Britten's Endgame

If Benjamin Britten had one favourite city in the world,

it was Venice.

He visited it eight times in his life, normally in the winter.

Captivated by its sounds, its light, its history and its art.

It offered the composer respite from his normal frenetic existence.

You play banks over Venice when you're going there and he was looking out

and there was a big smile on his face and he said,

"There it is, Serenissima."

For Britten, Venice had been a place of triumph.

In the 1950s, it gave him the premiere of his opera,

The Turn Of The Screw, just as it had given Verdi the first

performances of Rigoletto and La Traviata a century before.

But Venice is also famous for disease and decay.

It's where Monteverdi and Wagner died and Stravinsky is buried.

And in a sense, it was to claim Britten too.

The story of Death In Venice by Thomas Mann struck a chord

with Britten.

He knew what it was to wrestle with serious illness

and with demons in his personal life.

After all his victories as a young man, he found it tough to keep

his footing in the swirling currents of contemporary music.

Where was it?

Benjamin Britten was a man under pressure,

struggling to get his late music down on paper.

Who's playing the block?

BRITTEN: 'People sometimes think that

'with a number of works now lying behind,

'one must be bursting with confidence. It is not so at all

'I haven't yet achieved the simplicity I should like in my music.'

He had the most colossal job to perform in life

and I think he knew it almost from birth.

In some way, I think he also knew that his life wasn't going to

be a very long one and he was going to have to get an awful lot into it.

Venice was the setting for Britten's final opera in 1973

which mirrored his own life.

He was still in his 50s but fast running out of options

and all his late music was driven by the shadow of death, his own

He was a man in a hurry who knew he had a great gift, who knew

he had a lot to offer and he didn't have all the time in the world

Benjamin Britten wasn't simply the greatest opera composer

produced by the 20th century,

he was a gifted conductor and festival organiser

and one of the outstanding pianists of his generation.

As a young man, he'd contemplated a career as a piano soloist.

He played his own concerto at the Proms before the war.

But in later years, he confined himself mainly to chamber music

and song recitals, notably with his partner Peter Pears.

Even that was hard.

He would have a tumbler of whisky or brandy which he'd have a

couple of sizable gulps before playing.

Good for him!

This is unique. I don't know any other artist..

I often tell musicians this who don't know it and they're shocked

cos they would never dare touch alcohol before they go on.

Usually meant several, it seemed like,

gallons of whisky backstage before he went on.

Whatever your poison is. I don't know how on earth any of us get out there.

And very often, he vomited several times before he went on stage,

he was so worried and nervous.

He was in his dressing room and he banged on his window and shouted,

"Derek!" and he was going to conduct something, I don't know what.

I said, "How are you feeling?" He said "Terrible.

"I could be sick on the spot."

Well, there's no doubt that Henry Purcell was

convinced of the truth of the title of his song

"Man Is For The Woman Made" but we're going to sing three songs

to throw some light on this eternal riddle.

But it was terribly difficult for Peter.

I remember Peter getting really quite cross with him

just before going onto a platform once or twice, saying,

"For goodness' sake, pull yourself together.

"How do you expect me to sing when you're in a state like this?"

# When I was a bachelor

# I lived all alone

# And I worked at the weaver's trade

# And the only, only thing I ever did wrong

# Was to woo a fair young maid.. #

But once he got his hands on the keys and was playing,

he got his nerves under control and one might almost say

that by the end of a concert, he had quite enjoyed himself.

Quite.

'If you shut your eyes for a moment and think of Benjamin Britten

'and sort of conjure him up in front of you, what do you see '

Hmmm.

I see a big smile...

A really friendly face. ..but some people see a frown.

When he smiled, if he smiled, it was a shy sort of smile.

He could be quite ruthless.

Very spritely, really. Quite wiry.

Athletic even.

Always amazed by his nose.

It was a sort of great, long conk.

Fairly heavy jowls later on in life which made him look a bit ferocious.

Looking extraordinarily healthy all the time although, of course,

we know he wasn't.

At figure five, "What man do build,"

it's just a natural warmth as you go up.

Don't let it flower into a sort of Tosca-like sound

Keep it quite hushed.

If people can't hear what I say can you complain?

I'll try and support my voice.

CHOIR SINGS

Life had been so simple when he was young.

His wonderful Hymn To The Virgin was tossed off during a day or two

in the sick bay at school.

Music, it was said, sprang from his fingers

when he played the piano, just as it did from his mind when he composed.

In the early 1960s,

he bestrode the world stage with his great pacifist work,

The War Requiem,

as the world teetered on the brink of nuclear war.

He'd hit the headlines almost two decades earlier with his first

big opera, Peter Grimes, which took post-war London by storm.

By his 50th birthday in 1963, he was more celebrated

internationally than any previous British composer.

But under the pressure of expectation,

he withdrew from the spotlight fighting ill health

and brooding over what would be his last hurrah on the operatic stage...

..a work whose central character, Gustav von Aschenbach,

reflects Britten himself,

a creative artist in middle age

fretting about his craft as the years slip away.

I can't think of any other opera where a composer kind of sets

out his stall so specifically.

It's as though Britten wants to get on with this

and when you hear the first few sentences,

you realise that he's telling you all about the dilemma, the central

dichotomy of his life, and the moment he's at now, facing death.

"My mind beats on and no words come.

"Taxing, tiring, unyielding, unproductive. My mind beats on

"No sleep restores me."

From the very moment it starts up, that very,

very first da-da-da, da-da-da-da-da, that very first thing, it's a

kind of feeling of sort of febrile, everything being on the edge.

Aschenbach is completely unable to cope.

# My mind beats on

# My mind beats on

# And no words come

That's so Britten.

That harp tells you we're going to go into an imaginary world soon

# Taxing, tiring... #

In early 20th-century Munich, Aschenbach worries about his

creativity drying up, just as Britten would half a century later.

# Unyielding, unproductive... #

'Very ominous, these sounds.'

# My mind beats on... #

Almost immediately,

Britten has set up the colours of the palette

that he's going to draw on.

# No sleep restores me

# I, Aschenbach

# Famous as a master writer

# Successful, honoured

# Self-discipline my strength

# Routine the order on my days

# Imagination, servant of my will... #

That's a self portrait. He was the most disciplined man

and imagination was the servant of his of his will.

# My mind beats on

# My mind beats on

# Why am I now at a loss?

Aschenbach, like Britten, has a puritan approach to life

which will be turned on its head as the opera unfolds.

# I reject the words called forth by passion

# I suspect the easy judgment of the heart

# Now passion itself has left me

# And delight in

# Fastidious choice. #

He was such an incredible master by the time he wrote

Death In Venice that the state of mind of Aschenbach is exactly

and perfectly described in that music

and the consequence of that is you can get inside the head

of that guy and stay inside the head of that

guy from the beginning of the opera to the end.

He was never somebody who had writer's block himself or

if he did, it was something that he'd get over with very quickly

You read so often in his letters or diaries,

"I'm having a terrible time writing. I can't write a note"

and it basically means he'd had a difficult afternoon

because for him, I mean that was a struggle

but compared with other composers, he was extraordinarily fluent.

For some in the musical world,

Britten's fluency was not a badge of pride.

The new progressives felt his music was too easy, too accessible.

He hadn't joined the bandwagon of the avant-garde and still used

the time-honoured system of tonality which was supposed to be worn out.

Britten himself worried that his powers were on the wane.

He commented just before his 50th birthday that he was the last

rotting branch of a dying tree

He told his publisher, Donald Mitchell,

that he was forgotten and that he was being left behind

and I think there's something in that.

BRITTEN: 'I don't always follow the new directions

'and nor do I always approve of them.

'Seeking after a new language has become more important than

'saying what you mean.'

He was not in the club in a sense, in the avant-garde club,

and I think that probably did worry him quite a lot.

'I think this is a moment of lack of confidence which I shall outgrow.'

I remember people being quite dismissive at Royal College

when you talked about Britten or Shostakovich,

those composers were thought of as old-fashioned.

'I cannot understand why one should want to reject the past.

'If we rejected the past, we should just be making funny noises.'

I think he felt a bit out of touch.

He was up there in Aldeburgh, as a kind of king of Aldeburgh

living isolated from the town

and I felt he was a bit out of touch with everything in a way.

Well, I think you put your finger on it.

It was old hat and an awful lot of the composers I admired at that time

couldn't have any time for it at all and particularly foreign composers.

I remember meeting Luciano Berio at Dartington

and he was very rude about Britten.

'I couldn't be alone. I couldn't work alone.

'I can only work, really,

'because of the tradition that I am conscious of behind me.

'This may be giving myself away If so, I can't help it.

'It is a time of change in music now, whether one likes to admit it or not.

'The old tradition has split.'

Britten guarded his national status jealously but at the same time

he avoided simply repeating his early successes.

He did look for new directions one of them

sparked by his new best friend, the Russian cellist Slava Rostropovich.

He'd never written for the solo cello before and relished

the challenge of stretching the instrument's technique.

This music is now a staple of the professional cello repertoire.

Then, it was a private tease for Rostropovich's virtuosity.

But in other ways, it was music of retreat,

of withdrawal from the public stage with its own dark shadows.

Britten was often holed up in Suffolk,

immersed in the Aldeburgh Festival.

He'd withdrawn from the operatic stage too with a new

form of drama, performed in church with just

a handful of instruments and without a conductor.

He wrote the first of these Church Parables soon after

the War Requiem and it could hardly have been more different.

Curlew River is a stark meditation on mortality

and grief which foreshadows Death In Venice in the strange

oriental colours of the music.

And as in several of his works notably Death In Venice,

it has a boy at its heart.

TENOR SINGS CURLEW RIVER

I remember this bit very well.

This is when the mad woman, who's been

wandering around the place looking for her lost child...

..the people that she meets on the ferry reveal

a story of a little boy who died on a journey across the Curlew River.

And she suddenly realises that the little boy in question was

her son and her son is dead.

This poignant story is set in the Fenland marshes of East Anglia

but clothed in the formal ritual of Japanese Noh theatre

alongside Gregorian plainchant from medieval Christianity.

The all-male cast are dressed as monks who then

put on a play-within-a-play.

The stylised gestures of the Noh actor,

they're supposed to conjure a more poetic response from the audience so

that an audience sees something in their mind's eye that is far

greater than what's on the stage.

Curlew River was the biggest emotional experience

I had at all, of all his music

It really touches people's sense of life and death.

The way Britten wrote for the tenor voice of Peter Pears

defined Curlew River,

just as it had in Peter Grimes and would again in Death In Venice.

Pears captured Britten's emotional connection with a mother

deranged by the loss of her young son.

RECORDING OF OPERA PLAYS

This is the mad woman praying at the grave of her son

And the flute is the call of the curlews.

Britten broke new ground in the way each performer sings or plays

the notes at his own speed,

only coming together at key moments such as when they think

they hear the voice of the dead boy's spirit above the tumult.

'So they're not sure what they can really hear.'

# I thought I heard the voice of my child... #

What it sets out to do is quite extraordinary

and it's one of the most individual works that he ever wrote.

# I thought I heard him praying in his grave... #

I remember the score arriving and I looked at it

and I could make absolutely no head or tail of it.

I could see the notes, I could sing the notes

but I didn't understand the layout of this part.

The music was of, then,

such difficulty that it required the longest rehearsal period

of any opera of the English opera group that I've ever known.

We had five solid weeks, including all the orchestra.

In fact, I never did learn it beforehand, there was

no way I could learn it.

'We all learnt by doing because we all had to learn the whole piece.'

# Is it you, my child? #

Britten had long since let go of his Christian upbringing

but he was absorbed by the idea of redemption and transfiguration.

He rewrote the end, I think, six times

till he was really satisfied with it.

He had six different versions to rehearse before he finally said

"This is it, I've got it."

Curlew River was blacked out before it even started

by an electrical storm and the entire audience, full of

critics and management, were sitting there in the church in the dark

My goodness, the tension that built up was tremendous.

'What about Britten himself?' Goodness knows what he was doing.

He was out in the churchyard just bringing everything up.

He was in a terrible, terrible state.

We just waited and waited.

And then, during the performance,

he and I were leaning against a pillar at the back

of the church watching it and this lightning kept on going off

and he thought, "Oh, God, it's going to happen again.

"We're going to be blacked out in the middle of the piece

"and it'll wreck it" and he started getting very upset.

Then we discovered there was a light illuminating the big

painting behind the altar which was at the other end of the church

and he was leaning against that button, you know,

one of those timed buttons, so every time he leant on it, the

lightning flashed and he was getting sicker and sicker, poor man.

At the end of Curlew River,

the boy releases the mad woman from her torment and, at the same

time, releases an unusual tenderness in Britten's score.

The voice of the little boy singing, singing to his mother...

"Go your way in peace, mother.

"The dead shall rise again."

There was this passionate yearning in him for a child and I think

this came through the whole mother's predicament in that opera.

I think it was very personal to him from that point of view.

He had always had something wrong with him.

He had continual problems with one arm.

He was sometimes a martyr to stomach troubles.

He would run a high temperature for a reason nobody quite understood.

We were nursing him along quite a lot of the time.

We thought of it as really being an emotional, mental problem.

We were looking ahead to what the schedule was likely to be

and he said, "Well, I'm going to do this and I've got a few other

"pieces to write and then I shall be ill" and I said, "What?!"

And he said, "Oh, I'm always ill after a big piece." But it was

such a strange thing to build in, your illness, into a schedule.

I was having Monday lunch with him

and he apologised because it was cold meat,

it was yesterday's roast and he said,

"I don't really like this at all."

I said, "Well, why don't you ask Miss Hudson

"to do something special?"

He said, "Oh, that's more than my life's worth."

And at the same time,

she came in and she put down his pills in various orders

and said, "Mr Britten, they're your pills to take this morning "

There was a sort of slightly more haunted, worried look to him.

He didn't have that youthful confidence any more.

He couldn't go for such long walks any more

and he wasn't playing tennis any more and generally speaking

he just wasn't feeling well.

The desperate difficulty for him was to keep the world at bay

so that he had enough time to compose.

And the world seemed to conspire to take him away from that,

so he was fighting everybody and everything round him all the time.

He'd had a crisis in his health in his mid-40s

when he saw a consultant over his multiple medical problems.

He was diagnosed then with a leaking valve in his heart.

It was decided not to operate.

By 1968, the heart murmur was louder and he spent several

weeks in hospital with a serious heart condition, endocarditis.

If anything, this compounded his determination to proceed with

Death In Venice, his 17th work for the stage.

The complexity of the book with its high-flown language

and ideas was a challenge for his librettist, Myfanwy Piper.

She and Britten batted ideas back and forth in every spare moment

and on any scraps of paper that came to hand.

On legal advice,

Britten never saw Visconti's feature film of Death In Venice

starring Dirk Bogarde, to avoid any risks over copyright

because Britten was set on his subject.

The Munich writer Aschenbach travels to Venice,

the gateway to the exotic Orient,

hoping the change of scene will stimulate him.

But the beauty he finds there has a sickness that will, in the end,

destroy him.

Venice was a place that would suffer from disease,

cholera which would wipe people out, so the season would end

and the city would suddenly transform into somewhere that

was even ominous and frightening and it is fascinating how a place

of great beauty can also become somewhere that is quite chilling.

This dark side of beauty resonated with Britten.

He knew he was running serious risks with his health

but the opera came first.

The race was on to get it finished, get it completed,

because, of course, the world was waiting for the next Britten opera.

If he had had his heart dealt with a bit earlier,

maybe even before he started writing Death In Venice,

life might have been very different for him.

Six months would have made a difference.

Five years would have made a huge difference.

Hard work was just what the doctors felt was going to be bad for him.

He was not to be deterred and he went ahead.

When he said, "I cannot stop. I have to finish this piece before you take

"the knife to me", they said, "Well, all right, it's on your head."

# The wind

# Is from the West

# A lazy sea... #

At first, Aschenbach finds Venice oppressive.

It takes a while before he starts to feel liberated.

# A stagnant smell from the lagoon

# My temples throb

# I cannot work

# O Serenissima,

# Be kind

# Or I must leave

# Just as once I left before. #

Britten not only had to complete the opera before his health gave out,

he also wanted it to be his supreme gift to his partner,

Peter Pears, who was now in his 60s,

probably Peter's "last great part" as he put it

For almost 30 years, Britten's relationship with him

had been discreetly open but illegal.

He's very aware that people are talking about him

and being gay was a great problem for him.

It wasn't to Pears, I think, but it was always to him.

He struggled, I think, throughout his life with this tussle,

in a way we don't need to nowadays about being gay.

I just don't know how he did cope.

You know, going out into the public, facing an audience of thousands

of strange human beings and wondering if they're judging you.

At a time when some prominent gay men in the arts world were

prosecuted, the police did arrive on Britten's doorstep

but took matters no further.

They were never overtly too close to each other in public.

They would no sooner kiss each other in public than fly,

they were extremely respectable

They hardly ever referred to each other publicly by their first names.

It was always Peter Pears or Benjamin Britten.

RECORDING: We are awfully happy Peter Pears and I.

PETER: In fact, Benjamin Britten writes for the voice...

Jolly badly!

No, on the contrary, don't put it like that.

For example, a strange, strange time,

my father remarried a rather bitter,

blue-stocking woman who suspected that there was something

fishy going on there. So one day, she said to me

when I was housekeeping for Ben and Peter in London, "I'd like to come

"and see you." So, she came and "Now, I want to see over the house."

So, I showed her over the house and right at the top of the house,

there was a large bedroom with a very large double bed in it

"And who sleeps here?"

"Well..." And I told her the truth and she was absolutely horrified.

And I thought, "What have I done?

"She's now going to go to the newspapers

"and there's going to be the most terrible row."

She didn't, of course, because, well,

it was all part of the family so you couldn't quite do that.

There's no doubt that Ben was absolutely mesmerised

by Peter's voice and it was really a catalyst for so much.

RECORDING: I think it's marvellous singing.

Absolutely marvellous singing.

It's aiming at something so rare and so special and so pure that. .

Honestly, I think we've got two smashing takes there.

But I would like to have one more go. Of course, Peter.

# A thousand thousand gleaming fires

# Seemed kindling in the air... #

Britten wrote for Pears' voice across almost 40 years.

# A thousand thousand silvery lyres

# Resounded far and near... #

It was a partnership unique in the history of music

# Methought, the very breath I breathed

# Was full of sparks divine... #

The Snape Maltings concert hall was their baby.

It was just two years old in 19 9 when disaster struck.

Somebody actually whispered in my ear that the Maltings

was on fire so I rushed to my car

and rushed over to Snape

and halfway there, I could see a glow in the sky.

Panic stations. I said to Jack

"For goodness' sake, put your foot down as fast as you can."

# And all my heather-couch was wreathed

# By that celestial shine... #

It was like a volcano going off

You have these curious mixed feelings about it, really,

you were conscious of the fact that it was a terrible,

terrible thing to be happening

There was our lovely concert hall being destroyed before our very eyes...

# And while the wide earth echoing rung

# To that strange minstrelsy... #

..but at the same time, you couldn't help

but be terribly thrilled by it in a sort of macabre sort of way.

There was something unprecedented

and you knew that it was a historic event and it was.

# "O, mortal! Mortal! Let them die;

# "Let time and tears destroy... #

We turned straight round and went back to Red House and actually

Ben and Peter, at that point, didn't know.

Ben was extremely, of course, upset

because the Maltings had become very dear to him,

possibly the best acoustic of any concert hall in the kingdom

# "To thee the world is like a tomb

# "A desert's naked shore

# "To us, in unimagined bloom

# "It brightens more and more... #

The Aldeburgh Festival had just begun

and Britten's two-week schedule of performances in the Maltings

seemed to be doomed.

There was a moment of shock where we thought,

"We'd better go away and forget about it for a week or so."

But as soon as one got over that, one realised that the first thing

to do was to go on with the concerts and operas are far as possible

# Because they live to die

# The little glittering spirit sun

# Seemed to sing to me... #

'At an emergency conference at The Red House,

'which lasted into the small hours,

'the composer turned administrator rearranged the whole festival.

The main reaction from him that night,

he was already in his dressing gown and pyjamas,

was to make plans for rescuing the festival.

And he was completely calm, completely composed, there was

no emotion, just determination

It was so urgent that everybody just sat there aghast,

taking notes furiously about what they all had to do.

It was only a year since his treatment for endocarditis.

The hard-pressed composer inspected the ruins the next day with

the man who'd designed the hall

We met Britten and Pears on the wet ashes.

And I actually had a cry.

Britten said to me, "I've had my cry, Derek,

"and I've got over it, cos we'll build it again exactly as it was."

And Peter said, "Well, just one or two little things, Ben."

The rebuilding of the festival and then the hall was taxing and tiring.

But it symbolised the way Britten recharged his music,

after a rather arid period in the late '60s.

He got his mojo back and basically something happened to him

and he was able to move on and I think the enthusiasm was there.

It happens to composers. You suddenly get excited.

The challenge was to rebuild the Maltings within a year

and to raise the necessary money.

It does take up time and one's life is a rather full one.

I do plan my writing very carefully.

Now, with this big planning operation,

the battle is already lost, I would say.

The first new opera for the rebuilt Maltings stage was to be

Death In Venice, with a story fraught with danger.

Britten understood all too well the infatuation Aschenbach

develops for a beautiful Polish boy, Tadzio.

Britten enhanced this idealised beauty by casting him

a non-singing role, as a dancer

For Aschenbach, a widower with a daughter,

this is not a tender parental feeling as in Curlew River.

He becomes torn between platonic admiration

and a more sensual desire.

# Oh, Tadzio, the charming Tadzio

# That's what it was

# That's what made it hard to leave

# So be it

# So be it... #

Aschenbach has the chance to leave Venice, but instead,

succumbs to his infatuation, which he mistakenly thinks he can control.

# Here will I stay

# Here dedicate my days to the sun

# To the sun

# And Apollo himself... #

'Britten was attracted to young boys.'

And to dramatise that was something

he felt was an essential part of his art.

Lots of composers would have stayed away from it.

To confront it, in a way quite brave, I think.

It's quite awkward to talk about, but it's not at all awkward to play.

It was part of him that he was attracted in that way.

It wasn't natural to Aschenbach

Aschenbach was turned by the vision of this boy,

and his view of the world was changed.

I don't think Ben's view of the world ever varied,

particularly, as far as young men were concerned.

Tadzio and his friends played sports on the beach,

danced on stage at a Greek pentathlon, the Games of Apollo

Britten's librettist, Myfanwy Piper, even suggested that the boys

should compete like the ancient Greeks - naked.

The composer said the idea was excellent

and could be wonderfully beautiful as well as Hellenically evocative.

But he was wise enough to reject it for fear of unwelcome publicity

In the event, Frederick Ashton's choreography was to cause a stir.

I honestly don't think

you'd be allowed to put it on the stage these days.

It was pyramids of barely adolescent boys wearing loincloths.

You know, it was kind of...

I know it was considered by some people to be deeply,

deeply offensive and embarrassing at the time.

I personally wasn't bothered, I thought it was beautiful.

I had always admired Ashton's choreography.

'Britten's librettist, Myfanwy Piper, wanted the boys dancing naked.

Now, I didn't know that.

Yes, well...

Perhaps just as well that she didn't get her way, isn't it?

'Britten said, "I think it might be misconstrued.'"

HE LAUGHS

Yes, I think we can all agree about that.

The Polish boy who, in real life,

had caught the eye of the author Thomas Mann, was only 11.

In the book, he made Tadzio 13

the age which always appealed to Britten.

But in the opera, because he has to dance,

Tadzio usually looks more mature.

No idea, actually, how old Tadzio is meant to be in the opera.

Clearly, he seems to be around 5 or 16 in that original production.

There probably was a consciousness

that he shouldn't appear to be to young.

I think it would be very difficult nowadays to compose an opera

such as Death In Venice.

Just as it would be very difficult to write a novel like Lolita,

for that matter.

I mean, in a strange way, we've become more conservative

more politically correct now,

than one could have been 30 years ago.

Even at the time, some of Britten's colleagues were

nervous about the subject of the opera.

I was a bit puzzled and worried, in fact.

I immediately saw a parallel to Britten's infatuation with

David Hemmings in Venice at the time of The Turn Of The Screw.

And it seems to me that this was a little bit too close to the bone.

David Hemmings was 12

when he created the role of Miles in The Turn Of The Screw in 195 .

Before the Venice premiere,

he'd spent two months in Britten's house, learning the part.

The good-looking boy was, in a sense, Britten's Tadzio,

almost 20 years before Death In Venice.

He just sort of drank in all this adulation that Ben was giving him.

But if you can believe David Hemmings,

and I do, it never got to anything improper, even though

apparently they slept in the same bed sometimes.

My father told me, strangely enough in Leicester Square men's lavatory.

He told me that...

His words exactly...

"You know he's a homo, don't you?"

Now, I didn't understand cos I was about this big.

I didn't understand what "homo" meant.

But...

..my father was therefore not concerned enough

not to take the money...

..that I earned from it, but he was concerned for my health.

But I can unequivocally say

he never endangered my health at all.

Some of us were amused by it.

But we were, none of us, shocked and none of us horrified,

the ways some parents might have been.

'Peter Pears is quoted as saying,

'"While in Venice, I had to take him away to cool off a bit."

'Do you remember that?'

Well, if you really want to know, Peter had to be taken away to

be cooled off as much as anybody else.

It was the same with Death In Venice,

when Peter became totally besotted with the guy who was doing Tadzio.

And, eh...he always let his hair down much more than Ben did.

I think, this cooling off business referred much more to Ben's

frustration with David not really being able to hit the note,

as it were.

And that he wanted him to be perfect and David was imperfect.

He was a dad to me.

He really was, not only a father, but a friend.

And you couldn't have had a better father, nor a better friend.

Although there was this relationship with lots of young boys,

never anything actually happened.

And I know this from my own experience.

I remember jumping into bed with him when he came on holiday

on the Norfolk broads for a couple of nights.

Went sailing with him as well.

But I can assure you, nothing happened.

There was no inappropriate behaviour, as we would call it now.

Nothing happens in the opera either.

In the book, Tadzio brushes past Aschenbach

but Britten never lets them touch or even speak to each other.

They merely exchange glances, and at one point,

the boy smiles at Aschenbach.

And that is all.

The rest is in Aschenbach's head.

There's a moment where he actually encounters Tadzio,

has an opportunity to say, "Well done."

Sees the boy and...

I just can't say what he wanted to say. I couldn't even speak to him.

And at the end of that one he then says, "I love you."

And then spends act two

trying to work out exactly he meant by the words "I love you".

# I...

# Love you... #

This has an almost sort claustrophobia -

Mahlerian...sound-world.

But something quite English

and quite...almost harking back to Peter Grimes.

Stunning.

It's remarkably thinly scored.

It's as though he can trust the power of the single line,

of the single phrase.

That's it's enough.

The contrasts of the deep darkness of the water

and then these little drops.

I think the tie between Aschenbach and Ben is extremely strong.

I think he associated with that character more than any other

characters - even Peter Grimes

But the way things turned out, boys were not Britten's greatest worry.

In August 1972, his doctor called him in for a check-up.

He needed emergency surgery on his heart,

otherwise his life would be very short.

But the opera was still far from complete. He decided to press on.

I remember him writing that second act

when he really didn't think he was going to live to finish the opera.

And he slashed everything out that he didn't feel was essential,

so that he didn't have to deal with anything that wasn't necessary

I think that's why the second act, which is written at white heat

is so devastating, cos it wasn't just Aschenbach's predicament,

but also his own life-or-death predicament.

You have that strange story where Peter himself said,

"Ben is writing an evil opera and it's killing him."

An evil opera?

I don't hear it as an evil opera.

An evil opera? Well...

'What do you think he meant?'

That's very... That's really scary.

I don't know.

It's a very telling remark.

I am perplexed by the use of the word "evil", I must say

But it's killing him because he was working to a deadline.

That was compounded by the fact that this was

an opera in which he was confronting his own demons.

And that the effort of doing that, intellectually,

was also taking it out of him.

Pears had always tolerated Britten's interest in adolescent boys.

He himself was more detached, but he might have felt unease

at having to enact the struggle going on in his partner's head

I think one has to remember that Peter was a much fresher,

more outgoing character than Ben.

And something as desperately dark as this subject would have

worried him.

And to have to spend weeks

and months on this topic would have been hard, very hard, for him.

But if Peter could get dressed up in drag

and convince everybody that he was a mad woman in Curlew River,

I thought he would get away with being Aschenbach in Death In Venice.

The white heat saw Britten through to the finish.

The "evil opera" was done.

My father got a phone call - Ben rang him up

and said "I've finished it, come and have a drink!"

So we went to The Red House library, Christmas Eve, or just before

Christmas Eve, of 1972, and he was very pleased that he'd finished it.

After some weeks preparing the full score,

Britten handed himself over to the doctors, seven months late.

He told his sister Beth, "I'm going into hospital

"so they can find out what really is wrong.

"I promise to do exactly as they say.

"No-one expects anything very serious or something

"that can't be coped with."

He was 59.

His cardiologist Graham Hayward arranged angiogram

tests on his heart.

The results were worse then expected.

I could see that the valve was extraordinarily leaky,

which we knew anyway.

Also, that the pump function of the heart was seriously compromised

That means that however successful valve surgery would be

the heart would not make a good recovery.

That I knew, from the moment I'd done the test.

It was knackered.

Because it had become stretched over the passage of time

and I suspect particularly over the four years since the endocarditis.

'So at that stage, you felt that his days were numbered?'

Oh, yes, I didn't feel it, I knew it. We all knew it.

Did he know it?

It wasn't my job to explain it to him.

That's was Graham Hayward's job

Did he? I don't know.

I rather doubt it, because otherwise,

the subsequent story would have been more palatable.

I don't recall anyone saying at the time that he definitely

wasn't going to recover.

Then came the operation he'd put off so long,

to replace his heart valve - still quite a new form of surgery.

Britten had told colleagues that, after convalescence,

he "should be as good as new, even conducting."

"The medical chaps," he went on "are optimistic about the future."

He wasn't happy but he was quite accepting of what was going on

I said to him,

"Don't worry too much, we'll see this through together "

And he always remembered that, right up

until he was really very ill and dying.

He said, "We'll see it through together,

he used to say to me.

The surgeon described Britten's heart as

"Enlarged, bulky and flabby,"

with all the extra muscle built up as it had struggled to

compensate for the leaking valve.

His assistant remembers it as, "Like a prize-fighter's heart.

But the surgeon was puzzled by what he found.

"The cause of the valve damage is not clear to me," he wrote.

It wasn't consistent with what he'd been led to expect -

the heart valve had not been malformed from birth.

When the heart weakness was first diagnosed,

the specialist had wondered whether syphilis was to blame.

But Britten's medical file is incomplete

and there's no definite evidence to prove or disprove the idea.

It could rather have been the rare condition Marfan's disease.

Altogether, a series of conundrums

about an operation that did not go to plan.

'O Rose thou art sick.

'The invisible worm,

'That flies in the night

'In the howling storm -'

"Has found out thy bed of crimson joy -

"And his dark secret love

"Does thy life destroy."

'There's a touch of Liebestod there.'

'It's very erotic that music.'

# Oh, rose, though art sick

# The invisible worm,

# That flies in the night

# In the howling storm -

# Has found out thy bed

# Of crimson joy -

# And his dark secret love

# Does thy life destroy. #

The operation lasted the expected hour and 40 minutes, but there

were serious problems once the new tissue valve had been sewn in.

At the end of the procedure, when you expect the heart to start

up again into a nice regular, rhythmic beating, it didn't do that.

It got lots of extra beats and missed beats and it was irregular.

'What did that signify?'

Potential for a cardiac arrest

So you keep the patient in theatre, watching,

giving medication to see if it will settle down.

Which it did with time.

But that delayed the return to the intensive care unit.

It then turned out that while he was in the operating theatre,

he'd had a stroke.

We realised that he had some weakness in is right arm because he

could move it and do everything with it, but he didn't know where it was.

The anaesthetist remembers it as quite a bad stroke,

and says that when Britten came round, he was devastated.

Ten days later he was moved to The London Clinic a few streets

away to recuperate.

He was on a stretcher and I went to the lift just to say goodbye

to him and he said, "Come and see me."

I said, "Yes, OK, I will." He said, "Come tonight."

I said, "All right."

So I went to The London Clinic and he was very unhappy there, really.

'Why?' Well...

When I was there that evening, the maid

came in with his dinner on a big tray with big silver things on top.

But he could hardly lift these far less...

And it was a steak, a really thick steak which even in his full

health and strength he wouldn't have eaten.

I suppose, for the first three months or so, there was

a lot of hope.

But then, it slowed down and slowed down and then

he started to go backwards.

# This ae nighte

# This ae nighte

# Every nighte and alle,

# Fire and fleet and candle-lighte

# And Christe receive thy saule. . #

'So it wasn't with that wonderful

'joie de vivre that one used to have.'

He said to me, "I sometimes wish I'd never had this operation."

He would often hold his right hand with his left hand.

# And Christe receive thy saule. . #

And he would point with his left hand about something

and his right hand would be very still.

# Every nighte and alle... #

One almost wonders what would have happened

if he hadn't had the operation

Would he have had a few more years of a slightly better life

or would he have dropped dead?

It's impossible to say.

For the first time since he was five years old,

Britten couldn't write a note of music.

12 months after the operation,

the anguish of his Serenade 30 years before seemed all too real.

He'd had to give up playing the piano and things looked bleak.

# From Brig o' Dread whence thou may'st pass,

# Every nighte and alle,

# To Purgatory fire thou com'st at last -

# And Christe receive thy saule. #

There was terrible doubt, terrible doubt as to

whether he had it in him,

to write any more now.

But... Doubt from him, or...?

From him. Yes, I think he doubted that he was able to write

anything of consequence from now on.

Because he just didn't feel that surge of energy in himself.

It was at this point that Colin Matthews visited Aldeburgh

after some months away.

I was really shocked by how weak he looked and how ill.

In what way?

He just...

He was just very, very feeble, found it quite difficult to communicate.

Britten's nurse at the heart hospital was persuaded to

leave London and become his full-time carer

honouring her promise to see things through together.

I think everybody felt that this was just the end,

that he was just dying.

But I felt that there was more that could be done for him.

Straight after the operation,

the doctors had realised the heart murmur was still there.

Though in the climate of 1970s medicine, they didn't tell anyone.

Now, they even contemplated a second operation.

Ian Tait and I thought, "Well, do we want to consider repeat surgery?"

But then that would be not likely to work

because of the underlying flabby, weakened heart muscle.

You did consider repeat surgery

Yes. Yes.

One option would have been to put in a mechanical heart valve to

provide a better fit.

That would have required blood-thinning treatment with

warfarin, which doesn't mix well with some other drugs

and with alcohol.

His cardiologist thought that he was probably a heavy drinker

because he was in the arts.

He thought everybody in the arts was probably an alcoholic.

But, of course, Ben wasn't.

He wasn't a heavy drinker,

but he would have, as I understand it,

spurts of really quite heavy alcohol consumption,

interspersed with very little alcohol consumption.

That makes the warfarin levels very difficult to control.

But you could have told him, "You can't drink any more."

That's a bit unkind...denying him one of life's pleasures.

They would ask Ben, "Do you drink?" And he would say, "Yes,"

because, of course, he did.

But if he'd been told, "You can't drink again,"

he would just not have drunk again.

He wasn't in any ways addicted

Did you discuss this possibility with Britten?

Reoperation? No.

No. Why not?

Because we thought that the decision was self-evident.

And because he'd already had a stroke from the previous operation

and it would have been unkind to burden him with a decision

which was self-evidently in favour of leaving him as he was.

He was going to die of the weakened heart muscle.

And another operation might have accelerated that.

And in medicine, in the early ' 0s, we were a bit more avuncular

and didn't have to share everything with the patient.

# And Christe receive thy saule. #

Britten's medication was changed and under Rita Thompson's care

he even began to compose again

She was, I think, a breath of fresh air.

She cut through a lot of the sort of stiffness

and reputation surrounding Britten.

I helped him bath and shave and get dressed and everything

otherwise he all his energy would have gone on that.

And then, in the morning,

from about 11 o'clock to one was his best time for working.

It seemed to be a sort of marriage made in heaven in some ways.

I think she changed their lives in a way,

and brought a lot on sunshine to The Red House.

Peter, when you're talking about Rita, said,

"Ben's going to marry her."

That was just Peter being a bit dramatic, I think.

It wasn't like that at all.

Rita had a creative as well as a nursing role.

Word that Britten was depressed and couldn't compose

had reached the Queen,

who some years before had paid two visits to the Maltings

A letter arrived in her own hand asking "Dear Ben"

to write something special for the Queen Mother's 75th birthday.

Thanks to Rita, A Birthday Hansel was the result,

with words by Robert Burns.

He used to like someone to read aloud to him,

and I used to read him Burns' poems.

He thought, "Well, as she's Scottish,

"that would be a good thing to do."

# Wee Willie Grey, and his leather wallet... #

The title was Rita's idea too.

The Scots word "Hansel", meaning a good-luck gift at harvest time.

SHE LAUGHS

# The rose upon the breir will be him trews an' doublet... #

He used to ask me sometimes, about Scottish tunes...

# Wee Willie Gray, and his leather wallet... #

..and I would say, "Dee-dee-de-de."

He would say, "I can't take down deedles."

# Feathers of a flee wad feather up his bonnet,

# Feathers of a flee wad feather, feather, feather up his bonnet.. #

It's wonderful.

He sent off his manuscript

and received a thank-you letter from the Queen Mother,

again in her own hand.

"What lovely things you've chosen for your lovely music," she wrote.

"I honestly do not think that anything in my life has

"given me greater pleasure than your birthday gift."

He was summoned to Sandringham

for a private royal command performance

by Pears, and the harpist Osian Ellis.

We went there for Peter to sing and Osian to play to the Queen Mother.

And the Queen was there and Princess Margaret.

MUSIC PLAYS

He was sitting, of course,

and at the end Princess Margaret came over to talk to him

and he tried to struggle his feet and she said, "Don't worry."

And she sat - there was a little stool beside him

and she sat there so that he wouldn't have to stand up

which I thought was very kind and thoughtful.

He enjoyed laughing, but from an ill man,

you can't imagine that his mind was going like that all the time.

MUSIC ENDS

Britten himself never recovered any physical agility,

but his late music never entirely lost the energy

and quick wit that had defined him as a younger man.

Take for example the medieval poem he found

that poked fun at old age and death.

Was he fun to be with? No.

I always though he was a bit like a tortoise.

I was a little uneasy in any case, as a young,

relatively inexperienced musician.

If you asked him anything awkward he would withdraw.

His head would go back into his shell.

It only took a furrowed brow to make people tremble.

Like the woman who asked him, "What is the difference,

"Mr Britten, between The Rape Of Lucretia and Albert Herring?"

He said, "Same notes, different order!"

With infuriate rage.

He could be extremely cutting.

If people didn't measure up to what he wanted,

he could demolish them with a put down of a fairly savage nature

I don't think that he took on friends

just for the sake of friendship

I think there was always a very good reason why

he befriended or got close to other people.

If you go too close to the flame you were in danger of getting burnt

I saw what happened to people who did.

This sort of respectful distance

we kept from each other which on my part was quite deliberate

brought me this wonderful gift at the end of his life.

Britten was now too weak to write any more operas -

he simply couldn't reach the top of the manuscript paper

But in the cantata he wrote for Janet Baker, another story

of infatuation, guilt and death he seemed to be defying his illness.

'Phaedra is a masterpiece.'

'Glorious beginning to that piece - radiant.'

# In May in brilliant Athens

# On my marriage day... #

It really gets you between the eyes.

We were all blown away by it. I certainly was.

# I turned aside for shelter

# From the smile of Theseus... #

Phaedra, the wife of Theseus, the mythical founder of Athens,

has become infatuated with her stepson Hippolytus.

# Death was frowning in an aisle

# Hippolytus!

# I saw his face turned white... #

I was presented with this fantastic mini-opera with the woman who

was absolutely up my street.

Britten chose the version of the story by the French

playwright Racine,

in which Phaedra owns up to Hippolytus about her

incestuous feelings.

# You monster!

# You understood me too well!

# Why do you hang there speechless, petrified, polite?

# My mind whirls

# What have I to hide? #

It simply astonishes me that Ben can find this edgy passion of hers

# ..Phaedra, in all her madness stands before you

# Phaedra, Phaedra In all her madness stands before you

# I love you

# Fool, I love you

# Fool, I love you Love you, love you

# Fool, I adore you... #

'That iciness of the strings.'

Icy, cold...despair.

When Janet Baker went to Aldeburgh to run through the work with

the composer, she hadn't seen him for almost a year

and wasn't sure what to expect

And he looked fragile.

Then we started to work.

We didn't work too long at a time, but nevertheless,

this process was giving him life and energy and strength.

And you could see that.

I remember he was very impressed because she was word-perfect.

At one point in the score...

..Phaedra cries out to her nurse

and says words which I found un-singable.

# Oenones, I want to die

# Death will give me freedom... #

"Enoni, I want to die."

# ..It's nothing not to live... #

'"Oh, it's nothing not to live

'"Death to the unhappy is no catastrophe.'"

# Death to the unhappy

# Is no catastrophe... #

When I first sang these words to him, it hit me like a bolt.

What am I saying to this man?

I felt...

I'm feeling it now as I'm saying it...

How to give them the sort of agony he must have been through.

The strings take up the melody

and turn it into something really quite ecstatic.

An ecstatic acceptance of death which is not just Britten

writing about Phaedra, it's him writing about himself

They rise and they break, like waves, almost.

Somehow or other he'd had to use this time of illness,

as many people do, to come to terms with his life, his death, his work.

'No words spoken about this?'

No. Not necessary.

# My time's too short, your highness

# It was I who lusted for your son with my hot eye

# The flames of Aphrodite maddened me

# Then Oenones' tears troubled my mind

# She played upon my fears until her pleading

# Forced me to declare I loved your son

# Theseus, I stand before you to absolve your noble son... #

How it is this poor, broken figure huddled in a wheelchair,

with a rug around his shoulders can produce music

of such incredible power and passion,

it just beggars belief.

'In her resolve to take her own life,

'Phaedra feels it's what she deserves.'

# My eyes at last give up their light

# And see the day they've soiled resume its purity... #

SHE PUFFS

Gosh.

Incredible, isn't it?

By this time, Peter Pears' last great part in Death In Venice

was giving fresh life to his singing career,

but no longer with Britten at the piano.

It meant that just when Ben needed him most,

Peter was away for weeks on end

A mouthpiece for Britten's music, but away nonetheless.

Ben absolutely adored Peter,

was totally in love with him.

Peter was slightly not less in love,

but his adventures were slightly more loose.

I think we know that.

Ben was the monogamous one of that pair.

Later on in life, Peter went pretty wild,

but Ben went straight down the right path.

And he didn't let anything deter him from this.

Was he aware that Peter was wild?

He was aware but he said, "I just don't want to know about it.

"Let him do what he wants to do just don't tell me about it."

But I do remember Peter getting a little bit anxious and cross

at being quizzed rather a lot, and being watched rather carefully.

By whom? By Ben.

Yeah.

Just very occasionally.

And I sometimes felt that Peter would even encourage

a relationship with a woman just for the hell of it.

It wasn't always very helpful, but it did happen a little bit

Was he entirely loyal to Ben, do you think?

Yes, I think so. I believe so.

Whatever anybody else may think

And I remember Ben saying to me

when Peter was out of the room. .

Cos they'd been bantering and then he suddenly looked seriously at me

and said, "The world will never know how much I owe Peter."

I just always remember that.

Death In Venice was the grand finale of everything that Ben had

written for Peter.

The biggest gift he'd ever given him.

Yes. Although, what a gloomy, what a dark gift.

Halfway through Act Two,

I walked into the Maltings for the first orchestral rehearsal

I attended, first stage rehearsal,

and I've never forgotten the memory of that moment.

Why? Just an extraordinary blaze of sound.

It's in a scene called The Chase.

MUSIC FROM DEATH IN VENICE

Aschenbach is now so smitten with Tadzio

that he pursues the boy into St Mark's Cathedral,

then through the square and the streets.

He's losing his self-control

and his dignity as his obsession becomes reckless.

# O, voluptuous days

# O the joy I suffer

# Feverish chase Exquisite fear

# The taste of knowledge

# Time gained by silence

# While the echoing cries answer from the labyrinth...

# ..Follow them... #

There's still no direct contact with Tadzio, but Aschenbach has heard

rumours of an outbreak of cholera in Venice, the dark side of beauty.

# Stagando aou... #

In his frantic chase, with the gondoliers' cries

echoing down the canals,

he resolves to shield Tadzio and his family from the rumours and

pursues them back to their hotel.

It still sends a shiver down my spine whenever I hear it.

# Tadzio, Eros, charmer

# See I am past all fear

# Blind to danger, drunken, powerless? #

Aschenbach even follows the boy upstairs.

# Sunk in a bliss of madness

# Tadzio, Eros, charmer... #

The crucial thing is Aschenbach's self knowledge.

That's what destroys him.

He wakes to find himself absolutely sickened and disgusted with himself.

That he'd gone so low as to be stalking the boy to that extent

And I think this may have been a feeling of Ben's too.

I think he felt the underlying danger all the time

It's another part of his uneasiness.

And he knew the dangers and, so, he didn't venture into them

But, clearly, he felt guilt about this.

It's very autobiographical, obviously.

He examines himself and really rather condemns himself to death,

because he's allowed...

Well, in the opera,

he allows the relationship to go further than he should.

I think Aschenbach makes the decision that he deserves to

die because he has had unworthy thoughts.

# Gustav von Aschenbach!

# What is this path you have taken?

# What would your forebears say

# Decent, stern men In whose respectable name

# And under whose influence...

# You, the artist, made the life of art into a service...

# A hero's life of struggle and abstinence? #

Everything around him in Venice is fake,

but Tadzio is something real,

something pure, something beautiful.

It's not about sex, it's not about paedophilia.

# Eros has flourished too. #

I think an opera is only worthwhile

if it's dealing with a dangerous subject.

Art is art.

Death In Venice is a masterpiece as a novella.

The film is widely celebrated.

I think that art transcends fashion and, you know,

the dilemmas it articulates about old age,

about older men loving younger boys,

or women, for that matter...

In a sense, this is a universal thing.

They will be there for ever,

and great artists inform the way we think about them.

As Britten sat at home,

too nervous to listen to more than a few minutes of the first

performance on the radio, he could not have guessed that

over the next 40 years, his newest offspring would have more

than 500 performances in all six continents.

Pears began its international journey by singing

it in Venice itself, and then to great acclaim in New York.

Britten wasn't well enough to go with him.

Instead, we went with Rita to stay with friends in Germany.

# Does beauty lead to wisdom, Phaedrus? #

It was at this point, he accepted he would effectively be

an invalid for the rest of his life.

It was November and the weather was ghastly.

It was grey and the clouds were right down on top of your head

and I think that was the time that he really realised,

or spoke about it, that he wasn't going to improve.

# Knowledge to forgiveness. #

He was in a rather emotional state

because, of course, Death In Venice was in The Met

Peter was having a wonderful time,

wonderful reviews and everything there,

and he couldn't be part of it,

and he was missing Peter, and that was...

I think all of that was very lowering, but he was still working.

He still did his work and wrote letters.

He wrote to Peter and spoke on the telephone.

He couldn't speak on the phone very much,

because sometimes he would just cry.

At the end of a trip,

he wrote Pears an impassioned letter that reads as if it came

at the start of their relationship rather than after 35 years.

He wrote things he couldn't say on the telephone. He said,

"..Without bursting into those silly tears.

"I do love you so terribly, and not only glorious you, but your singing.

"What have I done to deserve such a man to write for?"

I have a friend who was in the orchestra pit

the first time Britten saw Death In Venice at Snape

and, apparently, during the Phaedrus monologue

on that first night,

my friend glanced over into the box

and Britten was in floods of tears watching it.

# And now, Phaedrus...

# I will go

# But you stay here...

# And when your eyes no longer see me...

# Then you go too. #

The love that went between them was so intense that it really hurt.

It hurt badly a lot of the time and I suspect that Death In Venice

brought all that up, brought up a whole lifetime of very,

very intense love between two people.

With the opera fully launched,

Venice held Britten in thrall one more time

for what was to be his final masterpiece.

He was working on a new string quartet -

his first for almost 30 years.

He'd written four of its five movements

when, in the autumn of 1975,

friends suggested a trip to his favourite city.

Part of him wanted to go, part of him was frightened of going.

I remember in the drawing room

there's a copy of Death In Venice on the table, and he just pointed,

and he said, "Look," and I said "Oh, come on, don't be silly."

He was staying in the Danieli Hotel,

which is in a very prominent position and overlooks the lagoon.

Best hotel.

We had a suite.

So he could rest in bed and work in a sitting room,

and Rita could be near him.

I'd taken my bell thing so he could ring me,

and it only would go till about halfway

to the middle of the sitting room.

And you would hear the bells. That's what he loved.

You hear one starts... "Bong, bong..."

and then all little bells start.

You hear all these bells. It's an amazing sound.

I think that's why he went to Venice. Just to hear that.

That marvellous moment in Death In Venice

where the bells sound in the beginning of the church service

There they are.

He was working on a third quartet.

He had it with him and that's what he was writing, the final piece

He had a routine, he worked every day,

he talked about it and was excited by it.

Certainly, he said that the opening of the movement was

influenced by the bells of Santa Maria della Salute...

Which was built in the 17th century after a plague.

You can see the connection with Death In Venice there.

I remember talking about the smells

and the sound of the water on the walls...

Slapping, slapping, slapping sound.

We would decide where we would go...

to see the Caravaggio pictures

or go to one of the churches.

We went on vaporettos and things.

We walked all round the back alleys and things,

lifting his chair over the little bridges and so on.

And had some fun, actually.

Spun him round. SHE LAUGHS

When he came back, I saw this extraordinary music

With its flow...