I wonder how many people, like me, bored with the cookery programmes, worthy dramas and so-called "reality TV", especially during lockdown, have found themselves reduced to scrolling down the alphabetical list of elderly BBC documentaries on iPlayer? One such search yielded a 2013 programme about the composer Benjamin Britten.
I didn't even know about the informal performances given by Britten and his partner Peter Pears on the BBC in the 1960s, short interludes with Britten at the piano and Pears in a cardigan. Thus, although I remember the Dudley Moore (himself a highly talented musician) parody of these performances, I had no idea at the time what he was parodying. Apparently Pears - the chief victim of the parody - took it in good spirit, but Britten was very hurt. He had not been singled out by Moore, who also parodied Brecht and Weill and several other better-known classical composers, yet clearly he took his work seriously and did not respond well to being held up to ridicule.
Britten and his partner, the tenor Peter Pears, were lifelong pacifists, both of whom applied for recognition as conscientious objectors during the Second World War. (Britten was not born until 1913, and claimed that his pacifism was an indirect result of the harsh regime he experienced at boarding school.) Like Sassoon, he became a member of the inter-war Peace Pledge Union, on whose behalf he wrote a piece of music called Pacifist March. As a composer, he was still in the process of building his reputation, and the march was not a big hit in the run-up to the war. In the same year, 1937, there were two major events in his life: his mother died, and he met Peter Pears.
Their pacifism was one of the reasons for Britten and Pears leaving the UK for Canada and later the United States, where they were less exposed to the hostility of what Sassoon called "jingo". They returned to the UK before the end of the war and Britten agreed to work for the Ministry of Information.
Yet in 2013, while preparing a film about Britten for the centenary of his birth, director Tony Palmer claimed that the Ministry of Defence had refused him permission to use a piece of training film when they found out he was working on material about Britten, on the grounds that the MOD could not be seen to deal with "cowards" and "deserters". The MOD denied any such motive, but it may be that Palmer had happened to come into contact with individuals who held such views, of which many can be found on your nearest high street.
Britten's music can be something of an acquired taste, but that he was a remarkable talent is hardly open to debate. His setting of Wilfred Owen's "At a Calvary near the Ancre" was included in the concert, "Songs of War", organised by the Siegfried Sassoon Fellowship in partnership with other war poets' societies at St James's Church, Piccadilly, in 2009. Really, though, this song is part of the War Requiem that Britten wrote in 1962 for the consecration of Coventry Cathedral, a modern replacement constructed right next to the ancient building destroyed by German bombing in 1941. Many of us can clearly remember watching the opening on black-and-white television, though of course its significance was lost on a six-year-old child, as I then was.
The War Requiem, generally regarded as Britten's masterpiece, included a substantial chunk of Wilfred Owen's poetry (including "Anthem for Doomed Youth", the poem Sassoon helped him write), and no doubt introduced Owen's work to a much wider audience. These texts are interspersed with the traditional sequences of the Latin requiem - "Kyrie Eleison", "Dies irae", "Libera me", etc. One great admirer of the work was the late Dom Sebastian Moore, who described to me in our 2007 interview how it had moved him.
Britten's love of poetry was not limited to Owen and the war poets. He was a great admirer of the work of Thomas Hardy and William Blake, and was a close personal friend of W H Auden. Around 150 poets in total were given the Britten treatment, a staggering figure, but I can't find Sassoon among them; nor have I as yet found any clues as to Sassoon's opinions on Britten's music. Siegfried was very musical and would certainly have had a view. The two men were far apart in age, but not enough to have precluded them becoming friends, and they moved in the same circles and shared many ideas. It's impossible that they did not meet on occasions, and yet I can't find a direct link between them. Just another of the many remaining gaps in my knowledge of Siegfried Sassoon.
