His music was deeply rooted in the landscapes of Suffolk, but Britten also drew inspiration from well outside Europe, says Daniel Jaffé
Britten is widely celebrated for his profound connection with Suffolk’s flat, open landscapes, its coast and its rich birdlife of waders and waterfowl, one of which is celebrated in his opera (or ‘Church Parable’) Curlew River. It’s a curious paradox, then, that much of his music, even some that is most apparently rooted in that East Anglian region – including in his great ‘home coming’ opera of 1945, Peter Grimes – was profoundly inspired by music from even further East, virtually the other side of the world.
It was not through travelling East, but westwards across the Atlantic that Britten had his first encounter with Balinese music. In 1939, despondent about the rise of fascism, Europe’s fate and that of his own country, Britten left for the US just months before the outbreak of World War II. There, while in Long Island as house guest of the German émigré psychiatrist William Mayer, he met the Canadian composer and ethnomusicologist Colin McPhee. A sufferer of debilitating depression – hence his frequent visits to Dr Mayer – McPhee nonetheless played a vital role in researching and documenting music in Bali, living several years on the Indonesian island for that purpose.
McPhee persuaded Britten to play several of his two-piano transcriptions of Balinese music, five of which they recorded in a New York studio early in 1941. One of these, ‘Taboeh teloe’, particularly sank into Britten’s creative consciousness, resurfacing in Peter Grimes with the tintinnabulation of bells evoked in the interlude ‘Sunday Morning’. Its climax, with the characteristic sound of a dissonant low tolling bell against the stately rising and falling horn theme and the polyphonic chatter of treble register instruments, virtually illustrates – instrumentation apart – McPhee’s description of Balinese gamelan texture: ‘Over a slow and chantlike bass that hummed with curious penetration, the melody moved in the middle register, fluid, free, appearing and vanishing in the incessant, shimmering arabesques that rang high in the treble as though beaten out on a thousand little anvils.’
Back in England (having returned in April 1942), with Grimes’s premiere still to come, on 6 January 1945 Britten joined Poulenc in the Albert Hall as co-soloist in the French composer’s Concerto for Two Pianos. Written in 1932, it was inspired by a Balinese gamelan Poulenc had heard at the 1931 Exposition Coloniale in Paris – the work b
