Tea at Trianon: Benjamin Britten: Music, Sex, and Politics

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Saturday, April 27, 2013

Benjamin Britten: Music, Sex, and Politics

A new book about the modern British composer is reviewed by R.J. Stove. (I don't think Rob cares much for Britten's music.) To quote:

It has become a cliché among such books’ reviewers to observe that Britten is as popular now as when he died in 1976. He is certainly as much talked about as he was then. How much this verbiage concerns his music is another issue. (After the nauseating revelations of earlier biographers, John Bridcut and the late Humphrey Carpenter, no newspaper in 2013 would dare use the headline with which London’s Sunday Times flagged the composer’s obituary: “Britten: a man with purity of vision.”)

We need not adopt the indefensibly extreme stance of dismissing Britten as a Harvey Milk with brains to point out that his initial cheer squad drew disproportionately upon musical semi-literates. Tributes to him as “English music’s savior” or “the first major English composer since Purcell” were always absurd. The truth is, artistic criteria play a smaller role in Britten’s current repute than in that of any other important modern creative musician, Shostakovich excepted. For most present-day pundits, Britten and Shostakovich matter primarily as dissidents, sexual dissidence assuming the same inspirational role with the Englishman that political dissidence has with the Russian. Both men accordingly generate innumerable column inches from a commentariat largely uninterested in musical considerations. (Read entire article.)