The following is an extract from the essay, The church parables: limits and renewals, by Robin Holloway.

The importance of Curlew River as a crossing-place and synthesis can hardly be overstated. In some dream-conflation of harsh East Coast Anglia and milk-and-honey West Coast America, middle-age Christian culture lies down with ageless Japan and Bali, and native Englishry (folksong, Elizabethans and Purcell, Vaughan Williams and Holst, the earlier Britten himself) nuzzles the European avant-garde. Very difficult, vitally important questions of harmony and rhythm are solved and dissolved with breathtaking ease (the practicality of the performing notation in itself opens up enormous new possibilities for compositional procedure). None of this would signify were the work not also very beautiful, and quite peculiarly affecting. Indeed there really seems to be no parallel for its fusion of narrow concentration with infinite suggestion. This music goes straight to the most painful place in a totally disembodied martyrdom of St Narcissus (Canticle V)—the spiritual groin.

After this, The Burning Fiery Furnace is clearly something of a fun piece, sometimes unsuccessfully, as in the arch little riddle scene, sometimes with uncertain results, as with the would-be comic gravity of the young Israelites’ reluctance to eat at Nebuchadnezzar’s table. Modest fun is made from their three names, outlandish in two languages; and glorious fun with the ‘cornet, flute, harp, sackbut, psaltery, dulcimer, and all kinds of music’. By far the best thing in the work is the march inspired by this list of instruments, and there is hardly a better instance in all Britten of his delight in gratifying our desire for a half-expected surprise than the moment when the players transport the delectable little invention all round the church.

But in spite of the brazen trombone and the new colours in the percussion, too much is a pale replay of the predecessor. Everything fresh and inevitable in Curlew River—the triple frame of plainsong, address, ceremonial heterophony; the characterisation in voices and by instruments; the big set pieces—is here by formula, because the genre requires it. The twitterings of Nebuchadnezzar and his Astrologer are closer to mannerism than to real characterisation; and during the earnest chanting of the three goodies our ears stray guiltily to the musicians as they prepare one by one for their ‘unholy’ procession. Dissatisfaction is focused in the other set pieces. The orgy of abasement before ‘Merodak’ is ice-cold, horrible and completely stunning. But its complement, the miracle in the furnace, badly hangs fire. The greyness of the crowning Benedicite recalls Britten’s United Nations anthem Voices for Today with its equally doleful vision of the age of gold. Even the return, with converted Babylonians joining the goodies and the finely composed instrumental enrichments, cannot ignite it into celebration. The triple frame closes in, but the climax has escaped.

With The Prodigal Son the sense of genre has become distinctly dutiful, and the musical impulse tired. The story is again serious, but without the inward concentration of Curlew River. In its absence we hanker for something to compare with the pleasure of the intricate and delicious little Babylonian march. The main set piece, the orgy in the City of Sin, goes rather for the coldly disgusting quality of ‘Merodak’, heightening it into something more complex in meaning, though just as horrid in sound. There are of course inspirations throughout, notably the Prodigal’s frisky escape from boredom and the brilliant closer and closer entwining of Tempter and tempted as the city is neared. Also inspired is his homeward journey, an urgent fantasia on the work’s germinal plainsong in four free parts over the percussion ostinato of his weary footsteps. But just before it, his lowest hour grubbing with the swine is set to a rehash of incomparably more poignant originals in the Madwoman’s arias. And some of the music is frankly perfunctory, especially the elder brother with his landlubbery clusters, and the dance of welcome when the Prodigal returns.

There is a problem of monotony. The deliberate blandness of the father’s farm is all too effective; at the reconciliation our strongest reaction to the return of the seraphic unchanging B= chord from which the younger son fled is to remember the boredom that impelled him rather than to be moved by his return. More difficult still is the final ensemble. The voices go up and down and round about, repeating ‘was dead, and is alive; was lost, and is found’ to the densest ‘aggregate’ in all three parables and the one closest to a discord that needs resolution; but nothing seems to focus or clinch, whether musically or dramatically. As in The Burning Fiery Furnace the climax is somehow missed (though everyone knows where it should be); moreover in The Prodigal Son the reserve upon which the genre depends for its expressive manner gives way in two crucial places to a direct appeal—to pathos in the father’s forgiveness, to reconciliatory warmth in the final ensemble; and in both cases the result is ineffectual.

These shortcomings in The Burning Fiery Furnace and The Prodigal Son suggest limitations in the church parable convention unraised by Curlew River; moreover they touch upon wider limitations in Britten at large. In the depiction of Babylonian gold-lust and the debaucheries of the Big City a tone can be heard that is not so much ascetic as prim and even priggish. This music renders abandon with monkish distaste; there is no imaginative understanding of the ambiguity within ‘sinfulness’. One has only to recall the comparable vignettes in Mahagonny—also the work of a moralist whose attitude to what he pictures with such seductive pleasure is unmistakably severe—to see how coldly Britten looks upon the frailty of the flesh. The effect in The Prodigal Son of setting the famine the morning after to the same music as the ‘dark delights’ of the night before is of lofty disapproval rather than spiritual insight. ‘Sin’ is only joyless, fearsome, loathly; therefore its music is made so; and as the framework closes on each story and the Abbot comes forward to preach, we feel a discomfort different from what is intended. After the story of the miracle in the furnace he tells us that ‘God is tried in the fire, and the mettle of man in the furnace of humiliation’ and prays that

God give us all
the strength to walk
safe in the burning fiery furnace
of this murderous world.

The aptness is undeniable; but what the composer’s art has so extraordinarily opened up suddenly becomes thoroughly small and dry, and not a little banal. How serious, really, is the tone of this elaborate medievalising? Do the spectators also dress up, in fancy, to become illiterate peasants receiving a ‘sermon in sounds’? No answer; the musicians process out, taking their noises with them, leaving their audience too much in the dark.

Worries about the didactic strain in these explicitly moralising works open up wider reservations still. The church parables officially exemplify Hope, Faith and Love, but it is difficult not to find such neatness a little laboured, especially after Curlew River had beautifully embodied all three. Faith and Love remain abstractions in their respective parables, giving scant warmth, for all the wagging finger. The same is true of Curlew River, but with positive effect. It is far less insistently didactic, working—overwhelmingly—by pity and terror; and it is propelled by something absolutely authentic, a yearning for ‘someone … someone …’ that goes altogether beyond an emblem of Hope in the abstract. If the three parables have a common theme it is the drabbest stoicism: make do, knuckle under, hold fast, carry your burden, forgive and forget, dutifully kill the fatted calf. This is cold comfort at best, and at the worst, not bread but a stone. And artistically the result is a severe impoverishment, even a denial, of the free spirit that could once set Rimbaud and Michelangelo, and write the Spring Symphony and The Prince of the Pagodas.

And so the very clarity of the renewal in the parables soon serves to expose limitations more clearly than before. The irresolutions that linger on after three ostensibly reconciliatory endings suggest a high degree of disquiet which indeed surfaces in Britten’s next stage work, Owen Wingrave, with a turbulence, almost an incoherence, unique in this artist. ‘Peace’ here is certainly not an inert abstraction, but whereas the cardinal virtues fail to quicken their respective parables, ‘Peace’ has a weight thrust upon it which it simply cannot bear. It is a truism that everyone hates war and wants peace, and equally that a tyrant has never been defeated or a people civilised without the military virtues. Why not write three parables on honour, courage and glory?—for it is another failure of imagination, another deception, to dismiss them as base or hollow. To place all self-deception, brutality and blood-lust on the one side and all humane decency on the other is more than just simplistic and mean; it is untrue. And this, in a man of painfully sensitive conscience, must stand at a peculiarly vulnerable place. It is commonplace to pay pious tribute to Britten’s pacifism. But Peace and its facile companion Compassion can hardly be reconciled to a preoccupation with subject-matter that sometimes seems closer to a nervous compulsion than to the spirit of ‘peace on earth, good will towards men’. And in Owen’s monologue praising peace we sense that the word’s larger vibrations carry beyond the purely conventional associations invoked. His fervour and the music’s glittery warmth amidst so much that is angular and crashing suggest what dare not speak its name in work after work. ‘Love is the unfamiliar word’—not love as an abstract, but the individual eros. Peace is the symbol of self-discovery, self-possession, self-realisation: ‘in Peace I have found my image’. The private, almost fetishistic quality of this word in Britten’s output explains itself—warrants its full warmth—only if it is understood as the pass- or code-word for his sexuality.

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