5 November 2023
An evening of musical-literary collisions inspired by a meeting (and parting) of minds like no other, as CLS’s first partnership with the London Review of Books.
Marking 50 years since W. H. Auden’s death and 110 years since Benjamin Britten’s birth, this first instalment of the partnership between CLS and the LRB revived and reinterrogated the tempestuous lifelong marriage between music and text.
Artists
Matthew Kofi Waldren conductor
Alex Jennings actor
Barrie Rutter actor
Johnnie Fiori actor/singer (pictured)
Phillip Breen director
The association between Benjamin Britten and W. H. Auden began in the mid-1930s when they worked together on short documentaries for the GPO Film Unit and plays for the Group Theatre, an experimental troupe whose collaborators also included Christopher Isherwood, Louis MacNeice, and Henry Moore.
Initially overawed by Auden’s precocious gifts, Britten eventually emerged from this apprenticeship with a genius so singular that Auden never quite forgave him. Perhaps because of this, the debt owed by Britten’s early masterpieces to the lessons of their partnership has been underappreciated.
This programme – with a title taken from Auden’s ‘Epitaph on a Tyrant’ – traced the full arc of their creative relationship, moving from the incidental music and cabaret songs Britten composed for Auden’s 1936 play, The Ascent of F6, through to the imagined meeting between an elderly ‘Bengy’ and ‘Wystan’ in The Habit of Art by Alan Bennett – via Britten’s Simple Symphony and Auden’s excoriating and prophetic break-up letter.
Drawing also on writing by Bennett and Frank Kermode from the LRB archive, the evening culminated in a rare performance of Britten and Auden’s most famous collaborative work, Night Mail.