Benjamin Britten on Camera

ORCHESTRA STRIKES UP

Benjamin Britten was the great British classical composer of the broadcasting age.

His music was regularly heard

on radio and television throughout his working life.

The BBC was constantly trying to ..

I was going to say court him and in a way we were.

An intensely private man, he did allow the camera into his world

Even though he was involved with the televising of his works,

he never owned a television himself.

In this programme we'll see and hear

some of the highlights of his broadcast legacy.

Meeting some of the musicians he worked with...

He was a hero amongst composers

and I...hero worshiped.

..visiting the Suffolk coast which inspired so much of his work...

This music came from deep in Ben's heart.

..and hearing from the producers

who brought his music to vast audiences.

The BBC were able to find ways of serving him,

recognising that he was a truly great figure in our lives.

BIRDSONG

In the cold and wintry month of February 1969,

a significant piece of broadcasting history was made

here on the edge of the North Sea in Suffolk.

The BBC had taken a bold decision

to leave the comfortable, controlled environment of its London studios

to film a production of Britten s majestic dark opera, Peter Grimes,

on location at Snape Maltings,

the composer's own concert space close to his home in the seaside town of Aldeburgh.

BIRDSONG

At Sadler's Wells in 1945,

the very first production of Peter Grimes

had caused a national sensation.

Broadcast on BBC radio,

it brought modern opera to a whole new audience.

"I had no inclination to switch off

even in the most discordant passages."

"The story is grim and sordid

"and could hardly be called pleasant entertainment, but it's well told."

"Britten has ARRIVED with this opera!"

Now, nearly 25 years later,

the BBC would bring Britten's greatest operatic triumph

to the nation's TV screens in full colour,

with the original singer, Peter Pears, recreating the title role.

# Picture what that day was like

# That evil day

# We sailed into the wind, heavily ladened... #

Peter Pears was Britten's lover and partner for most of his life.

They met in the late '30s when Pears was a member of the BBC Singers

and for decades they would defy the law against homosexuality

and social convention by living and working together.

# And a child's silently... #

Britten had composed the role of Peter Grimes specifically for Pears' distinctive tenor voice.

It was difficult with Pears being in his 60s then.

You know, trying to be the young fisherman

was not so easy in close-up.

# With a childish death! #

The major thing about it is that it's Benjamin Britten conducting

and Peter Pears singing Peter Grimes.

You know, come on, that's already a fantastic bonus.

# Hurry! Hurry! Hurry! Hurry! Hurry!

But the cast was very strong,

they had Joan Cross, a veteran director and singer herself...

..with Brian Large, then a very young

but brilliant television director doing it.

# Helen, Helen

# Give me your hand. #

There was a lot to cram into the auditorium of the Maltings,

not just the sets, the singers and all the cameras,

but a 50-piece orchestra.

Britten insisting on it being recorded in the Maltings,

which was ideal in terms of sound but not as an opera set.

And I should like to say how very proud all of us from Aldeburgh

are that this great operatic experiment with all of you

is taking place here in Maltings.

The whole apparatus of televising opera was very complicated.

I can't look at you directly in the monitor.

I think he found it a rather frustrating and slightly limiting medium,

partly because he wasn't in total control himself.

I'll try and remember. That side is... No, that's the wrong side.

No, that side is you.

There were limitations to the number of cameras

and therefore the number of angles you could get, you could see that.

But I felt that that released a sort of intensity.

It reminded me how much you unleash creativity when you set limits.

Peter Grimes is the classic outsider,

a fisherman desperately eking out a living

in a tiny community, The Borough.

The townsfolk suspect him of causing the death of a young apprentice

# Peter Grimes...! #

When a second apprentice also disappears

the mob rises up in judgment against him.

# Peter Grimes! #

I think Britten is the great humane composer of the 20th century.

Some of this may come out of the tension he felt as a person himself

not being quite at ease with his place in society.

# Peter Grimes! #

He's someone who cuts straight to people's heart,

because they can understand the personal issues

of an individual isolated in respect of society.

# Come on, lend me... #

So these are very, very human emotions

which Britten is putting on a big wide scale

and he's doing it with such compositional skill

that you're immediately drawn in.

# And begin. #

What I find fascinating about the Peter Grimes character,

and it probably is very strong in the Pears performance,

because he was so embedded in the role,

is the match between the musical landscape and the character.

The fictional Borough was based on the Suffolk town of Aldeburgh

where Britten made his home for 30 years.

It's a place which is right on the edge

and it does have a terrific kind of atmosphere.

It's... The weather is incredibly affecting here.

You have days with very low skies

in which you can actually physically feel the pressure.

And you have days when, you know,

you can just feel the tension before the storm breaks and stuff.

There's an awful lot you can find in the music, too.

Britten was born into a world that was just about to discover broadcasting,

so he was a teenager in the '20s when the BBC was just beginning.

And we can tell from his diaries that it was a source

of real interest and real stimulus to him as a composer.

And he would note in his diary, "Orchestra disappointingly bad wind out of tune."

And I think we can sense him being musically educated through the medium of broadcasting.

And, in that sense, he's a perfect example of what the BBC set out to do.

Right from the start of his career the young Britten's own compositions had been heard on the radio.

In 1939, his setting of the French poet Rimbaud's lyric

about an imaginary sea, Marine

received a BBC Proms premiere at the Queen's Hall.

Amazingly there is still a recording

of this wonderful, wonderful dramatic singer

singing from Britten's song cycle, Les Illuminations, conducted by Henry Wood.

And one can hear on the sound recording how well this comes across

and you do sense an audience that is very open and receptive to Britten's music.

APPLAUSE

In 1948, Britten founded the Aldeburgh Festival of Music and the Arts here in his home town.

Using community halls and churches, he and Pears began to stage ambitious productions.

The arts programme, Monitor, visited in 1958.

The very first job I did in television

was looking at rushes of John Schlesinger's documentary about Benjamin Britten.

And I helped to write the commentary for that 1958 film.

Benjamin Britten has only lived in Aldeburgh for the last ten years,

but he was born in Suffolk not very far from here

and except for a short time

has always lived in this part of the world.

When you look back at John Schlesinger's film

it's amazing that he must have told Britten what to do.

You couldn't just grab it as we would now,

he must have told Britten, "Do you mind starting walking now, Mr Britten?"

"Come towards the camera. Now would you mind waiting here?"

"Maybe you could lean back on that bollard and think for a little bit."

That kind of direction must have gone on, which is unthinkable today. HE LAUGHS

Britten belongs wholeheartedly to the community in which he lives

and his music is bound up very closely

with the lives and interests around him.

The film was in a miniature way

trying to give a portrait of the festival

and also hone in on Britten's new work that year, which was Noah's Flood,

which was written partly for the children of Suffolk.

# Don't go drawing back the blind, or looking in the street

# Them that ask no questions isn't told a lie

# Watch the wall, my darling, while the Gentlemen go by

# Five and twenty ponies, trotting through the dark... #

He asked me to play Jaffett, one of the three sons in Noah's Flood.

And it was going to be premiered in Orford Church.

And I was 14 I suppose by then or

and my voice had slid down slightly, so he changed...the key.

And I've got the score still.

And all the dots are his.

He did all the transposition and it was very exciting to try it all out.

THEY SING

And he just spent any amount of time we needed,

because he was a kind man, he was...generous.

Everyone was so enthusiastic

and you always wanted to impress Mr Britten especially.

And, as the oldest brother, I was put up on the tiller

and I was in this storm

and the ark was going up and down and up and down, round and about.

And I...I pulled as hard as I could to make it as dramatic as I could

and pulled, unfortunately, a little too hard

and went straight off the back of the ark,

legs up in the air and head over heels backwards.

I find children highly receptive, very choosy perhaps,

but if they like something and it can be music as new or as old as you like,

then their reaction is spontaneous and encouraging.

It was a very moving film

and at the same time Britten's credo that I want to write music

that's useful for the community came across loud and clear.

I have a particular intonation as a composer to want to write music that is useful.

And if someone asks me to do something,

my inclination is to want to please them.

He would work with all the children and be encouraging,

that's the best kind of teacher,

especially as an introduction to classical music.

You long for a teacher to make it live,

to draw out of you something

that you otherwise might never have discovered.

In 1960, the BBC came to the Aldeburgh Festival

to record for the radio the premiere of Britten's new opera

based on Shakespeare's play A Midsummer Night's Dream.

The opera is I think one of Britten's most rich and varied achievements.

He's freer in this than he has been for a long time.

The work featured 25 orchestral players and a large cast of singers

All squeezed into the tiny space of the Jubilee Hall in Aldeburgh.

We sometimes had to actually go out of doors

to get from one side to the other entrance,

so if it was raining and blowing our make-up went all over the place.

SHE LAUGHS

I was actually asked to sing by Ben

and that was a very great tribute for me.

Cos she's so in love and she can't bear that he's not returning it

The pleading and the very shape of the phrase that you sing,

the timing is perfect.

There are little gaps

just where you need to take a breath to plead again.

Working with him on

a piece that had been written for me was just wonderful.

Cos it all sort of fitted like a glove.

If I obeyed everything he wrote in the score...

it sounded like me somehow or other.

The critical reception for the festival performance was positive,

but some listeners to the BBC Home Service had a different reaction.

The appreciation index was much lower than was standard

for operas that were performed on radio at the time.

In most cases it was apparently active dislike,

that it was completely lacking in melody, harmony,

form, beauty or interest.

A cacophony on rhythmless banging and clanging called music

by someone who obviously thinks melody is below his dignity to produce.

I remember Ben saying to me one day, "Of course, one does feel rather sad

"knowing that if a piece of one s music is announced on the radio

"hundreds of thousands of people lean forward and change the channel.

The '60s was the golden age of television experiment

and for ten years BBC programme makers were able to persuade Britten

to explore a variety of ways in which his music might be presented on television.

1963 was the 50th birthday of Benjamin Britten and I wrote to him and said we'd like to do programme.

He said, "No, please, don't. It makes me sound like an obituary at 50 "

"Can't you wait till I'm 80?" And I said, "No, we want to do it now for your 50th birthday."

And he gracefully acceded.

Five, four, three.

The programme was much more ambitious than just being a documentary about his life,

it was also trying to take an overview of his work.

APPLAUSE

This profile in words, in pictures and above all in music

of Benjamin Britten has been put together by his admirers,

those who think that in him we have a great figure living amongst us

and who think that today his 50th birthday is a perfectly sound occasion on which to say so.

And we welcome to the studio his fellow composer and friend, Michael Tippett.

They include music critics and Hans Keller is with us

and Mr Rozhdestvensky the great Russian conductor.

I would like to wish him many, many happy returns of the day.

Good health and new beautiful music.

Thank you very much.

It was very ambitious, I must say.

Looking back on it I think how did we manage to get it all in, but we did.

ORCHESTRA STRIKES UP

Britten At 50 managed to include an intimate portrait of Britten and Pears on their home ground.

Preparing for the Aldeburgh Festival.

Relaxing together walking the dogs.

Out of all the musicians I have met,

he is the one in whom music and from whom music flows always,

out of his mind, out of his body.

APPLAUSE

The programme contained nearly a dozen musical extracts,

including Peter Grimes,

Noah's Flood,

and this pizzicato piece composed when Britten was only ten.

From this playful and if I may say so rather childish pizzicato,

we turn to the real Britten.

The top A first violin... HE HUMS

Not too solemn, gentlemen, it is after all based on a dance.

He was not a telly viewer, but at the same time I think

we persuaded him that we were on his side.

And, of course, that was very important, getting his confidence.

ORCHESTRA STRIKES UP

He doesn't for a moment acknowledge or want to acknowledge the presence of the cameras.

If it's Andre Previn, he liked to talk to the camera,

with Britten it's just come on and do it.

The important thing is the music.

Yes. If you can just give me the feeling that you're coming to the end of the section here.

There was a bit more crescendo the bar before one. HE HUMS

Then we are off again, you see

ORCHESTRA STRIKES UP

One, two, three, four.

His clarity of vision in the music is clear in the way he conducts.

It's not a fussy conducting, on the contrary it's very straightforward.

Britten At 50 ended with a sequence from the new War Requiem.

When it came to planning how to put pictures to the War Requiem,

I had the temerity to ring Britten and say, "Look, dare I ask you

"whether you had any images when you are composing this music?"

Expecting him to say, "Don't be silly, composers don't have pictures, they think in music."

But he said, "Normally I don't have images,

"but in this case I would suggest to you the famous Grunewald triptych,

"that wonderful painting of Christ on the cross."

So, in a sense I had approval in a way I've never had before or since from a composer

for what pictures I used to illustrate a passage of music.

It was very powerful.

It went out on the night that President Kennedy was assassinated.

And it was somehow on that terrible day the kind of peaceful moment,

a reconciliation moment,

when we saw the Requiem which Britten himself had as it were, blessed my images.

The work that made his name more than any other

would have to be the War Requiem.

And I think that remains perhaps the music

that has the most immediate effect on people.

BELL CHIMES

On the night of 14 November, 1940, a massive aerial bombardment of Coventry and the West Midlands

left hundreds dead and thousands homeless...

..destroying much of the city centre and leaving the Cathedral a hollow, burnt-out shell.

The rebuilding of the cathedral in the late '50s,

became a symbolic act of reconciliation and national unity.

Britten composed his monumental War Requiem

for the reconsecration of the building in 1962.

The War Requiem allowed Britten

to project onto a public stage his private world.

He didn't have to compromise on his pacifism for example

and the piece actually dramatises that relationship

between a private grief and a public grief.

Britten was able to give the work a deeply personal dimension,

four of his close friends had been killed as a consequence of the Second World War.

He was bitterly upset when they departed

and he thought he'd like to dedicate it to them

and also through them to all the thousands who died.

The words he chose to set interwove the traditional Latin mass for the dead

with the First World War poems of Wilfred Owen.

# Move him into the sun... #

The amalgamation of the poems within the War Requiem itself

was an inspirational idea.

To mix the Latin text with these poems

which are contradicting everything that's in the Requiem text.

The premier in Coventry Cathedral

quickly led to two BBC Prom performances,

first in 1963 and then this televised version a year later.

# If anything might rouse him

# Rouse him now! #

What's so brilliant about it is you know, Britten is never bombastic.

Even though it involves so many people, it's actually

one of the most intimate and personal works he ever wrote.

One can only imagine... I mean gosh, I would give anything

to have been at Coventry Cathedral that first performance

to have witnessed that.

It just transfixed us.

I mean, I just stood there and my hair stood on end.

It was certainly very moving.

I think that was certainly one of the effects

that Benjamin Britten himself would have hoped for.

I heard the first performance.

I was a little bit appalled in that some people saw that piece

as some kind of glorification of the memory of war.

And, of course, it does make war into a very profoundly moving experience

without the horrible physical violence.

At the finish, I'm afraid I was in tears.

I think a lot of the audience were.

And that explains why there was no clapping.

But it wasn't just about

the destruction of the Cathedral and buildings,

it was the destruction of people, really, wasn't it?

These days, people take the War Requiem rather for granted,

I mean it's part of the English wallpaper

in the cultural landscape.

But the whole thing is extremely powerful and it's so full of tenderness.

The Agnus Dei is a very simple musical scheme and a very simple word setting.

And it comes out as something absolutely transcendent,

partly cos of the way Pears sings it.

It's a simple device of going down a scale from one note

and then going up another scale from the bottom note.

And he runs one scale down from the F-sharp and another up from the C.

And he reharmonises those two scales all the way through the piece

before winding up on an F-sharp major chord.

It's a little, tiny piece of music

and just a perfect piece of clockwork as well.

Now, that is a technical explanation of what is going on

and it sounds very mechanical and very simplistic

and a little too neat.

But the impact that this music has,

particularly the way Pears sings at the end of this movement, is overwhelming.

The Prom performance of the War Requiem in 1964,

which was for the anniversary of the First World War,

Britten by then was an iconic national figure.

And how extraordinary that is for someone who had been an outsider,

was still an outsider in many ways, of course,

in terms of the homosexuality, for a long time an illegal outsider,

here he is moving into absolutely the centre of our musical life

APPLAUSE

Appearances on TV had now made Britten and Pears household names

and their frequent song recitals together revealed to

audiences the composer's brilliance as a musician.

I was very proud that we got Benjamin Britten into the studio

and heard his pianism, as it were, in perfect circumstances.

# A flaxen headed cowboy

# As simple as may be

# And next a jolly plough boy

# I whistled o'er the lea

# And soon I'll be a footman

# I strut in worsted lace

# And next I'll be a butler

# And whey my jolly face... #

The impromptuness of the way we shot it was part of the style of the whole recital.

Recital sounds rather pompous.

This was pullover time and Ben and Peter, very relaxed.

# So great a man I'll be

# So great a man, so great a man

# So great a man I'll be

# You'll forget the little plough boy

# That whistled o'er the lea... #

Ben didn't say a word but he played magnificently.

APPLAUSE

# Little Miss Muffett... #

When Dudley Moore did those wonderful

parodies of Britten at the piano, which of course made sense to people

because they'd seen Ben

and Peter in their double act on television quite regularly.

That was so familiar to people that Dudley Moore could get the laughs.

# Away... #

LAUGHTER

# Away... #

Their responses to it, which of course were

very separate, perhaps tell us something about the characters.

Peter was amused by it whereas Ben, I think, took in rather bad part.

Didn't exactly think it was the right thing to do.

Stand by for a take, please. Turning over sound.

Classical music on television never had it so good as it did

when BBC Two arrived.

I joined it in 1965, just before its first birthday

and did my best to devote specialisms that BBC ONE didn't.

And one of those things was classical music.

In 1966, the BBC mounted an ambitious studio

production of the all-male opera, Billy Budd.

Adapted from Herman Melville's unfinished novella, it had

first been performed on the stage of the Royal Opera House in 195 .

Now shot as a drama at Television Centre,

Peter Pears sang the role of the ship's captain, Vere.

Michael Langdon was the sadistic master-at-arms, Claggart.

And Peter Glossop sang the title character.

# Your name?

# Billy Budd, sir

# Your age?

# Don't know, sir

# Don't know? Your trade?

# Able seaman

# Can you read?

# No - but I can sing

# Never mind the singing... #

What we wished to do was to do was not to produce a theatrical

experience in the sense of that you were looking at a scene

on stage but it would be an opera in which the viewer was really

involved in the same way as he was in a drama.

And the results were stunning.

# Mr Bosun, Mr Bosun

# Yes, Sir

# Hands to braces! Man the yards!

# Ay, sir! Ay, sir... #

I think with Billy Budd, which has the biggest orchestra in any

opera he ever used, erm, there is an incredible tang to the sound

You can feel the feel the grime you can feel the salt everywhere.

# Toplights down there and scrub! Scrub!

# Toplights down there, swabs!

# Eyes on deck

# Can't idle you know, men

# Life's not all play upon a man-of-war!

# Cocky, young bastards

# Send them back to Mammy... #

I find the breadth of language,

the musical language in Billy Budd extraordinary.

The build-up in the orchestra in the first act,

until this enormous sea shanty can be heard sung off stage by all

these sailors...really, very overwhelming.

# Oh, heave

# Oh, heave away, heave

# Oh, heave

# Heave

# Heave

# All manned above!

# Yards manned!

# Leads those halyards at the double... #

Despite the fact that the action is extremely claustrophobic,

the music has a bigness and an opulence

and a generosity to it, which is pretty unique in his output.

# And sway

# And sway

# And sway... #

I really did not know at that point, whether the idea of writing a large

scale opera with a cast only of men, which had not been done before...

Whether that would be suitable.

But Britten loved this particular story

# Make-fast, braces and hews... #

It represents a world very much impoverished.

Because one lacks a dimension of human

experience in the relationship between men and women.

# I'll teach you

# I can't do anything right here

# Speak

# Yes, sir

# Take this man away and list him for 20 strokes

# See it's done at once

# Yes, sir! Yes, sir... #

It was so fundamentally a part of his character, of his creativity,

that it was no good anyone saying to him, although I thought this,

you would be a great composer if, like your heroes, Mozart,

like Verdi, your world was all-embracing.

He felt the world was against him and restricted him

and narrowed him down in that choice, I guess.

# Oh, heave away, heave

# Oh, heave

# Oh, heave away, heave... #

Eric Crozier's fellow librettist for Billy Budd

was the novelist E.M Forster.

Melville, after the initial roughness of his realism,

reaches straight back into the universal.

To a blackness and sadness so transcending our own,

that they are undistinguishable from glory.

It seems to me the kind of subject that would attract

a composer by the quality of extension from the story.

That you start with real human characters which are then

extended on to other plains of significance.

Ben, you think that's true?

Yes, I'm slightly out of my depth here honestly,

because when I start writing I always start from the

characters themselves and the conflicts between the characters.

What you've been talking about, Eric, I hope comes in accidentally.

If I'm any good as a composer,

the music will show a greater depth than perhaps I'm intending.

I mean, an example of that, I think, is Claggart's aria,

"Oh beauty, oh handsomeness, oh goodness!"

# Oh beauty, oh handsomeness, goodness

# Would that I never seen you... #

Claggart's monologue is perhaps the one case in Billy Budd where the

character gets, as it were, outside himself and sings about himself.

# Having seen you, what choice remains to me?

# None, none!

# I'm doomed to annihilate you

# I'm vowed to your destruction... #

From a technical point of view

Britten's scores are nothing short of miraculous, really.

I mean, you need an incredible mind to put those things together.

# I am the messenger of death

There's this astonishing moment when the captain goes into the cabin to

tell Billy Budd the verdict of the court and he's going to be hanged.

And Britten then plays simply a succession of common chords,

with the notes of the F major chord at the top.

So, you don't hear them all at as being in the same key at all.

The conductor for the BBC's 1966 studio production wasn't

Britten himself but Charles Mackerras.

It was quite difficult because in those days

we had the orchestra in one studio and the action went on in another.

And in the Billy Budd we had two choruses.

One that sang with the orchestra and looked at the music

and the other that was doing the action.

CHORUS AND ORCHESTRA SWELL

The reason that he didn't conduct that television performance was

because he didn't think he could do it.

Keeping the two choruses together.

He was around the whole time which made us all rather nervous

because he really insisted on having it exactly his way.

CHORUS AND ORCHESTRA SWELL

The end was a bit of a nightmare because we were running out of time.

Peter Glossop, who was playing Billy Budd,

kept marching to the scaffold and then getting the wrong note.

"Starry Vere, God bless you... You know.

And my assistant, David Lloyd-Jones had to stand next to him,

And my assistant, David Lloyd-Jones had to stand next to him,

invisibly and hum the note to him, so that he got the right note.

# Starry Vere

# God bless you!

# Starry Vere

# God bless you! #

The transmission of Billy Budd had a huge impact on audiences

and critics alike.

Captured on that same evening's edition of BBC Two's late night line-up.

This is from the Daily Mail, Peter Black's column.

He says,

"Cedric Messina's production of Billy Budd translated the full impact of

"Britten's opera, which can be likened to a fist which clenches

"the separate components of music, action, singing,

"words and atmosphere so tightly that they cannot be prised apart "

And a last word from Richard Last of The Sun, "The production of

"Benjamin Britten's Billy Budd, shown last night, is beyond doubt

"the finest achievement in television opera yet mounted in this country.

"Almost for the first time, genuinely cinematic treatment has been brought

"to bear on the problem of translating opera to the small screen."

CHOIR SING

In 1967, BBC Two transmitted Tony Palmer

and Humphrey Barton's film about the gramophone recording

of Britten's Burning Fiery Furnace in the Suffolk village of Alford.

CHOIR SING

I can remember the excitement of working

so close to Benjamin Britten and to feeling, you know, where they're

making history but we're recording it and it's a privilege, really.

So, we were able to watch Britten rehearsing, working with singers

and conducting and also working with the Decca recording engineers.

The record producer was John Culshaw,

pioneer in stereo recording.

What would you like?

We have time to go on and do, if you like,

the whole thing again or would you like to concentrate on this first?

I would rather like to get this one absolutely firmly in the bag.

I think our Herald's intonation was a bit wild in his first royal command, Great King of Kings.

How was Peter in the 14, was that all right? Very good, I think.

Like Noah's Flood, the Burning Fiery Furnace is what Britten calls

"a church parable".

Stand by trombone.

The Old Testament story of three scholars, Shadrach, Meshach and

Abednego, who by divine intervention are saved from being burned alive.

Peter Pears sang the Babylonian King, Nebuchadnezzar

# You shall be cast at once

# Into the burning, fiery furnace

These sessions showed a side of Britten that was rarely

seen on film. Confident, relaxed with a team that he trusted.

He was scared stiff before we started,

that somehow the noise of the cameras would get in the way.

But they were so busy doing their production that they didn't

have time to worry about us.

Get the triplet on the beat...

HE SINGS RHYTHM

That's important.

To see him really flat out and he's healthy

and he's still on top of his game.

It's very exciting.

I think that was his great skill to get across the absolutely

motivating force behind his music

and he is always determined to draw the best from his performers.

Please, we want to start off with a balance.

When you watch Britten conducting, there's an extraordinary

combination of absolute technical control and great calm.

But under it you sense an absolutely bubbling energy.

There had to be a march around the church

and he hadn't worked out what to do with the bass player.

And he said,

"I wonder if we should put him on roller skates."

But eventually the bass player

marches around with a big, so-called, Babylonian drum.

Between takes, Britten comes round to the control room with me

to listen to the playbacks.

They are, of course, enormously useful for hearing mistakes.

He's very quick at spotting our mistakes.

It's written as played

but shouldn't be played...but Neil goes on regardless.

Now everyone stops.

He didn't like discussing the technicalities of music,

unless he wanted to know something.

I mean, for instance, the percussion player, James Blades,

he would have long discussions about percussion techniques

but he didn't want to talk about his own music if he could help it.

These are genuine pieces, from China.

Perhaps the camera will oblige by focusing

and you can see the dragon.

The five Chinese drums.

Yes, but Mr Britten said,

"I shall want more than that - several sorts of sound."

But he said, "I want something harder."

He said, "Would you try using thimbles?"

I said, "Most certainly, Mr Britten."

You never know what to expect from Mr Britten.

His fertile working relationship with the BBC also allowed

Britten to share with audiences some of his own favourite composers,

particularly Mozart.

There is a marvellous moment of Britten and Richter

playing the Two-Piano Mozart sonata together

in a sort of competition for who can play it faster

in the last movement, which is really exhilarating.

He obviously had that completely instinctive understanding

of the instrument, the way to use it.

He never makes an ugly sound, but he always makes a penetrating,

lyrical, beautiful sound.

Mozart was one of the people who Britten felt absolutely closest to

through his composing life

and I think that you can see where the links are there -

they are in beauty of form, absolute command of structure,

but, within that beauty, a real fierceness and a real impact.

Idomeneo was the only opera he conducted not composed by himself.

At that time, Idomeneo wasn't done that much.

It was rather splendid.

There was even a monster.

It was a Britten version

in a sense that there were quite a few cuts,

there were even rewritings.

He rewrote, for instance, the passage for four horns

when the Oracle turned up, he took out the trombones.

He re-orchestrated that bit.

ORACLE SINGS

But you wouldn't really know.

Unless you know it very well, you wouldn't realise what had happened.

For Britten, Idomeneo proved to be one of the happiest

of all his TV experiences.

He was conducting his beloved Mozart,

whom he revered above everybody.

Probably because he was very similar in a way.

I mean, there were lots of similarities between him and Mozart.

Benjamin Britten was perfectly clearly

one of the great composers Britain had,

if not the greatest.

And the BBC was constantly trying to...

I was going to say court him and, in a way, we were,

because it would be a great feather in our caps

if we could commission an opera.

I looked around among all the stories

that I could think of immediately

for a story which would be most suitable

to the medium of television.

This was to be something special -

a Benjamin Britten opera conceived for the camera.

He chose Owen Wingrave, a Henry James' short story

in which a young cadet refuses to fight,

rejecting his family military tradition,

and ultimately dies for his beliefs.

The main reason that he took the commission on was because

it gave a huge audience to pacifism, about which he felt very strongly.

# He struck him on his tender head

# His tender head... #

There was a lot of talk about

how he would use the potential of television

to produce ghostly effects, because it is in effect a ghost story.

# Upon the floor... #

What is most attractive to me in the story was this bombshell

which arrived in the middle of this family.

It would give a marvellous opportunity to show

each person's individual reactions to the bombshell.

Inevitably, Britten insisted that the whole opera

must be shot in Suffolk, at Snape Maltings.

We had to build, effectively, a completely new studio,

which was equipped with outside broadcast units.

So it was very much a lash-up.

The biggest difficulty is literally squeezing everything

into a hall, which isn't a television studio.

The Maltings was transformed into layers of different sets.

Squeezing in a large, almost 50-piece orchestra.

The orchestra was sort of halfway up on a great rostrum

and everything had to be done through monitors.

Highly complex and full of all kinds of pitfalls.

And I went down there during the production

and the atmosphere was electric

the tension was huge.

Britten himself was extremely tense.

There was one time when there wasn't a monitor in the right place

and there was a terrific shindy and eventually hoisted one into position

and Britten says, "Now we can get on with this BLOODY opera."

Every single singer in that cast was really, I feel, the ideal one,

each one of them being associated with quite a few of my operas.

Well, it was just...I didn't know what I did to deserve it, frankly.

The part of Owen Wingrave was sung

by the Cornish baritone Benjamin Luxon.

# In peace, I have found my image

# I have found myself

# In peace, I rejoice amongst men

# And yet walk alone... #

He's not the most complex character.

There's a very young man who worked out for himself

that he cannot stand the business of war and glory

and all the hypocrisy that goes with it

and he suddenly makes up his mind

that he won't have anything to do with it.

# For peace is not lazy But vigilant... #

It was very relevant, the pacifist theme was, you know,

it was the time of the Vietnam War,

and Britten was very keen to get that message across

and I think it's very clear.

# Peace is not weak but strong

# Strong like a bird's wing... #

Nigel Douglas sang the tenor role of Lechmere, Owen's fellow student.

Lechmere was a wildly enthusiastic young puppy

who couldn't wait to get at the enemy.

He takes his sword down from the wall and he says, "You, beauty!"

# Ah! You, beauty You, beauty

# How many vile heads

# Vile foreign heads Have you rolled into the dust?

# How you all rejoice in violence! Put it down, you silly boy

# Chop, chop, chop!

# Put it down or you'll break Something

# How you all rejoice in violence!

# What is the enemy for

# But to be routed and killed?

# You forget

# You are the enemy, too. #

I won't pretend that it went without technical difficulties.

We had things like the dinner party scene, which was tricky.

The head of the family, Sir Philip, was sung by Peter Pears.

It was always extremely amusing working with Peter

because it was a well-known fact that he had trouble with his memory.

Quite near the end of the dinner scene

there's that passage where he goes, "Pistols! Halberds...!"

Lots of weapons were mentioned

and he could never get them in the right order.

Out would come "dagberds" and "halgers" and all sorts of things.

And I used to stand behind the camera going,

"Bang, pistols! Dagger...poom, halberds" and all that,

trying to mime exactly what weapon it was supposed to be.

# Halberds, pistols, daggers Are their company

# Lances, sword-thrusts Parted them from life... #

And they could see me doing this

and everybody around the table used to get giggles.

Britten was conducting away oblivious to all this.

Owen Wingrave took nine days to film

and it found the 57-year-old composer

at the apex of his creativity.

It was the first orchestral score Britten had written for over ten years

and I think it unleashed something new in him.

He could create a very complex world

without actually covering the page with millions of notes.

There were very few times when the whole orchestra was playing.

But where...I remember when Wingrave goes into the haunted room

and he tells his lady friend Kate to turn the key

and, at that point, the orchestra is playing

for one millisecond all together.

# Come, turn your key. #

FULL ORCHESTRA PLAYS

And you realise how much has been held back for that one moment.

In the end, I personally don't feel it's one of Britten's

most successful operas, but it is one that fits very well

the medium of television.

# Nor did he yield a soldier on... #

He didn't have a television himself.

His television was specially bought for him

when Owen Wingrave was broadcast so he could actually watch it.

BBC Two ultimately showed the finished one-and-three-quarter-hour opera

on Sunday, 16th May 1971.

Owen Wingrave can still pack a punch,

but there seems to have been a falling-off in the '70s of Britten's work with the BBC.

I think that was largely due to his health and then, suddenly,

he was gone and I remember three days, two nights

working on the obituary, which we put together.

Benjamin Britten died on 4th December 1976.

Three days later, he was buried at Aldeburgh Parish Church.

It reflects well on the BBC, I think,

that we were able to find ways of serving him,

recognising that he was a truly great figure in our lives.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd