How is Britten's Young Person's Guide so whimsical and brilliant, when everything else he wrote was so godawful turgid? The story behind the story.
Find Britten's Young Person's Guide here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vbvhU22uAM
Benjamin Britten, before history packaged him as the greatest tunesmith of orchestral education, was a man dedicated to ideals. Dull ideals. For Britten, music ought to elevate, refine. A catchy tune, in his system, ought not be a daily prize, falling like candy from a piñata. It was something that might occur later, when time permitted, and probably not. Britten expected that his listeners (like himself) were engrossed when an F minor chord transitioned slowly to G minor. He didn’t get many dates.
Britten's audiences were thin, while he saw concert halls packed with Saint-Saëns, whose animals cavorted, and Prokofiev, whose wolves had clear management objectives. Their music bounded in, tossed its hat on the bar, and started dancing. Britten’s music entered quietly, removed its coat, and began reading names scratched into the bar.
No one knows how Britten landed a desperately needed commission to write a piece introducing young people to the orchestra. But they would have rolled their eyes to see him try to base it on one of his dullest pieces, the Chichester Psalms.
The first out-of-town tryout. It began with a chord that appeared to have taken a long-term lease. Instruments entered one at a time, each representing another aspect of what the program called “a condition of reflective presence.” A child in the front row asked his teacher if this was the music or if they were waiting for it to start. Another began crawling under the pews towards an unlocked door.
Adults held on bravely and applauded boldly at the end of the first movement--before realizing there were six more. Reviews granted the piece “admirable stillness,” a term associated with Northumbrian lakes and country manors turned into asylums.
Britten was baffled. Simply invisible to Britten was the canyon separating his turgid chords from Prokofiev’s spinning carousels of harmony.
We now see a seaside tavern after a Saturday evening performance attended by an audience of six. At the bar stood a compact man with quick eyes.
“You wrote that music then?” he asked.
“For the education of youth,” Britten replied ironically. He fingered a letter in his tweed jacket, a letter from a solicitor firmly requested the return of the advance..
“Right,” said the man, nodding slowly. “Ever try...a tune?”
Britten explained that too busy attending to harmonic development in the minor keys.
“Yes, but a tune. A TUNE,” the man said. “Eh, now, say, Purcell, didn't he do that. Lively chap."
Britten stared.
Then he thought.
“A tune…” He stood up. "Purcell?"
Dawn found Britten at his hotel, sheaves of music scattered from bed to bath. A Purcell theme had entered, upright, cheerful, and hopping from sheet to sheet, shaking hands with flutes, horns, percussion. The final fugue fairly leapt up from the page.
Within weeks, audiences all over London were bursting with animation and demanding encores. Within a month, The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra took its place beside Carnival of the Animals and Peter and the Wolf. Children learned instruments without first facing eternity and the grave. Britten was getting more dates.
And somewhere in the orchestral firmament, Purcell could be heard humming, pleased to have been of service to education, romance, and the fugue.
