Scenes
I: Prologue-The Many-sided Man (Text from Homer's Odyssey) 0:04
II: The End of the World (Text from Britten's Trial) 2:40
III: The Answer of the Sea ( Poem "Self Dependence" by Matthew Arnold") 7:17
IV: A Letter to the Musical Times From an R.A.F. Pilot Officer, Age 19 11:10
V: What to Say, and What Not to Say (Text by George Crabbe and by the composer) 16:47
VI: Love Song in Time of War (Poem "Dover Beach" by Matthew Arnold) 18:12
VII: The Unfathomable Deep (Poem "Lights Out" by Edward Thomas) 23:59
VIII: More Lives Than One (Text from "The Ballad of Reading Gaol" by Oscar Wilde) 27:05
IX: Epilogue-Now Voyager (Poem by Walt Whitman) 29:28
Program Notes (also at firstleafmusic.com/voice-%26-orch-1)
Todd Strange, Tenor
Dylan Skye Hart, Horn
Geoffrey Pope, Conductor
The Hollywood Film Chorale Strings
Corey Field, Composer
The Trial of Benjamin Britten is a dramatic song cycle which takes place inside the mind of Benjamin Britten during his May 28, 1942 Conscientious Objector hearing before the Military Service Tribunal in London. On that occasion and a subsequent appeal, Britten was on trial publicly, testifying and offering witnesses in support of his petition to be a Conscientious Objector during World War II, with an uncertain outcome that could have resulted in Britten choosing prison over accepting the judgment of the Tribunal. Britten was also deeply aware of another reason for possible public condemnation in the Britain of the 1940’s, arising from his personal relationship with his muse, tenor Peter Pears. During most of Britten’s lifetime, such relationships were illegal, and indeed the poet and playwright Oscar Wilde had in 1895 been convicted of such “criminal acts,” imprisoned, and died not long after.
As Britten stood before the Tribunal that day, it was also the culmination of a three-year odyssey in the United States, which began in Spring, 1939 and resulted in Britten being safely “stranded” in the United States as war broke out in Europe. During his American odyssey Britten considered remaining in the United States, perhaps following the example of his friend and mentor the poet W.H. Auden. After sojourns in Canada, New York (in Auden’s notorious “Bohemian” Brooklyn apartment) and on Long Island, Britten and Pears continued westward and drove three thousand miles across the continent to spend several months with friends in the hot and dry summer of 1941 climate of southern California, in Escondido near the Pacific Ocean where they could “pick oranges off the tree for breakfast” and were enthusiastic beach goers, swimming in the sun-drenched Pacific and comparing its waters to the Atlantic. The location was between Los Angeles and San Diego and therefore also a practical location because Britten was ambivalently considering a career change to Hollywood film composing. He hired an agent and attended at least one meeting in Hollywood with a producer. In Britten’s letters the pursuit of film music fame and fortune sounds more like a fantasy he knew would not come to pass, and his letters were filled with sharp-witted contempt for all things Hollywood and Los Angeles (which he described as the “exhaust pipe” of America).
At the same time he was taking his escape from Europe to its farthest possible extent, the “end of the world” where Western Culture reaches its geographic end at America’s west coast. It was there, at the “end of the world,” that Britten found himself and what he needed to be, and to become. The key moment was in an antiquary book shop (it may indeed have been the famous “Pickwick Books” on Hollywood Boulevard), where Peter Pears found a volume of the relatively obscure book-length poem from 1810, “The Borough” by George Crabbe. Crabbe was an English poet from the same Suffolk North Sea coast as Britten, and his long poem included the tragic story of the solitary outcast Aldeburgh fisherman Peter Grimes. Finding a way to tell Grimes’ story as an opera became the key to Britten’s spiritual and geographic return home.
The Odyssey concluded when Britten and Pears sailed home on a fearfully dangerous return voyage across the U-Boat patrolled North Atlantic in 1942, to face the Military Tribunal and an uncertain future precisely at the moment when Britten had found his own artistic and life meaning. The Trial of Benjamin Britten is a “flashback” in Britten’s mind during the Tribunal hearing in nine scenes including a Prologue and Epilogue. As the trial takes place and brings to a head several years of soul-searching inner anxiety and conflict, Britten’s mind is only partly “there” in the hearing room, and his well-rehearsed public testimony is indeed a performance of a kind. While testifying, inside his mind he conjures up his own private world in the one way he best knew: carefully selected poetry that when set to music is transformed into a dramatic arc that expresses his true inner self as he recalls key moments in his life-changing American Odyssey.