Window Online

[Back to index of April articles]

By Lucy Chumbley
Washington Window
Vol. 75, No. 5, April 2006

As a schoolboy, Graham Elliott heard the debut of Benjamin Britten's masterpiece, The War Requiem, on the radio - and was completely "bowled over" by the music.

"It was a revelation, really, and great excitement," he said.

That performance - at the May 30, 1962, reconsecration of Coventry Cathedral, which was destroyed during the Battle of Britain in World War II - marked the beginning of his enduring interest in the composer and his work.

Now director of music at St. Paul's, Rock Creek, Elliott is author of the recently published, Benjamin Britten: The Spiritual Dimension (Oxford University Press, 2006).

The academic work, an updated version of Elliott's doctoral thesis, explores Britten's spiritual influences and aims to give a more complete portrayal of their influence on his life and music.

While it is primarily aimed at music conservatories and universities, Elliott hopes his book will appeal to anyone interested in learning more about Britten, who is widely recognized as one of the great composers of the 20th Century.

"After Britten's death in 1976, there were many books written about him," Elliott said. "Most concentrated on his pacifism and his homosexuality. Knowing about the man as I did, I did not think this was a complete picture of his life. …I'd like to see [my book] if possible get a wider airing simply because I've presented what I believe to a perfectly valid way of looking at this great man."

While conducting his research, Elliott conversed and corresponded with Britten's friends, colleagues and patrons, among them the celebrated tenor Sir Peter Pears, Prince Philip and the Queen Mother, who described him in a letter as "one of our great men."

"The book emerged gradually and almost subconsciously with the many conversations I had about Britten over the years," he said. "It really came out of some very privileged and close relationships with people who were close to Britten."

While hearing The War Requiem sparked his interest in Britten's music, meeting Pears at the 1973 Aldeburgh Music Festival enabled Elliott to finally meet the man.

This chance encounter with Pears blossomed into a friendship, and three years later, in August 1976, Pears asked Elliott to accompany Britten, who was frail and in poor health, to a performance of The War Requiem with the original tenors at the Royal Albert Hall.

"During the performance he simply sat absolutely still, not really appearing to be looking at the stage or anything. … He just sat very, very quietly and people were very respectful of that," Elliott said. "Most people didn't even know he was there."

A few months later, he was dead.

While Britten described himself as an agnostic and was not religious in the conventional sense, his work had a strong spiritual sensibility, Elliott said. This is what he set out to explore in his research and share in his book.

"I think it is very important to see that behind all of this music, there is an aspect of his music that is the spirituality he absorbed as a boy," he said, describing childhood letters Britten wrote to his mother from school about attending services in the chapel there. "The book looks at themes through his life, and one of them is spirituality."

While he was raised in the Church of England and wrote a few liturgical pieces, Britten distanced himself from the church as an adult, though "when he knew he was dying, he asked to receive communion from the Bishop of St. Edmundsbury," Elliott said.

"He just wasn't prepared to have [religion] all shut up into a neat little box," he said. "He wanted it to be freer."

The first part of Elliott's book explores the Christian values Britten absorbed as a child, and the second section looks at how these influences inform his music.

"It really examines the spiritual influences in his work," Elliott said. "Not just the overtly religious music and the small amount of liturgical music but also the operas which I think have a lot of spirituality in them… He's a composer where it's not difficult to find links between what he wrote and his musical style."

Elliott hopes his book will de-sensationalize what others have written about Britten, whom he describes as a "most private, almost old fashioned" man. And he hopes it will refocus attention on something essential and often overlooked in the legacy of this great composer - his spirit.

- Elliott will give a pre-performance talk before the Cathedral Choral Society's May 21 performance of The War Requiem. Visit the society's Web site, www.cathedralchoralsociety.org for further information.

[Back to index of April articles]