Gay wrestling
La Cieca should know by now that any think piece that kicks off with the locution “I have from time to time wrestled with this conundrum” is just going to piss her off and she should just close the tab. But she didn’t, and this is what she found a little lower down (in more than one sense of the word):
I have always been rather disgusted by Benjamin Britten’s distinctly unhealthy interest in young boys. There is no proof he ever engaged in sexual activity with any of them: but his behaviour would today come under the heading of “grooming” and he would have been put on the sex offenders’ register. Much of Britten’s music I find magnificent; he is possibly the only true genius among our 20th-century composers. Yet the homoeroticism of some of his later works, or rather the paedophilia, I find repulsive
That this same Simon Heffer manages to drag in the tiredest of all Wagner canard (the Ring is “laden with half-hidden hints of anti-Semitism”) doesn’t surprise me in the least: those who triumphantly spout one bit of received wisdom are likely to believe just about anything they’re read a hundred times before.
But let La Cieca stay within her bailiwick here and simply remind the smarmy Mr. Heffer that “homoeroticism” and “paedophilia” are two distinctly different things, the confusion of which has led to much hatred and discrimination against gay people. If he finds homoeroticism repulsive, at least he should be be man enough to say it straighforwardly, not with the weasel words he chose.
that is to say, a composer for people who wanted something more up-to-date than Strauss but not so jarring as Stravinsky. Minotti was another.
You say it like it is a sin to have and find success in the business. Newsflash: Every composer wants to have success and be liked by the public. Most composers writte what they think their audience wants to hear. Very few inhabit the cloud that makes them believe that they are better than anyone else and thus it is their mission to enlighten the masses.
Britten appears to also have been quietly cruel on other fronts. One only has to read (Joyce Grenfell’s memoirs? )how he treated Viola Tunnard who worked with him loyally, in creating his operas. When her performing standards as a pianist showed the first sign of a few missed notes, he berated her mercilessly in front of others, including her peers. The poor woman was soon quickly diagnosed with the horrendously feared Motor Neuron Disease. She died in a matter of months, the friendship completely ‘busted’. What ‘a P…K’, Britten personally was!
I must be missing something here. I never interpreted Britten’s exploration of the outsider in a conformist society as an obsession with little boys. We are talking about his operas, right? The focus of Peter Grimes is not the little boys but Grimes inability to connect/communicate with others (a simplification, I know). And where are the little boys in Billy Budd? Nowhere. Albert Herring, Midsummer Night’s Dream, etc. Ditto.
Maybe the argument could be made for Death in Venice, but again, I’d say the focus is not on the boy but on the man (who comes to a bad end).
FYI: Prolific doesn’t equal great, we know, but some of us do like and are intrigued by Britten’s music.
#35 and #40 – I’m talking about the music of Britten in #33. What the hell are you talking about?
Vox, I think you actually wrote #34, not #33.
Thanks CruzSF. You are correct. I’m terrific at music; math – not so much…
@36, Thank You. I appreciate that.
@38, But would you put Britten in the same boat as Menotti or even of Walton? I don’t believe he is that ‘light’; his operas seem to intend originality and seriousness of purpose. I think that this can only be settled with an open score: show me in given scenes and on given pages how Britten is not in instrumentation, in counterpoint, in vocal writing, in trying and often succeeding to be a successor with his own individuality to 19th-century greatness. I don’t think he’s quite Strauss in that Strauss is wondrous–but he’s not quite Walton either, and certainly not Menotti.
**
(The aside that follows is a digression that I hope will be pardoned. Some of what’s gone before really pushes my buttons, I’m afraid.I’m female, which will no doubt
I had pretty much the same height, build, and body when I was eleven as I do now as a grown woman . Can you imagine
surprise
that I had the same *mind*? This is really important, potentially simplistic, but perhaps overlooked. A child, male or female, whatever the IQ, does not have an adult mind. What this means for the argument that some are making for children being “mature enough” for sex is that they are arguing for biology trumping mental aspects. This means, think about it, that they are making children purely biological identities and thus objectifying them. This is a terrible argument for an informed liberal perpective to make.
This is again far from
discussing Britten’s homoeroticism (so what? it enriches his work); however, again, I appreciate the opportunity to give my opinion.)
#47 – Are you suggesting some here are advocating sex with children? I’m not seeing it.
@ 48. That’s well-taken. 33 and 39 were the only posts that struck me that way. I apologize if I was a mite hysterical, but I’m not sure we can’t be, as a society … :/
Alexythymia, it seems to me that you are both wandering pretty far off topic and repeating yourself here.