In June 2013, the Aldeburgh Festival of Music and the Arts produced Benjamin Britten’s opera Peter Grimes (1945) on an open-air stage by the sea. Combining pre-recorded orchestral music and miked singers, the production, renamed Grimes on the Beach, was mounted in the very town where the story takes place and where the composer had made his home.Footnote 1 Using the North Sea as a backdrop, the singers acted on a set consisting of a dilapidated promenade, while the audience sat on the shingle, huddled under blankets to stay warm. In an interview with The Guardian a week before the show’s opening, director Tim Albery suggested that it would bring the performers and audience ‘closer to the world of what the piece is’. The same article noted that the production took place in ‘the buildings you can actually see from the stage, and featur[ed] the ancestors of the people who will make up the audience’.Footnote 2 Aside from the belief that setting the opera on the beach would lead to a heightened experience of the work itself, this production almost seemed to suggest that the fictional story had taken place in the past and could thus be recreated. Site-specific performance was to function as time travel, allowing audience members and performers to access another world, even if it had never quite existed in the first place.
Although reviews drew attention to the ‘surely unrepeatable’ nature of the production, the sentiments that led to Grimes on the Beach had been long in the making.Footnote 3 In 1958, for instance, The Yorkshire Post suggested that if an audience member ever wanted to experience Peter Grimes, all she needed to do was travel to Aldeburgh:
To come down the hill from the station, sharply to the edge of the sea, with the wide-aisled perpendicular church at your back and the picturesque, brick-and-flint 16th-century Moot Hall at your side – this is to step abruptly into the real setting for the first scene of ‘Peter Grimes’. The sea itself is the auditorium, and the Moot Hall is so near to its edge, on an open square that seems almost falsely theatrical, that one instinctively looks for more stage room.Footnote 4
But, as Desmond Shawe-Taylor had noted some years earlier, there are limits to the comparison: ‘if the visitor demands to be shown The Boar, or the cliff down which the unfortunate apprentice fell, he will draw a blank’.Footnote 5 Despite the many similarities between the town and the setting, this vision of Aldeburgh still required an imaginative leap of faith, which was where the Festival came in. Founded in 1948 by Britten, Peter Pears, and director and librettist Eric Crozier, it transformed the fishing town into a prime tourist site every June and provided the scaffolding – in the form of performances, exhibitions, lectures and tours – needed for the visitor to imagine herself part of a local community.
To be sure, the Aldeburgh Festival was hardly the first festival to showcase the town in which it took place; festivals have long been a celebration of location as well as a way to attract tourists to an area.Footnote 6 But the difference at the Aldeburgh Festival was the way that the production of specific operas shaped the celebration. For organisers and attendees alike, the town was to function as both context and content for Britten’s operas.Footnote 7 Of course, not all the music – not even all of Britten’s operas – performed at the Festival had a clear link to Aldeburgh or the surrounding county of Suffolk. But for those pieces that did – most notably Albert Herring (1947) and Little Sweep (1949) – on-site performance was promoted by Festival supporters as revealing the connections between the ‘world of the piece’ and that of Aldeburgh itself.Footnote 8 What is more, these operatic realities were woven into the programming and overall atmosphere of the Festival, as organisers sought to create an all-encompassing experience in which art and life were to be integrated. The Aldeburgh Festival, then, provides an early example of how opera stages space outside the opera house, as Aldeburgh came to serve as a parallel staging of the village life seen in Britten’s works.
Key to this staging was the Festival’s cultivation of a sense of local community. Heather Wiebe has argued that Britten’s participatory music-making community ideal was a response to the modernist crisis in the arts and a way to ‘plan’ a community in the post-war reconstruction period.Footnote 9 While agreeing with this overarching assessment, this article seeks to take it one step further by considering the specific role of visitors in this vision of community. To this end, I wish to examine how the ideal of localism promoted by the Festival organisers – including founders Britten, Pears and Crozier, administrator Elizabeth Sweeting and a committee led by Fidelity Cranbrook – drew upon the rhetoric and modes of behaviour of contemporary tourism. In particular, the Festival community can be productively situated in relation to the search for the English village in the mid-twentieth century; in programmes, exhibitions and tours, organisers encouraged attendees to discover a supposedly untouched, organic society at Aldeburgh. Within this context, Britten’s village-themed operas came to function as the conceptual backdrop to visitors’ experiences of the Festival. Although Festival organisers suggested that these operas simply reflected the community that could already be found in Aldeburgh itself, the repeat performances of these operas, along with other opera-themed events, bonded visitors together into the kind of community they were seeking.Footnote 10 Much like the search for the village in the twentieth century, the Aldeburgh community offered by the Festival was imagined, constructed and enacted by the visitors themselves.
The appeal of the local
The ideal of the ‘local’ has always been key to the Festival’s promotion, but the type of localism on offer was of a particular kind, and explicitly not of the sort that Britten had disparaged in ‘England and the Folk-Art Problem’ (1941). Written while in the United States, the article had derided a localism that consisted of composers turning to folk songs, and refusing ‘to accept the destruction of “community” by the machine’.Footnote 11 Yet, as Wiebe notes, by the mid-1940s, Britten had begun to envision an ‘alternative musical culture’, one ‘connected with a broader interest in rural and village England as both location and inspiration for art’.Footnote 12 His vision was part of a shift away from the early twentieth-century approach of Cecil Sharp and his followers, with their ‘scientific’ collection and revitalisation of English folk traditions then imposed ‘by sheer force of will’ onto the people of the provinces.Footnote 13 Britten instead put forward a particular vision of integrated art and life in a small town. Paradoxically, however, this vision of localism was one that catered primarily to the visitor.
As Wiebe has suggested, many of Britten’s projects in the 1940s and 1950s can be understood as conscious attempts to construct an English community, in line with many other aspects of life in reconstruction Britain.Footnote 14 Offering a fortnight of events, the Aldeburgh Festival serves as the epitome of such a constructed community. The tourist orientation of the Festival, however, has led to its near absence in critical discussions of the composer’s community-building projects. Various early proponents of the Festival suggested that Britten tapped into some pre-existing, local community in composing his works and creating the Festival.Footnote 15 But such claims always stumble when it comes to the place of the Festival visitors, either ignoring them entirely or defending the Festival vigorously against claims, real and imagined, that it was not embedded in the lives of the year-round inhabitants.Footnote 16 At the same time, others have characterised the Festival as Britten’s tea party – a reference to the cliquish group that surrounded the composer – and have argued that the Festival’s appeal to tourists undermines any claim that it may have to represent the local community.Footnote 17 Underlying both support for and critique of the Festival was the belief that, if it relied too much on outsiders, it could not be expressive of a local community, implicitly defined as a closed, homogenous unit. In the mid-twentieth century, however, this very idea had become a fiction designed to appeal to tourists. It was also increasingly unsustainable, as small communities in Britain were shifting dramatically in response to the pressures of suburban development, increased tourism and rural planning initiatives. What if, then, we direct our attention to how the Festival organisers’ efforts resulted in a different kind of community, one constituted by the visitors themselves?
According to Crozier, it was after an exhausting European summer tour in 1947 that Pears first suggested making their own ‘modest’ Festival at Aldeburgh, describing it simply as a ‘few concerts given by friends’.Footnote 18 Yet the few friends invited by Pears and Britten – including aristocrats such as the Earl of Harewood and his cousin Robert Gathorne-Hardy – showed how the Festival attracted a well-heeled crowd whose circumstances and backgrounds were far from modest.Footnote 19 Nor were the Festival’s prices: owing to the small size of the venues, tickets were limited and costly.Footnote 20 Moreover, the emphasis on modesty belied a national and even an international orientation. Britten and Pears chose to hold the Festival in June, for instance, so that it would not conflict with the national Festival calendar.Footnote 21 And despite Sweeting’s claim that they only sought to attract audiences from the ‘East Anglian catchment area’,Footnote 22 a few months before the first Festival Britten wrote to Crozier from Amsterdam that there was ‘enormous interest in the Aldeburgh Festival out here – I’m plugging it hard in interviews’.Footnote 23 Indeed, less than five years into its history, Aldeburgh was playing host to the Copenhagen Boys’ Choir, planning a series of long-playing records for America, coordinating overseas broadcasts with the BBC, and tracking the number of international visitors.Footnote 24 The Festival’s aspiration to modesty, then, seems to have depended less on the kinds of guests it attracted and the sums they paid for admission than on the construction of its image as a local affair in a small, seaside town.
Why was it so important that the Festival be local? For one thing, organisers were keen to differentiate Aldeburgh from the other music and arts festivals that had sprung up or been revitalised after the war; most notably, the reopening of the opera house at Glyndebourne (1945), and the foundation of the Edinburgh International Festival (1947).Footnote 25 Such events offered the best of the European scene to British audiences, taking advantage of the continental vacuum left by the war, with Bayreuth and Salzburg temporarily out of commission.Footnote 26 And by contrast with such major events, Harewood argued that their Festival avoided the sort of overwhelming programmes that caused ‘mental indigestion’ since it was ‘planned round Aldeburgh itself’, while Sweeting suggested that at other festivals all the components ‘can be seen or heard elsewhere’.Footnote 27
Nor, though, did the organisers of the Aldeburgh Festival wish to be lumped in with provincial gatherings, of the kind that writer and early Festival contributor E.M. Forster derided as ‘remain[ing] at the flower-show level, the amateur-theatrical level’ and featuring his ‘old enemy, the Morris Dance’.Footnote 28 Forster’s reaction can be understood as a hangover from the years of the Second World War, which saw the promotion of touring and amateur performances under the auspices of the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA).Footnote 29 Festival organisers were keen to avoid the accusations of low standards lobbed at these regional arts activities, not least by CEMA member and the founding chairman of the Arts Council John Maynard Keynes, who called for ‘the preservation of serious professional enterprise, not obscure concerts in village halls’.Footnote 30 This was also a strategic move: although CEMA’s successor, the Arts Council, shifted its focus to metropolitan and professional institutions, the Council continued to provide some funding for regional endeavours, such as the Aldeburgh Festival.Footnote 31 And despite the fact that many of the Festival’s concerts did, indeed, take place in the town’s Jubilee Hall, organisers made sure that performance was of a high standard – which generally meant featuring well-known, professional musicians. In his account of ‘The Origin of the Aldeburgh Festival’, Crozier recalled that they ‘tried to plan a balanced programme that would include only outstanding works and artists [while] giving fair representation to local interests’, while Sweeting wrote that ‘in everything it must be of exceptional quality’.Footnote 32 The majority of the Festival was therefore dedicated to high art enterprises, much like the other cultural projects increasingly promoted by the Arts Council in the late 1940s.Footnote 33
Festival organisers, in other words, wished to position their Festival as simultaneously local and internationally important, modest and professional. In public statements, they maintained that this Festival was by and for the local community.Footnote 34 But in the planning of the Festival – the posting of automobile signs, the provision of local tourist material, and the tone and schedule of the programme – they were well attuned to the needs of the visitor population, and particularly to their desire to feel part of a local community.Footnote 35 This is not to suggest that the organisers were disingenuous in their statements about the Festival – although some of their rhetoric seemed aimed to quell townspeople’s concerns that, as Sweeting put it, ‘a group of people were coming from outer space to settle all over Aldeburgh and put on their festival willy nilly’.Footnote 36 Rather, the vision of localism that Festival organisers promoted was outwardly orientated. In his foreword to the very first programme, for example, Harewood drew attention to the broader scope of the Festival:
The various items of the programme ‘belong’ to Aldeburgh and Suffolk in the sense that Mozart did to Salzburg. They are at the same time, many of them, of world-wide fame. Through them, local patriotism, with its enhanced sense of physical relationship with its surroundings and its intimate local associations, finds its point of contact with the national and the international.Footnote 37
Like the inhabitants of Salzburg who appreciated Mozart’s music because it was a home-grown product, so too could the inhabitants of Aldeburgh gain entry into a broader (and supposedly higher) culture through Britten’s music. It was the very nature of the local focus in Suffolk that served as the Festival’s bid for universality.
Such statements reflect what Alexandra Harris has recognised as a familiar strain in the arts in the 1930s and 1940s: the advocacy for ‘greatness of art that grows out of familiar places’.Footnote 38 This vision was strongly put forward by a group of English writers and artists, known as ‘Neo-Romantics’, who turned away from continental abstraction and towards Romantic perspectives and subjects, seen most readily in their engagement with the small-scale and pastoral. Renaming this group ‘Romantic Moderns’, Harris argues that these artists – including Britten’s close collaborator, artist John Piper – did not abandon their modernist credentials in their dedication to uncovering the ‘places, people and histories too valuable and too vulnerable to go missing from art’ in the lead-up to the Second World War.Footnote 39 The idea that the insistence on the local did not preclude innovation has also gained ground more generally with scholars who wish to rehabilitate those artists thought to be operating on the periphery of continental modernist trends. As Christopher Chowrimootoo has noted, however, these revisionist histories can serve to reinforce the binary of modernism versus traditionalism.Footnote 40 Moreover, this way of thinking about the local can often fail to reveal how the focus on particular places was dependent on engagement with outside forces. In other words, the reverence given to particularity was useful in enabling artists to open up a local world to a wider audience.
In this context, it is notable that the dedication of neo-Romantic artists to preserving these places in art often went hand in hand with tourism. When he was not sketching churches or designing sets for Britten’s operas, Piper, for instance, was co-editing the popular Shell Guides, designed to bring motorists to the countryside.Footnote 41 Above all, the guides emphasised the strong communities that could be found, in a way that underlined an image of England as a ‘lived-in country’.Footnote 42 And the vision of the local community advocated by the Festival was deeply embedded in this neo-Romantic ideology: not only was the Festival shaped by the contributions of the same artists and writers – Piper lent both his own artwork and his expertise in curating exhibits of local painters, while lectures, articles and exhibitions were often provided by Shell Guides artists and editors – but organisers also presented the community of Aldeburgh as both self-contained and open to access by Festival visitors.Footnote 43 According to Sweeting, the ‘spirit of the Festival’ was to be ‘a unique collaboration of its audience, the arts and their creators and performers, and the ambience and burghers of Aldeburgh’.Footnote 44
As a result, the Festival embodied the conundrum of localism in the mid-twentieth century: while it was purportedly a locally generated product, the recognition and valuing of the local came from without. And while Festival organisers did not explicitly acknowledge this doubleness, they definitely profited from it. As Sweeting wrote, by 1951, they could ‘boast of a local habitation and a name’ – and these local and broader aims were not treated as mutually exclusive.Footnote 45 Moreover, Crozier claimed that they had always intended for the Festival to be ‘an annual and growing event, making Aldeburgh a temporary home for leading contemporary artists in opera, drama, ballet, chamber music and painting’.Footnote 46 As one journalist put it, ‘Benjamin Britten has said that for him local things are finally first. But he has a rare gift for enticing the world into his parish.’Footnote 47 From the perspective of the Festival organisers – who typically characterised Britten and Pears as simply playing hosts to their talented friends performing at the Festival – the international element did not trouble the localism, but helped to validate it.Footnote 48
At the same time, the very ideal of the self-contained community promoted at the Festival was one that attracted the visitor. Although the majority of English citizens lived in urban areas by the first half of the twentieth century, the period witnessed a national fascination with and concern for small communities in the countryside.Footnote 49 In classics such as George Sturt’s Change in the Village (1912) and The Old Wheelwright’s Shop (1923), the village was presented as a space of social interaction that had been transformed by the incursions of modernity. F.R. Leavis and Denys Thompson argued that such works represented the lost vestiges of an ‘organic community’ wracked by machine-power, a position that Britten would later attack in ‘England and the Folk-Art Problem’.Footnote 50 Industrialisation was blamed for these social ills; England had been in an agricultural slump since the late nineteenth century, losing essential services, stores and people to larger urban centres.Footnote 51 Moreover, suburbanisation, which swallowed up villages in ring development around major cities, contributed to the public belief that the countryside was facing impending ruin.Footnote 52
While Leavis and Thompson concluded that the organic community was forever lost and could only be recovered through literature, other interwar writers, such as J.B. Priestley, suggested that it could still be found by travelling to ever more remote parts of England. With the rise in car ownership and the increase in leisure time for most classes of society, tourists set out in search of the ‘real’ England, accompanied by their guidebooks.Footnote 53 This in turn brought the danger that such places would be trampled by tourists and thus lose their attraction. In English Journey (1934), Priestley wrote of two ‘unspoiled’ villages in the Cotswolds and reflected that he was ‘probably hastening their ruin now by writing this. Cursed be the hands that defile them.’Footnote 54 The increase in tourism, in turn, spurred the creation of organisations such as the Council for the Preservation of Rural England (1926), which sought to delimit where city dwellers could venture. Eventually, the state became involved, and passed a number of acts, including the National Parks and Access to Countryside Act (1947) and the Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty Act (1949), that exercised greater control over rural areas while creating tourist attractions such as perfectly preserved country houses and picturesque villages.Footnote 55 Channelling the rhetoric of their travel guides, tourists would then reject the spaces designed for them as inauthentic and would seek out supposedly unspoiled places further away from the metropolitan areas.Footnote 56 As a result, the ‘real’ England seemed to recede further and further into the distance.
Calls to recapture village life often have a reactionary ring – echoing the lament for a lost rural idyll that Raymond Williams suggests marks each generation.Footnote 57 But, if the interwar writers wished to guard the village against destruction, in the post-war period, the village began to be repositioned as a modern space, a space not of nostalgia, but of the future.Footnote 58 Inspired by the Scott Report – a 1942 government paper on rural land use – planner Thomas Sharp drafted what became England’s key post-war rural-planning text, The Anatomy of the Village (1946), in which he promoted the village as the building block of English society.Footnote 59 He attributed the presumably happy social life of the village to its mixture of people of different occupations, and sought to show how this mixture could be created through planned development. But Sharp did not necessarily see rural planning as a way to return to the imagined ideal village; instead, he saw the remodelled village of the post-war period as the blueprint for the community of the future.
The Aldeburgh Festival lies at the fault line of these different ideas of village community. Although organisers did not explicitly link their Festival to the post-war search for village life, their promotion of community at Aldeburgh owes much to it. Not only did Festival organisers invite prominent tourist writers – including Norman Scarfe and John Betjeman – to speak about rural architecture and life, but they also benefited from increased road and rail access to the countryside in attracting visitors to their new Festival.Footnote 60 The rhetoric of the Festival organisers, too, shows their awareness and ability to capitalise upon the tourist ideals of the 1940s, as seen in their emphasis on the social interaction available in Aldeburgh. As chairwoman Fidelity Cranbrook put it, ‘it’s almost like a large house party’.Footnote 61 In planning the Festival, organisers sought to create a sense of a close-knit community through enforced contact and shared experiences. For the tourists who came, the Festival seemed to offer much-desired access to a supposedly lost, organic society at Aldeburgh, but with a caveat: it could only become manifest if the visitors participated in its making.
Touring Aldeburgh, Suffolk
Britten’s choice of Aldeburgh for the Festival has commonly been understood as a personal one: the town became Britten’s home soon after his return to England in 1942. But it also provided the ideal location for the exhibition of exactly the sort of village community so sought after by tourists in the post-war period. Of course, Aldeburgh was a town, not a village, at least according to the Scott Report, which defined a village as having no more than 1,500 inhabitants.Footnote 62 Sharp, though, suggested that distinctions between villages and towns should not be based on size, but rather on the character of the place, with simplicity being the key criterion.Footnote 63 In this respect, Aldeburgh was a perfect fit. Its compact layout meant that everyone came together on High Street. The town’s location also appealed to tourists: about a two and a half hour drive from London, Aldeburgh was far enough away to seem remote, but not so far that a trip could not be managed for a short visit. Moreover, Aldeburgh’s location meant that it had not experienced the far-reaching industrial development, along with the attendant suburbia, that had been common in the East Midlands and Home Counties surrounding London.Footnote 64 As a result, guide books tended to promote East Anglia as a place where visitors could access a ‘living version of a common past’.Footnote 65
In his speech accepting the Freedom of the Borough of Aldeburgh (1962), Britten seemed well aware of Aldeburgh’s attractions to visitors – and their desire to see it remained unchanged: ‘what a nice town it is! Festival visitors are always charmed by it, by its old buildings, though like me they are nervous about how its new developments will look in 50 years time.’Footnote 66 And he was not alone in his concerns about changes to the landscape: as towns and villages emerged out of the aftermath of the Second World War, they contended with lingering British military outposts and the resumption of suburban construction.Footnote 67 Despite the construction of an airbase nearby, however, organisers presented Aldeburgh as untouched. In the 1950 programme, for example, Gathorne-Hardy boasted that ‘a genius of the place has preserved alive the old character of the town’.Footnote 68 At the same time, though, it was of utmost importance that Aldeburgh should not be considered one of the ‘picturesque’ villages that had been emptied of a sense of life. Gathorne-Hardy stressed that Aldeburgh was not ‘an arty old sterilised village, where the natives themselves walk about like foreigners’.Footnote 69 While Britten, in trying to entice a friend to visit the Festival, wrote, ‘Aldeburgh is a sweet little town & the beach & sea full of fishing-business – not at all “quaint” though’.Footnote 70 The Festival organisers’ promotion of the realness – that is, non-tourist – status of Aldeburgh, however, only increased the promise of an ‘authentic’ experience for Festival visitors.
If Aldeburgh’s location was ideal, its population was more complicated. Like many villages and towns during the first half of the twentieth century, Aldeburgh had experienced an influx of city men and retirees who occupied the seaside cottages, pushing many of the old fishing families to the outskirts of town.Footnote 71 Festival manager William Servaes disparaged those who had moved from the city to Aldeburgh:
The mix of people is wrong. There are masses of retired chairmen, generals, admirals. They’re the top level. Then there’s the ‘real’ Aldeburgh, which you don’t normally meet – local working-people. They provide daily help and other services for the top level, who move in from Woking or wherever.Footnote 72
Aldeburgh also served a tourist population of sailors and golfers who came for the summer months.Footnote 73 And some members of the Aldeburgh community worried that the Festival – with its ‘long-haired types’ – would deter these ‘nice people’ from coming.Footnote 74 To remedy this situation, Britten recruited a committee of local, well-connected and often titled members – including Cranbrook – who held public meetings and sought to involve year-round residents in the day-to-day running of the Festival.Footnote 75 Nonetheless, tensions continued between Britten and those nicknamed by Cranbrook the ‘antibodies’.
This divide can be seen in the defensive tone of much of the press in the 1940s and 1950s that sought to deny that the Festival was imposing itself on an old-fashioned English community.Footnote 76 What got lost in the hubbub, meanwhile, was the fact that Aldeburgh itself was not – and had never been – a single homogenous community. Indeed, it had a long history of welcoming tourists, and as early as 1819, a book on Aldeburgh declared:
In the wish to accommodate their visitors, they have used every exertion to render the place in all its aspects worthy of public patronage and support … It is sincerely hoped, therefore, that the rising fame of Aldborough, and its encreasing [sic] attractions, will amply reward the laudable spirit that has been exerted for the accommodation of its numerous visitors.Footnote 77
The visitor was therefore hardly a foreign concept, but part of the fabric of the town. And yet, besides the comments by Servaes and a talk by Forster,Footnote 78 official Festival reports rarely referred to these outsiders, and instead reinforced the fantasy of the undiscovered local community.
This position also shaped the rhetoric of the written materials of the Festival. Instead of issuing individual programmes for each concert, a single all-inclusive programme book was created.Footnote 79 But, unlike the programmes for other festivals, the Aldeburgh Festival programme also served as the travel guide, as Eric Crozier described in his recollection of putting together the very first one:
People didn’t know Aldeburgh at that time, only those who brought families on summer holidays or came to play golf or to sail knew it well. A lot of other people didn’t know it. And I think there was an opportunity, not only to present the programmes in one volume, but also to have really important, informed articles about the district and about the town and also to have the best photographs I could find.Footnote 80
This first book featured pictures of Suffolk by photographer Bill Brandt, reproductions of Constable’s landscape paintings, two histories of Aldeburgh, an essay on the origins of the Festival, and a foreword by the president of the English Opera Group, the Earl of Harewood.Footnote 81 Such features became standard in the programmes that followed, not only fortifying the sense of the unified event, but also guiding the visitor’s experience of the place in a way similar to that of the Shell Guides. For example, in the 1950 programme, Gathorne-Hardy provided a step-by-step tour of the town:
Look at Aldeburgh; walk down the broad High Street, or along the sea front; climb up the town steps; don’t trouble about particular buildings yet. Red brick, primrose and grey stucco – with these quietly mingle less attractive houses, of a sort that we wouldn’t pick out for praising.Footnote 82
Gathorne-Hardy also revels in the absence of important buildings and boasts of the place’s picturesque nature: ‘Aldeburgh isn’t a museum-piece; there are, it is happily true, a few buildings worth special attention, but Baedeker would never have used a star here.’Footnote 83 As a result, he actually reinforced the twin ideals of obscurity and discovery that governed tourism in the English countryside in the first half of the twentieth century. Aldeburgh was significant precisely because it was not an important heritage site, which was supposed to make it immune to the effects of tourist overexposure and mummification.
Despite this concern with the side effects of preservation, however, early programmes often did cast Aldeburgh as a kind of time capsule. In an essay on ‘Suffolk in the Middle Ages’ in the 1960 programme, Scarfe claimed: ‘There is nothing hopelessly foreign about the later Middle Ages if you live in Suffolk; and that may be thought rather a compliment than an insult. Once one knows where to look, it is fairly easy to strip off the accretions of five centuries.’Footnote 84 And once the Festival was over, the programme served as a way to travel back to the Festival time itself. As Sweeting recalled, the committee believed the programme ‘would be a souvenir worth reading in situ […] as well as a reminder of past pleasures’.Footnote 85 Like mementos acquired on holiday, the programme book preserved and packaged the Festival experience so that visitors could put it in their pockets and bring it home.
The total experience
The approach to the programme book was indicative of the all-encompassing nature of the Aldeburgh Festival. Sweeting wrote that the ultimate aim was to create ‘the exhilaration of having participated in a total experience’.Footnote 86 As long as the Festival lasted, art was to be part of daily life. In this respect, it can be connected to earlier attempts to bring together rural life and art, as seen in the interwar proliferation of village drama societies under the auspices of Adult Education Committees or the appointment of ‘music travellers’ to promote Rural Music Schools under CEMA.Footnote 87 But, whereas these endeavours fostered amateur performance, participation at the Aldeburgh Festival was a more holistic affair. Crozier recalled how they sought to create a ‘formula’, ‘so that people could come, stay at a hotel or in digs, go to a lecture, to exhibitions, attend a concert, besides all the pleasure of being in Aldeburgh, walking by the sea, meeting friends’.Footnote 88 Whether intentional or not, the effect was the cultivation of a slower pace, similar to that celebrated in contemporary accounts of village life.Footnote 89 To encourage walks, Festival organisers provided a hand-drawn map of the seashore; in later years, they also organised boat excursions and church crawls. These were complemented by informational lectures which tended to reinforce the visitor perspective; presumably, the year-round residents did not need to attend the 1958 symposium on ‘The Herring’ which advised that ‘the audience need not think they are going to be worried with more than answers to questions so often asked by those who make a fleeting visit to a fishing port and feel there is nobody of whom they can enquire’.Footnote 90 Similarly, lectures on coastal erosion (1949), and the Aldeburgh defences (1961) – the latter was in response to the flooding of the seafront in January 1953 – resonated directly with visitors’ anxieties about threats to rural England while promoting their investment in the area.Footnote 91
At the same time, these activities encouraged audience participants to see the present as a matter of the past, much like the programme books.Footnote 92 For example, in 1954, the Festival put on a ‘Crabbe crawl’ to celebrate the bi-centenary of the poet behind the story of Peter Grimes. It began with a luncheon and then took visitors through important biographical sites before ending with a reading of his works.Footnote 93 As Barbara Kirschenblatt-Gimblett has argued, such tours conflate physical remoteness and temporal distance in encouraging visitors to ‘travel to actual destinations to experience virtual places’.Footnote 94 And yet, the necessity of the event simply pointed to the distance between then and now, as the physical site could not inspire such a sense of history.Footnote 95 This temporal gap was also showcased when the Festival was featured as a provincial Arts Centre during the 1951 Festival of Britain. As Sweeting recalled:
As the 1951 Festival unfolded, from the opening peal of bells to the final concert, the impression seemed to be clear that we had emphasized the “Englishness” of our local habitation and our name in the arts and their exponents. The bells proclaimed it … It is a common saying that English church bells are the most nostalgic sound to home-sick expatriates, and they certainly touched hearts at home as well as abroad, and this special contribution was made by the people of Aldeburgh.Footnote 96
The bells here were meant to connect a utopian vision of Englishness to the specific locality of Aldeburgh itself. But they could also be read as part of a defensive gesture: the Aldeburgh Festival was only four years old, but it was to stand for a longer tradition of English music, art and life.
As the Festival grew, it saw a widening of international offerings; the 1954 Festival offered a concert of musique concrète, for instance, and Poulenc visited in 1956.Footnote 97 It would seem, then, that the Festival threatened to become the very sort of diffuse affair that Sweeting and Harewood had disparaged in the late 1940s. But Festival organisers – such as Imogen Holst, who became a joint artistic director in 1956 – maintained that ‘the Festival still does what it originally set out to do: provide something that belongs by right to Aldeburgh more than to anywhere else’.Footnote 98 In keeping with the outward orientation of localism, what was seen to belong to Aldeburgh was not just what was contained within its limits, but also what was brought there by its visitors. And this included the Festival’s audience itself. In a 1952 article speculating about exporting the Festival, Harewood wrote that they would need to bring ‘the audience, which is by now almost as consistent a part of the Festival as the people who live in Aldeburgh all the year round. Yes, unquestionably the audience would have to go too.’Footnote 99 One of the main attractions of the Aldeburgh Festival for attendees, then, became their very own presence there.
The audience
The organisers’ aims to make the Festival all-encompassing placed great demands on this audience akin to those at Bayreuth.Footnote 100 Matthew Wilson Smith has described how the journey to Bayreuth helped to promote the sense of temporal disjuncture between the urban present and the rural, mythic ideal, and although Britten was keen to stress that Aldeburgh was ‘not a festival like Bayreuth’, there are nevertheless similarities.Footnote 101 Visitors, for example, often spoke of their trips to Aldeburgh in similar terms, as ‘pilgrimages’.Footnote 102 Indeed, it seems likely that Britten had Aldeburgh in mind when, in his Aspen Award speech, he stated: ‘Music demands more from a listener than simply the possession of a tape-machine or a transistor radio. It demands some preparation, some effort, a journey to a special place, saving up for a ticket, some homework on the programme perhaps, some clarification of the ears and sharpening of the instincts.’Footnote 103 The visitor could not rush through the journey, but was increasingly slowed down as she approached, whether arriving by road or rail. At the same time, as with Bayreuth, this journey to a remote location was made possible by modern technological advancements.Footnote 104 For instance, many of the documentaries about Aldeburgh from the 1960s showed performers flying in from Russia, choirs coming by boat from the continent, and audience members coming from America to attend the Festival.Footnote 105
Once they arrived, many felt they had entered the fictional worlds of Britten’s operas. In this sense, to have an opera as a fictional representation of the ‘real’ also helped disguise the fact that there was no real.Footnote 106 On the one hand, the Festival organisers took advantage of the resulting doubling of perspectives; for instance, during the first Festival, they put on an ‘Exhibition of Stage Models and Designs for Peter Grimes’ in the Moot Hall, ‘just where Crabbe had imagined his Tale’.Footnote 107 The 1956 programme also blended fiction and reality in providing directions to the Festival club: ‘The same directions that Crabbe gave for finding it are as appropriate now, as then … High in the street, o’erlooking all the place, The rampant Lion shows his kingly face.’Footnote 108 On the other hand, unlike at other theme parks, organisers claimed not to seek to create a fantasy world to be superimposed upon the Festival site. While Festival organisers made small adjustments to the town, their main conceit was that of guiding the visitor through her own discovery of the area.Footnote 109 In a prefatory note to the 1958 programme, expedition organiser Ronald Blythe wrote: ‘In suggesting the following excursions it is not our desire to instruct the Festival visitor in any didactic way but merely to signpost some paths to the pleasures of a little-known county.’Footnote 110 But such claims were belied by the excursions on offer: the activities chosen reinforced the very aspects of village life seen in Britten’s operas.
Take, for instance, an exhibition called ‘Fishing Off Aldeburgh’, put on at the Wentworth Hotel for the 1951 Festival. Lobster traps, nets and even gravel from the beach helped to transform a hotel room into the setting for a demonstration of the fisherman’s way of life. In Dean MacCannell’s terms, such exhibitions serve as a common tool in staging authenticity by providing access to the ‘back areas’ of a tourist location.Footnote 111 In their aim to feature what Sweeting called a ‘typical and special component of Aldeburgh’,Footnote 112 the exhibition actually made a spectacle out of what was meant to be daily life, thereby reinforcing the boundaries between those who viewed and those who were on display.Footnote 113 What is more, as in many other seaside communities in the 1950s, fishing was a dying industry. Although the beach remained populated with fishing huts and boats, the majority of people made their living in the service industry, catering to tourists and retirees.Footnote 114 Of course, the decline of an industry did not mean that it became any less important to the history (and identity) of the town.Footnote 115 But the unintended effect of exhibitions such as ‘Fishing Off Aldeburgh’ was to highlight the disparities between the past and the present. In comparing modern-day Aldeburgh to such representations, one journalist remarked: ‘Sit on the Aldeburgh shingle under Billy Burrell’s black fishing hut, [and you will notice a] jolly gang of apprentices who look more like pop stars than potential victims of Peter Grimes.’Footnote 116 Ultimately, the programming of such ‘naturalness’ revealed the constructed nature of the Festival.
This production of the world of Aldeburgh did not escape the attention of one editorial cartoonist, who depicted a group of fishermen alongside the bow-tie crowd. Underneath was written: ‘Ar, in the old days a man could break into a bit of a shanty any time without someone a’bobbin’ up to arrange it for ’m’ (Fig. 1).Footnote 117 Even the fishermen as represented here are figments of the cartoonist’s imagination – and the idea of fishermen spontaneously breaking out into song may owe something to the supposedly natural, yet very orchestrated, singing of the round ‘Old Joe has gone fishing’ in Peter Grimes. But, as the separation of the groups in the caricature made clear, the community sought out by visitors to the Aldeburgh Festival was not so much with the fishermen as with one another, as Sweeting described:
Even with full houses, there was a comparatively small number of people who could afford the Festival and it became quickly apparent that they would soon get to know each other. They made plans to meet at other performances and the atmosphere began to resemble that of a large family party. This went beyond the actual Festival period. As they came in on the last day to say goodbye to us in the office, they were also arranging to meet each other – ‘See you next year.’Footnote 118
‘Horner Goes Beachcombing’, Originally published in the News Chronicle on 16 June 1951. Credit: Daily Mail.
From the very beginnings of the Festival, this visitor community was actively cultivated; organisers provided both a Festival ball and club where people could ‘collect and discuss the Festival’.Footnote 119 Most importantly, the centralised nature of the Festival allowed audience members to interact with the performers. When Festival attendees spoke of the special community at Aldeburgh, they focused on ‘the proximity of audience and artists and performers’; for audience member Paul Fincham, this ‘added a rare element of intensity to the shared experiences’.Footnote 120 Performances in Jubilee Hall forced performers and audience members nose to nose in a cosy situation: there was no orchestra pit, so audience and performers were on the same level.Footnote 121 This shared space extended to the streets of Aldeburgh as well, as John Amis recalled:
It could take a couple of hours to walk down as far as the Moot Hall because of the people you met. Goodness, there’s Michael Tippett talking to Stravinsky biographer, Eric Walter White and his wife Dodo, and there’s Jonathan Griffin – that will take a pleasant half-hour of chat … let’s have a coffee, then on to have a respectful word with E.M. Forster who is seated, as often, on a bench outside the White Lion.Footnote 122
Aldeburgh therefore seemed not only haunted by the ghosts of artists past – like Crabbe – but also populated by those people responsible for the fictional worlds that audience members sought to inhabit in the present. Indeed, this proximity of listener, performer and composer provided the ‘holy triangle’ Britten believed necessary for a true musical experience to take place.Footnote 123 In a Radio Times article, record producer John Culshaw claimed that this sense of community was what marked the Festival as unique:
If the Aldeburgh Festival ever decided to adopt a motto, it might well be the words of Britten’s friend, E.M. Forster: only connect … The barrier between the audience and the performer, and therefore between the audience and the music, has been abolished in Aldeburgh.Footnote 124
For Sweeting, this community was both the reason for and the product of the Festival: ‘Between events, the audience strolled up and down the High Street, the hotels were full, there was a general buzz of excitement and friendly encounters – all good ingredients of a Festival, with a focus and a raison d’être’.Footnote 125 But this Festival community was also a temporary and imported one: at the end of June, everyone would dissipate. By bringing people together for a week and a half of events, the Festival created the ideal community for musical performance, but then suggested that this community was the basis for the Festival.
Aldeburgh and Albert Herring
Opera was central to the creation of the Festival community. Even when the Festival encountered financial roadblocks in the early 1950s, Pears and Britten refused to cut opera – the most expensive item – from the budget.Footnote 126 This decision may be attributed to the fact that the Festival provided a home for the English Opera Group (EOG). Though a travelling group, its tours of England in 1946 and 1947 had not been very successful, with sparse audiences and theatres reluctant to put on new works.Footnote 127 When appearing at the Festival, by contrast, the EOG was guaranteed a full house and, most importantly, an audience of regular patrons. The consistency with which attendees returned to the Aldeburgh Festival enabled the opera company to mould the expectations and responses of audience members. Limited resources and space dictated the choice of operas performed but, as a result, the Festival featured frequent performances of Britten’s chamber operas, especially Albert Herring and Little Sweep.Footnote 128 While the selection of these operas may have been due to necessity, the repeat performances also modelled the village community for the audience at the Festival.
Festival organisers made few comments about their intentions in scheduling Albert Herring, but the appropriateness was thought to be self-evident; as Sweeting succinctly put it, ‘Albert Herring needs no comment about its suitability’.Footnote 129 Although premiered at Glyndebourne on 20 June 1947, Festival proponents associated Albert Herring with Aldeburgh, as seen in Gathorne-Hardy’s 1953 programme note:
For veterans and addicts of the Aldeburgh Festival, it is good news that we are to have Albert Herring again. This, we maintain, is our opera, and, speaking for myself, I find it difficult to believe that the subtleties and beauties of it can ever be truly felt except at an Aldeburgh performance.Footnote 130
Albert Herring tells of the resurrection of an old May Queen Festival that honours a girl for her purity. The village committee, however, cannot find an appropriate female candidate and instead awards the title and money to Albert Herring, a simple young man who works in a shop run by his domineering mother. After the festivities – during which the recipient is thoroughly humiliated and drinks spiked lemonade – Albert takes the prize money and runs off for a night on the town. The next morning, just as the whole village believes him to be dead, he reappears and horrifies the committee with tales of brawling and drunkenness. The opera concludes with Albert back in the shop; it remains a matter of scholarly debate as to whether he has escaped or reassumed the bonds of his old position in the village.Footnote 131
It is perhaps unsurprising that Festival organisers and supporters did not clamour to align their community with the sadistic Borough populace of Peter Grimes, but rather sought out similarities with the comic treatment of the village community in Albert Herring. With its subject of putting on a festival, Albert Herring made an immediate connection with Aldeburgh; indeed, a yearly carnival is staged there in which a king and queen are elected.Footnote 132Albert Herring was also ready for performance at the first Festival, and so gained the reputation of being part of the original Aldeburgh experience. Most importantly, the setting of Albert Herring was meant to mirror village life in Suffolk. Although the opera was based on a French story set in Normandy, Crozier and Britten transplanted the tale to the fictional village of Loxford and made mention of specific places, events and people in Suffolk: the libretto refers to the village of Wickham Market, dances at Jubilee Hall, and photo-taking at Felixstowe pier. Furthermore, the Festival mounted the same production for over a decade, which borrowed some scenic details from Aldeburgh itself, and later versions adhered closely to the original staging.Footnote 133 As one audience member recollected: ‘The audience had never seen anything like it before; the scenery so like the High Street of the day – every other shop a greengrocer – and all this in the intimacy of the old Jubilee Hall.’Footnote 134
As a result, many scholars have assumed that the composer and librettist tapped into some genuine representation of village life, even if it could no longer be readily found in twentieth-century England. For example, Philip Brett claimed that ‘the kind of society it [the opera] portrays was still thriving in 1947 and can yet be recollected if not recognised in England’.Footnote 135 Not only does this narrative ignore the persistent gap between any stage representation and the real place, but it also fails to consider how the use of local elements in stage spaces then transformed people’s experiences of the places represented. Chowrimootoo more plausibly suggests that ‘in reveling in the details of its local setting, Albert Herring appears to have skated close to the edge of what George Orwell called “the nostalgia of place names”’. He also argues that ‘by reveling in its own conventionality on one hand and disavowing it on the other, it [Albert Herring] offered its audiences both the pleasures of the low and the prestige of the high’.Footnote 136
Such pleasures were particularly pronounced in the Aldeburgh performances, as the audience could giggle at the names of places and people that they recognised, all the while supporting the high art enterprise that was the Festival. Crozier, in particular, delighted at how performers and visitors would gasp when they saw signposts and sights in Suffolk that were familiar to them from the opera.Footnote 137 These associations were also propagated in the programme books.Footnote 138 Joan Cross, for example, who had played the original Lady Billows at Glyndebourne, compared the parade scene to fête Albert with the procession welcoming the Queen to the 1967 Festival:
Marching down the street past the Church to the Old Moot Hall on the seafront came the Boys’ Brigade, the Scouts, the Cubs and the Brownies. A fine posse of police was in charge and the entire junior population of the small town was assembled on the kerbs along the royal route. There were steel barriers to keep back the crowds! Flags and bunting waved in a chilly wind of a rather grey day. All this seemed to me to be Albert Herring enlarged and I reflected that the splendid show of efficiency on her home ground could only have met with Lady Billows’s complete approval!Footnote 139
By making these types of allusions, Cross encouraged the audience to see Aldeburgh – and the Festival community – as an extension of the world of the stage.
Repeat performances of the opera also helped to efface the temporal disjuncture between the present and the past. As Chowrimootoo has recently noted, many of Britten’s works, including this one, can be best understood as heirs to the popular pageant play tradition of the 1930s and early 1940s, which recounted the history of a specific place in a series of episodes and often brought together local performers and accomplished professionals to create a communal celebration of a native heritage.Footnote 140 In addition, Jed Esty has argued that such plays performed local history to promote the idea that change had not actually occurred in a given place.Footnote 141 By privileging the rural over the historical – or even in opposition to the historical – it sought to enact the village community in the moment of performance. Similarly, in its repeated performances at the Aldeburgh Festival, Albert Herring took on the function of the pageant play and transformed insiders’ views of the town. For instance, as Holst reported in 1949, performances in the Jubilee Hall encouraged audience members to feel as though the events were taking place in their midst:
Some of the members of the audience may have begun by complaining of the hardness of the chairs, but they soon forgot their complaints when they found themselves right inside the opera, sitting in the very hall where Sid, the butcher’s shop hand, had danced with his girl Nancy, from the baker’s. The singers must have found it exceedingly difficult to fit themselves into the few available inches of space in the wings, but they also forgot their discomfort as soon as they got on the stage, where the overcrowding in Mrs. Herring’s greengrocery was thoroughly appropriate.Footnote 142
The performance of Albert Herring at the Aldeburgh Festival thus served as one in which the opera’s real-life nuances were thought to be best understood – where the audience members could gain access to the world of the opera itself.
Perhaps unwittingly, Albert Herring conditioned audience members to adopt certain community-making behaviours outside of the performance venue that shaped the Festival format for years to follow. In Act II, for instance, the opera features a parade of all the villagers in the celebration of the May King. Shortly afterwards, during the interval, the audience would exit the hall and themselves form a parade along the seaside in their fancy dress, unconsciously mimicking the procession they had just seen onstage. This excursion was necessitated by the lack of lobby space at Jubilee Hall, but the promenade along the seaside quickly became part of the presentation of the Aldeburgh community. Refreshments were also served at the Copper Jug or at Britten’s house on Crag Path.Footnote 143 Forster argued that it was natural, and ‘exempt from the drilled smartness of Glyndebourne’, but as years went on, it became as much a construction of naturalness as Glyndebourne picnicking.Footnote 144 One Aldeburgh resident remembered that as a child she would be ‘sitting on the sea wall to look at Mr Britten’s house guests from Crag House, walking to the Jubilee Hall for opera evening [sic]. Lovely taffeta dresses, rustling skirts, men in dinner-jackets, all very grand, not seen by us before.’Footnote 145
As the Festival developed, it also began to mimic activities depicted in Albert Herring. The opera is one of few in the repertory that features both the rehearsal and the performance of a song: ‘Glory to our new May King’, sung by the Loxford schoolchildren, led by their teacher, Miss Wordsworth, for Albert’s coronation in Act II, scene 1 (Ex. 1).Footnote 146 No such song appears in the original Maupassant story, but its addition allowed Britten to showcase the role of community music-making at festivals. Marked ‘Majestic’, it is a parody of an imperial theme, accompanied by bells, with a square melodic line, and with frequent repetition of the words ‘hail’ and ‘majesty’.
Act II, scene 1: performance of ‘Glory to our New May King’.
Continued
Continued
Continued
Indeed, the other characters’ reactions to the performance might seem tongue-in-cheek, as they could stand in for comments on Britten’s own music at the Festival. Most humorously, Lady Billows quips: ‘Quite nicely sung, but rather modern, wasn’t it?’ It is tempting to dismiss the rehearsal of the song as mere indulgence on Britten’s part, as it allowed him to portray the late entrances, distracted choristers and other frustrations encountered by conductors for comedic effect (Ex. 2).
Excerpt from rehearsal of ‘Glory to our New May King’.
But beyond these humorous touches, the performance of a simple song by children also foreshadows the similar activities at the Festival itself. In fact, audience members had already been invited to participate at the very first Aldeburgh Festival as they sang two hymns in Britten’s cantata, Saint Nicolas.Footnote 147 In her review of the concert, Holst argued that the communal act of singing set the Aldeburgh Festival apart from others: ‘Joining in the two hymns, visitors are aware that they are visitors no longer and that the Aldeburgh Festival has become their festival’.Footnote 148 Much like the immersive education in Suffolk history and places, this musical participation helped to transform visitors into insiders, the ultimate tourist goal.
In 1949, such immersion became still easier, when the Festival premiered an educational stage work written specifically by Britten for Aldeburgh: Let’s Make an Opera!, the latter half of which contained the short opera Little Sweep. Footnote 149 Like Albert Herring, Little Sweep was based in nineteenth-century Suffolk; this time it was set in Iken Hall, modelled on the Great Glenham house of the Gathorne-Hardy family. Once again, Britten and Crozier made references to real people and places, using the names of the Gathorne-Hardy children for their main characters. The plot concerned a young chimney sweep and the children who help him escape his abusive boss, and also contained four songs to be sung by the audience, who function as the opera’s chorus. Here, the audience members were pushed further: no longer in the role of the congregation singing familiar tunes, they had to learn and rehearse the songs during the performance. And as in Albert Herring, Little Sweep was calculated to encourage audience members to make connections between onstage and offstage worlds. The music incorporated references to local phenomena, for instance, as in the ‘Night Song’, which featured different bird songs from around Suffolk. Holst suggested that these tunes were so convincing that ‘for weeks after hearing the opera the ordinary chaffinch in the garden sounds as if it is singing quotations from The Little Sweep’.Footnote 150 Sweeting went so far as to claim that ‘snatches of songs could be heard in the street and in the pubs throughout the Festival – like the tunes of Verdi’s operas, whistled in the streets so it is said’.Footnote 151 Such accounts of how the opera’s music permeated the visitors’ time in Aldeburgh reinforced the idea of the ‘total experience’ of the Festival in which the relationship between the environment and the artwork was supposed to be seamless. Indeed, Sweeting recalled that the scheduling of Little Sweep the year after Let’s Make an Opera! put the audience in the mindset of performing: ‘Let’s Make an Opera! had been the great talking point of the preceding Festival and seemed to have created an audience prepared, indeed anxious, to play its part.’Footnote 152 Of course, in writing Albert Herring, Britten could not have known that he was providing a precursor to the audience participation that he would later require at the Aldeburgh Festival. But in the continued scheduling of performances of Albert Herring, audience members had a template for community-based singing and music-making.Footnote 153
All these performances of the local community, of course, underline the very impossibility of the community’s construction. Or, put another way, the use of performance to produce community revealed the void that necessitated such a performance in the first place. Festival supporters may have believed that opera performances simply reflected the local community, but these performances, in turn, served to expose the limits of this vision of community. They revealed how the village existed as an imagined community, one that tapped into the desire for what had never been.
The Aldeburgh Festival today
‘Britten lives here’: with this slogan the 2013 centenary Festival put forward a programme featuring Peter Grimes-themed tours of the town, an Albert Herring feast and a walking trail past Britten’s favourite haunts. These activities were designed so that the visitor felt as though she had stepped into the real environment of Peter Grimes. Like the pageant play, Grimes on the Beach staged historical – and in this case, fictional – events to collapse time, so that the audience of the present could supposedly inhabit the places of the past. The past portrayed here, however, was not the early nineteenth century of Crabbe’s story, but rather the time of Britten. This was made clear when a roaring Second World War spitfire soared over the audience’s heads before the opera had even begun – a reminder that Britten had written Grimes during wartime. Nor was this sense of time travel confined to this production. Throughout its exhibitions and performances, the Festival sought to turn the clock back to the years when Britten lived in Aldeburgh. For instance, the composer’s house and gardens were restored to the way they were in the mid-1960s, ‘as though Britten and Pears had just stepped out for a moment’.Footnote 154 As in the early years of the Festival, then, the celebration of Aldeburgh blended the past and the present, the fictional and the real.
In order to convince the audience to believe in the fishermen and other characters, the 2013 production – and the entire Britten-themed Festival – had to make the audience into the sought-after community. When I saw Grimes on the Beach on 21 June 2013 – the third and last night of its run – the beach was packed with people thrilled to be part of the event. The audience members and singers shared the experience of shivering in the wind and cold evening temperatures. The production also incorporated moments which broke the fourth wall: before the title character even makes his appearance in Act I, for example, he could be seen in our own setting, lumbering down the beach that the audience had strolled down only an hour earlier. In the course of the opera, the mob also spilled off onto the beach and shone their torches into the audience, as though trying to find Grimes among the huddled spectators.
Such immersive effects were even more pronounced in the companion tour of ‘The Borough’, created by the Punchdrunk company.Footnote 155 This individualised experience was commissioned by the Festival committee to complement the performances of Grimes on the beach and on stage. And whereas the fishing exhibition of 1951 purported to provide access to back areas by setting up a hotel room as a fishing hut, ‘The Borough’ remade the whole of Aldeburgh into the set of Grimes. When I took the tour in June, I was outfitted with headphones and a portable music player. I was then instructed to sit in a chair on the beach and wait for my guide to pick me up. But no person appeared. Instead, over the headphones I heard footsteps on the shingle and then a man’s voice, which told me to begin walking at the same pace as his own footsteps. Like the programme books, the voice guided me around the Aldeburgh of the past, pointing out significant places and people. By visiting landmarks, such as Moot Hall where an announcement of Grimes’s upcoming trial was posted, and a fishing hut to show the hard life of a fisherman, I was supposed to be transported into the world of Peter Grimes.
Like earlier Festivals, what the tour foreclosed was just as important as what it revealed: keeping with the timeframe of the festival, it avoided the commercial High Street that would betray the fact that Aldeburgh was now in the twenty-first century. But ‘The Borough’ took it one step further: the audience member did not simply feel as though she had stepped inside the set of the opera, but, rather, a whole opera had been staged around her. To this end, the tour company employed a number of actors to play the parts of the characters of Peter Grimes. In a hotel room that had been transformed into a nineteenth-century bedroom, for instance, I was instructed to hide in a closet while watching a weeping Ellen Orford mend a blue sweater; later, when I visited a shed, a drunken Boles threatened to accost me. As William Drew remarked, these actors helped to blur the line between ‘real life’ and the theatrical experience: ‘As it goes on, it becomes hard to differentiate which passers-by are in it and which aren’t. Often they won’t approach you unless you look at them or if you go off course. This induces a particularly paranoid state.’Footnote 156 The result is that the visitor takes on the perspective of the persecuted Peter Grimes. And upon reaching a desolate hut on the edge of town, the voice on the headphones revealed that I was indeed Grimes. After I entered the hut, a boy in a torn sweater – presumably the apprentice – took me by the hand, gave me a sack and a piece of cork as a lucky charm, and guided me to a corner of the hut to stand under hanging fishing nets. Suddenly, the hidden door behind me opened and I fell backwards into the marshes where an angry mob had been lying in wait. One member of the mob violently confronted me, ripped my bag out of my hand, and pointed me to a path out of the marshes as the ‘Great Bear’ aria played on the headphones. In one respect, the ‘Borough’ simply takes the ‘immersive’ community experience of the Festival to its terrifying conclusion; if visitors can be made to feel part of a community, they can also feel ostracised and rejected by this same community. Thus, the Borough represents an inversion of the community ethos perpetuated at the Festival. At the same time, the ‘Borough’ experience and Grimes on the Beach both relied heavily on technology – particularly the immersive potential of pre-recorded sound and the insularity of headphones – to evoke a sense of place for the visitor. In trying to bring the visitor closer to the ‘real’ community behind the facade of the tourist location that is Aldeburgh, these productions drew upon the very mechanised relationship to the world that the Festival experience was supposed to counteract. Thus, the 2013 Festival explicitly – yet inadvertently – thematised how modern forces are used to construct the ‘real’ world of the opera for the visitor.
Of course, Aldeburgh is not the only place where such fictions can be found. Such experiences are now part and parcel of many tourist attractions. In his famous diatribe against the preservationist movement, Robert Hewison argued that the post-war proliferation of sites such as National Trust stately homes and national parks had resulted in a kind of ‘Heritage England’ in which all had been reduced to a pseudo-theme park.Footnote 157 Similarly, the operatic underpinnings of the Aldeburgh Festival forces us to confront the artifice of opera, as it seeks to replicate a reality that does not, in fact, exist. The 2013 Festival may have advertised Aldeburgh as the ‘place where his [Britten’s] vision comes alive’, but visiting the place during the Festival revealed that this vision could only be found in fictional accounts – that is, in Peter Grimes or Albert Herring themselves.
Britten’s Festival, then, capitalised upon the ideal of the ‘untouched’ local community promoted by tourism, but, in doing so, it created a new kind of locality, one that was cosmopolitan and temporary. It was a space that had both the illusion of reality and the certainty of the engineered. Although cloaked in the tourist rhetoric of exploration of the unspoiled, what the Festival unwittingly offered was a discovery of the known – or at least what was believed to be the familiar world of the English village as portrayed in the operas. And the Festival experience, in turn, made performances of Britten’s village-themed operas seem more real since they reinforced the vision of Aldeburgh that audience members experienced. In 1952, Andrew Porter of the New Statesman and Nation reflected upon this change:
Probably Aldeburgh was as delightful a place twenty years ago, before it acquired a local genius. But as Constable altered for ever the aspect of Salisbury Cathedral, so we hear now Crabbe’s ‘murmur of the ocean flood, With not a sound beside,’ through different ears.Footnote 158
It was this idea of hearing differently that the Festival encouraged in staging the local community at Aldeburgh; a practice that continues to this day.
