wrong. Britten flew into a rage and shouted at the ladies, “You women are useless with those cellos between your legs. At any rate you have nothing between your legs that I like and some of you are probably stuffed already with Tampax!” The ladies of that section walked out.
And so I repeat that Britten was the most loathsome man I have ever met.
We all have opinions about composers and we have a right to like or dislike them or their music although I wish such judgements were musical rather than personal. For example, there is a composer whose music I like but it badly written. Britten said that Beethoven’s works were very bad and mediocre at best, and that Puccini wrote interesting operas but dreadful music. He admired the music of Lully, Tschaikovsky and Ravel but it has to be noted that all three of these composers were homosexual.
In 1966 Ngoc Le and I performed Britten’s Cello Sonata in his presence and he argued with us that we must have played it many many times, as had Rostropovich before he played it in public. We said that we had only played through it once. “I don’t f****** believe you,” snarled the composer. He was objectionable. We replied that we would never play it again!
While he was alive and people were buying his recordings and music they were inadvertently supporting his sexual perversions since he paid his victims.
I will be accused of character assassination or trying to destroy Britten’s reputation.
He did that himself!
The other argument is that we should separate the man from his music and that the appreciation of his music must not be affectd by the way he lived. At first that seems a valid argument. But the music is the man. Rachmaninov suffered a nervous breakdown and after succesful treatment wrote his gorgeous Piano Concerto no. 2 in C minor. The music is the man. Bruckner was a devout Roman Catholic and it shows in his music. The music is the man and the man his music. The same can be said for James McMillan. The Irish composer, James Wilson, visited the Holy Land and was profoundly touched by the suffering of children many of whom were in hospitals and the like. Hence James wrote a piece, Menorah. Elgar was a disgusting individual with a fetish for ladies in navy blue underwear. He wrote a Cello Concerto for Beatrice Harrison to play so she would have to open her legs and he insisted that she always wore navy blue knickers. He insisted that women in the chorus and orchestra of his works did likewise and often inspected them to ensure this. The music is the man. Alban Berg loved women and his superlative Violin Concerto was written in memory of an angel, a beautiful young woman who died young and whom he sexually admired.
Britten wrote many works about homosexuality, anal sex with boys, buggery, bestiality and sexual perversions. It is in his music. The music is the man and the man is his music.’
WARNING - Copyright - David C F Wright 1977 renewed 2000. This article or any part of it, however small, must not copied, or used in any way whatsoever without the prior written permission of the author. It must not be downloaded or stored in any library or any retrieval system. Failure to comply is in breach of copyright law and international law and is illegal being theft and fraud and will render any offenders liable to action at law.
