The music man

When Humphrey Carpenter published the first major biography of Benjamin Britten in 1992, many of the composer’s associates were still alive and breathing down his neck. Carpenter’s knowledge of the music wasn’t intimate, nor did he have available to him the primary source of the superb edition of Britten’s correspondence, now completed with a sixth 800-page volume covering the decade before his death in 1976: deadly dull though these letters intrinsically are, the magnificent accompanying annotation and detailed apparatus make them richly revealing.

Thus hobbled, Carpenter’s effort amounts to a broad-brush portrait and a gripping narrative, but also something of a rushed and unpolished job — unbalanced and half-digested, peppered with small errors and marred by a rather crude psychological portrait of a man obsessed with his mother and bewitched by pubescent boys.

This second major biography emerges as the long-meditated and authoritative corrective. Somewhat shorter than Carpenter’s, it is cleanly shaped and moves as swiftly and surely as the music it honours. As a conductor of Britten’s operas, a former head of music at Aldeburgh, and the author of several Britten-focused academic studies, Kildea is more deeply and thoughtfully immersed in the subject than Carpenter was, but he has a fine sense of social and cultural context too. Writing with crisp urbane elegance, he displays an acute sense of his subject’s convoluted psychology, and although he seems to become increasingly hostile to Britten as he gets older and more tetchily autocratic, he has no impulse either to debunk or sensationalise him.

Kildea addresses the headline subject of the composer’s paedophilia soberly and sensitively, downplaying the sexual motive and characterising Britten more as the pseudo-paternal school captain taking the fledgling fourth-former under his wing than as a predatory molester or abuser.

Kildea appears convinced that in 1938 the 24-year-old Britten did bed the willing 18-year-old Wulff Scherchen (still alive today and reticent on the subject), but the implication is that this was the only physically consummated relationship he had with anyone except the tenor Peter Pears, his partner from 1939 until his death and the inspiration for some of his greatest work.