Trzy listy

Britten writes Pears in a letter dated 17 November 1974:

I feel I must write a squiggle which I couldn’t say on the telephone without bursting into those silly tears—I do love you so terribly, & not only glorious you but your singing. I’ve just listened to a re-broadcast of Winter Words and honestly you are the greatest artist that ever was—every nuance, subtle & never overdone—those great words, so sad & wise, painted for one, that heavenly sound you make, full but always coloured for words & music. What have I done to deserve such an artist and man to write for? 

Pears replies from New York in a letter to Britten postmarked 21 November:

Love is blind—and what your dear eyes do not see is that it is you who have given me everything, right from the beginning, from yourself in Grand Rapids! Through Grimes &Serenade & Michelangelo and Canticles—one thing after another—right up to this great Aschenbach. I am here as your mouthpiece and I live in your music—And I can never be thankful enough to you and to Fate for all the heavenly joy we have had together for 35 years.

*****

Auden to Britten, 31 January 1942:

I have been thinking a great deal about you and your work during the past year. As you know I think you the white hope of music; for this very reason I am more critical of you than of anybody else, and I think that I know something about the dangers that beset you as a man and as an artist, because they are my own.

Goodness and Beauty are the results of a perfect balance between Order and chaos, Bohemianism and Bourgeois Convention.

Bohemian chaos alone ends in a mad jumble of beautiful scraps; Bourgeois convention alone ends n large unfeeling corpses.

Every artist except the supreme masters has a bias one way or the other... For middle-class Englishmen like you and me, the danger is of course the second. Your attraction to thin-as-a board juveniles, ie to the sexless and innocent, is a symptom of this. And I am certain too that it is your denial and evasion of the demands of disorder that is responsible for your attacks of ill-health, ie sickness is your substitute for the Bohemian.

Wherever you go you are and probably always will be surrounded by people who adore you, nurse you, and praise everything you do, eg Elisabeth, Peter (please show it to P to whom all this also addressed). Up to a certain point this is fine for you, but beware. You see, Bengy dear, you are always tempted to make things too easy for yourself in this way, ie to build yourself a warm nest of love (of course, when you get it, you find it a little stifling) by playing the lovable talented little boy.

If you are really to develop to your full stature, you will have, I think, to suffer and to make others suffer, in ways which are totally strange to you at present, and against every conscious value that you have; ie you will have to be able to say what you never yet have had the right to say – God, I’m a shit.