Britten and the concentration camps

More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

14 February

[For which, of course, read extermination camps - or death camps.]

But can we really hear, in the writing of his String Quartet No. 2, that Britten had made a visit to these camps? Surely, if we could, we wouldn't need to be told the fact, because the music itself would tell us!

The essence of my point is the old, old one: does the detail of a biography (even an autobiography) inform how we listen to a composer's work*? If so, are we then not unbelievably alienated, according to that belief, from Bach's highly alive compositions, because we do not really know very much about his life?

After hearing a quartet, five or so years back, announce Shostakovich's inescapable String Quartet No. 8 in a different way from what predominates, I have been freed from crediting that old chestnut about the bombing of Dresden, even if the composer was, indeed, in Dresden to write music for a film about that very subject (Five Days, Five Nights), and wrote it there in the three days from 12 to 14 July 1960.

Rightly or wrongly, I feel that I can now hear that quartet without these supposed guides to an interpretative view of what is - purely - music: it is not, I believe, programme (or programmatic) music.

And we also ought not only to get a good chance for an airing of more than a dozen other string quartets except to mark the 52nd anniversary of his stubbing his toe in Dresden (a bit like Poulenc: 50 years since Poulenc stubbed his toe in Montmartre).


End-notes

* Orrin Howard seems to inform us, regarding Britten, that 'In spite of his being a Britisher through and through, he didn't go the folk route of Vaughan Williams'. Well, yes...


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