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Benjamin Britten and WH Auden

Source: The Guardian

Nov 07, 2009

Summary

Alan Bennett's new play imagines a meeting between Britten and Auden 25 years after they fell out irrevocably. But why did their creative relationship go wrong?

This is a sample of the writing Benjamin Britten set to music in his first opera, Paul Bunyan: "Let the dog who's the most sentimental of all / Throw a languishing glance at the hat in the hall / Struggle wildly to speak all the tongues that he hears / And to rise to the realm of Platonic ideas."

And here is a fair sample of the writing he commissioned, set and seems to have thought adequate in his last opera, Death in Venice, 34 years later: "Mysterious gondola / a different world surrounds you / a timeless, legendary world / of dark lawless errands / in the watery night. / How black a gondola is – / black, coffin-black, / a vision of death itself / and the last silent voyage."

Britten is always said to have been a sophisticated admirer of poetry, and to have exercised a connoisseur's pleasure in setting it. The claim seems plausible, apart from one thing. His first opera's libretto was written by WH A

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