In the Call of the Cuckoo

Benjamin Britten began the celebration of his 50th birthday by conducting the London Symphony last September in a concert dedicated to himself. He took the podium again last week to honor his birthday with a performance of his War Requiem at London's Royal Festival Hall. Having given English critics the entire autumn to contemplate the significance of a birthday that in fact occurred in late November, Britten found himself still best described by two praiseful paradoxes. Though he has gained immensely in intellectual force over the years, he has lost none of his youthful high spirits and originality. And though his music is unmistakably the work of a foursquare Englishman, it is rich with the ardor of a dedicated citizen of the world.

Clear & Clean. It was only last year that Britten produced the War Requiem, which is the capstone of his remarkable career. And since its first performance for the rededication of the Coventry Cathedral, the Requiem has grown in esteem at every hearing, until it is now acclaimed both in Britain and abroad as a modern masterwork. It describes the wide range of Britten's vision and his mastery of the clean, clear voice in which he speaks better than any of his other compositions. With it Britten has emerged as England's greatest composer since Henry Purcell (16597-95) and, among this generation's composers, the only active peer of Dmitry Shostakovich.

Since his opera Peter Grimes brought him to world prominence (TIME cover, Feb. 16, 1948), Britten has turned out a varied and impressive body of work, including nine other operas, a ballet, and everything from songs to symphonies, Masses to metamorphoses. Beyond composition, his talents sparkle with equal virtuosity. He is a gifted conductor, and when he accompanied Cellist Mstislav Rostropovich on the piano in the premiere of a Britten cello sonata, one critic called him "the compleat musician, a perpetual challenge to the age of specialization."

Often chided for a lack of innovation in his music, Britten has wisely scorned the sterile world of experimentation for its own sake. With the maturation of his talents has come a taste for "the slender sound of, say, Mozart or Verdi or Mahler." An early enthusiasm for Beethoven is gone: "It's really quite sloppy, you know." Brahms he cannot abide. "I play through all his music every so often to see if I am right," Britten worried recently. "I usually find that I underestimated last time how bad he was."

Dust & Cobwebs. "Britten has never claimed to be an innovator," argues Tenor Peter Pears, his longtime friend and the voice for whom most of his work is composed. "There blows through his vocal music, at least, a strong, revitalizing southeast wind which has rid English song of much accumulated dust and cobwebs. If Britten is no innovator, he is most certainly a renovator."

The cleansing wind of his music is generated in "The Red House," a seaside cottage near Aldeburgh, Suffolk, where Britten and Pears have lived since 1947. Thin and fit at 50, Britten works prodigiously when he is at home. Rising at 5:30 a.m., he plows straight through to lunchtime, never looking up from his work and snapping waspishly at any interruption. Afternoons are spent in long, silent hikes on the bleak Suffolk moors or beside the booming North Sea, followed by -a teatime plunge in the swimming pool--a chilly ritual he sticks to even in January.

Within his tightly circumscribed world, Britten is a keen observer and an even keener listener whose inspiration is constantly refreshed by glimmers and whispers of life around him. He locates elements of art in the prosaic occurrences of everyday life, and from them, he fashions his music. "Sometimes we have wondered whether he is an international or a parochial composer," the London Times confessed in a birthday tribute. "He has given evidence for both decisions, and although 50 is an age not in itself definitive for a creative artist's work, we can already see that he has an imagination which encompasses the whole panchromatic apparatus in a C major triad, the phenomenon of human resurgence in the call of a cuckoo."

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