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There is something eerily calm about the penultimate article in Britten’s ‘first period’ of writing (Essay 17). It is modest, unassuming, and totally unprepared for the way the opera it describes would change his life and the direction of British music. Simple facts concerning the origins of Peter Grimes are relayed; modest (and not so modest) hopes for the future of English opera are established; cogent ideas about prosody and opera in English are delivered; and economic arguments about staging native works are incorporated with the easy logic that anticipates the post-war composer-impresario. Yet whatever hopes Britten had for his opera and for a cultured, humane, post-war society, they were at the time of writing unrealized. After Grimes, Britten’s public role was greatly elevated; yet fame muted him, much as pacifism had done in wartime England. And the seeds of paradox were sown; for now Britten was given a forum, a platform, but chose instead to address the issues of his heart and conscience through his music. Thus his prose writings in this second period are less brash, more cultivated than those in the previous one. His opera Gloriana (1953), probably not coincidentally, deals precisely with this conflict between public responsibility and private passion. Essex’s second lute song, in which he longs for a place ‘obscure from all society’ is little different from Grimes’s search for a harbour sheltering peace, yet the difference in Britten’s status as a composer in early 1945 compared to 1953 could scarcely be exaggerated. In part, his journey was that of the boy in Hardy’s ‘Midnight on the Great Western’, one of Britten’s Winter Words (1953), taken to realms beyond his expectation: ‘This region of sin that you find you in, I But are not of’. Fame gave him entree to aristocratic English society; yet his homosexuality, or more precisely the sexual expression of his relationship with Peter Pears, was illegal until 1967. Whatever was his enjoyment of this elite society (and he retained royal connections and privileges throughout his life), he was never really part of it, unable to conform to conventional sexual mores.
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