Britten Phantasy Quintet and Three Divertimenti

Benjamin Britten was born at Lowestoft, England on 22 November 1913 and died in Aldeburgh, England on 4 December 1976. The Phantasy in F minor for string quintet was composed between 20 January and 11 February 1932 while Britten was a student at the Royal College of Music, London.  The work was awarded the Cobbett Prize for chamber music and premiered on 22 July 1932 at the Cobbett Prize Concert at RCM (with W.W. Cobbett in the audience).

The Three Divertimenti for string quartet originated as a suite of character movements for string quartet entitled Alla Quartetto Serioso: ‘Go play, boy, play’; the subtitle references a quote from Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale.  The suite was originally conceived as a five-movement set of musical portraits of Britten’s school friends, but Britten only completed three in 1933 – Alla Marcia, Alla Valse, and Alla Burlesca.  These movements were given one performance in London by the Machaghten Quartet on 11 December 1933.  In February 1936 Britten was persuaded to revise ‘Go play, boy, play’ and the revised movements were renamed March, Waltz, and Burlesque.  The work, retitled Three Divertimenti, was premiered by the Stratton Quartet at the Wigmore Hall, London, on 25 February 1936.  According to an entry in Britten’s diary the performance received “sniggers and cold silence” from the audience and he withdrew the work; it did not appear again until after his death.

One of the more interesting tidbits from the lore surrounding Benjamin Britten’s childhood is that his mother Edith had ambitions for her son to become “the fourth B” (after Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms); to her his birth on St. Cecilia’s Day also seemed to be a good omen for that to occur.  Before his matriculation at the Royal College of Music in 1930 Britten had been studying composition with Frank Bridge since 1925 when his viola instructor Audrey Alston introduced the young Britten to Bridge at a concert in Norwich. According to Britten, Bridge’s primary lesson to him was “that you should find yourself and be true to what you found”.  This was severely tested during Britten’s time as a student at Gresham’s, a public school in Norfolk, from 1928-1930. The music master at the school disparaged the modernist tendencies in his compositions, and Britten’s innate sense of social justice made the budding pacifist particularly sensitive to the culture of military exercises and bullying at the school (although as Britten was a skilled cricket player he himself was able to escape the customary hazing).  

Britten’s situation improved upon his matriculation to RCM, but his taste for modernism did not find a natural home during his time there as a student from 1930-1933. Later in his life Britten admitted that he found his fellow students “amateurish and folksy”, and while he deeply respected his instructors Arthur Benjamin and John Ireland, their preference for the English pastoral style made popular by Ralph Vaughan Williams was somewhat incompatible with Britten’s developing aesthetic (informed by the works of the Second Viennese School and Stravinsky, amongst others) and he continued to seek musical guidance from Bridge.  

Britten did credit Ireland for guiding him through “a very, very difficult musical adolescence”, and his time at RCM did help him meld his experimental nature with a disciplined approach to composing.  This process helped him reach his first maturity and led him to compose a set of pieces from which he could select his official Opus 1. One of the candidates for his first published piece (and therefore his official introduction to the international music community at large) was the Phantasy in F minor for string quintet, a work Britten wrote to enter in competition for the Cobbett Phantasy Prize.  This prize was established by the philanthropist and avid amateur musician W.W. Cobbett in 1905. He wanted to encourage composers to write instrumental pieces influenced by the single-movement works popular during the English Renaissance and Baroque.  He stated that:

“The parts must be of equal importance, and the duration of the piece should not exceed twelve minutes. Though the Phantasy is to be performed without a break, it may consist of different sections varying in tempi and rhythm. The competitor whose work afforded in the opinion of the judges the best example of an Art form suited for a short piece of Chamber music with strings”

Britten was awarded the prize in 1932. He won 18 guineas, which he spent on scores by Walton and Manuel de Falla, as well as a new suit.  The Phantasy Quintet was the first of Britten’s compositions to be broadcast by the BBC, in February 1933, but this led to a couple of lukewarm reviews. Throughout his life Britten’s extreme sensitivity to negative reviews caused him to withdraw works from his official output, and in this case probably helped lead  Britten to choose another work he wrote in 1932, his Sinfonietta, to become his Opus 1.  After writing the string quintet Britten was inspired to write another Phantasy, this time for oboe and string trio.  This would eventually become his Opus 2.

Britten then embarked on new projects veering away from the Phantasy idiom in his final year at RCM, including writing for string quartet.  Britten had up to this point already written four works for this instrumentation: String Quartet in F major (1928), Rhapsody (1929), Quartettino (1930), and String Quartet in D major (1931).  Literature was a passion of Britten’s and influenced many of his works, and his Alla Quarteto Serioso: ‘Go play, boy, play’ serves as a prime example.  

The subtitle of the work references Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale, one of the bard’s most intense portrayals of male jealousy.  In Act I Polixenes, King of Bohemia, wants to return home after visiting his lifelong friend King Leontes for nine months.  Leontes tries to convince Polixenes to extend his visit but does not succeed. Leontes then asks his wife, Hermione, to intercede and she succeeds in convincing Polixenes to stay.  The dramatic turn is that this exchange of innocent friendly affection between Polixenes and Hermione is misconstrued as a sign of infidelity and makes Leontes insanely jealous. Britten’s quote comes from when Leontes speaks mockingly to his son Mamillus (almost like a bully) to go and play while at the same time exploring the many nuances the word holds at this moment:

Gone already!

Inch-thick, knee-deep, o’er head and

ears a fork’d one!

Go, play, boy, play: thy mother plays, and I

Play too, but so disgraced a part, whose issue

Will hiss me to my grave: contempt and clamour

Will be my knell. Go, play, boy, play.

These pieces were also meant to be a series of portraits of his school friends from South Lodge and Gresham’s – the first David Layton from Gresham’s, who was a fellow violist at the school; and the third of Francis Barton, a friend from South Lodge, Britten’s earlier private school. The movements initially bore the titles PT, At the Party, and Ragging, but were withdrawn and changed to the less specific Alla Marcia, Alla Valse, and Alla Burlesca.  Britten heavily revised the movements in 1936 and transformed them into the Three Divertimenti.  Just as his Phantasy Quintet had received a lackluster reception, the “sniggers and cold silence” that Britten perceived as a response at the Wigmore Hall premiere of the Three Divertimenti caused him to withdraw the work and keep it from publication.  Britten may have been particularly sensitive to this criticism due to the particularly personal nature of these works.  

While there is no detailed account of what these movements portray, the initial titles of the work give us a clue as to what those stories might be.  As the Burlesque originated as a movement entitled Ragging, one can imagine a narrative where Britten, who served as head boy at South Lodge, attempted to protect his good friend Francis Barton from a swarm of bullies, and this incident may have been the initial spark that ignited Britten’s pacifist ideals that would inform his music for the rest of his life.

It is interesting to note that the first version of the Alla Marcia that was intended to open ‘Go play, boy, play’ was withdrawn and replaced with the March, but material from that extracted movement eventually found its way into Britten’s song-cycle Les Illuminations, written in 1939, in the “Parade” movement.  Both march movements offer a sarcastic treatment of militaristic rhythms, offering Britten a musical way to express his discontent with all things related to war.  While the dedication of the third movement to Francis Barton remains in the printed score of Three Divertimenti, there is no mention in the 1936 revision of David Layton, who Britten described in a diary entry written that same year as “my good looking, aristocratic, acme of ideal manhood, friend…”  and who shared many of Britten’s political ideals. In his Two Portraits for String Orchestra written in 1930 between his time at Gresham’s and RCM, Britten also wrote a musical portrait of Layton as the first movement alongside a broodingly lonely self-portrait in the second movement.  One can only wonder at how the deep interconnectedness of these works and literary references give us a peek into Britten’s psyche, especially at a time when his sexual and political identities were in their deeply formative stages. Britten would probably respond with how he opens Les Illuminations: “J’ai seul la clef de cette parade sauvage.”

-Program notes by Dr. Daniel Doña