"How a child's mind works": assessing the "value" of Britten's juvenilia.

...but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

--1 Corinthians 13:11

A thematic catalog of Benjamin Britten's complete works is currently being prepared at the Britten-Pears Library (BPL) in Aldeburgh. (1) The project is being funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC), and represents a collaboration between the BPL and the School of Music at the University of East Anglia. (2) It is intended that, as well as achieving printed form for Britten's centenary in 2013, the catalog will be available as a searchable, fully-integrated online resource; as such, it will effectively supersede the catalog of published works edited by Paul Banks. (3) The thematic catalog aims to document all manuscript sources as well as providing incipits, full bibliographic details, other related material such as performance history, photographs, and -- in the online version -- audio incipits, digitized manuscripts, and links to a live performance calendar. It also aims to provide, for the first time, a complete listing of the unpublished material held in the BPL archive and elsewhere. This article explores the issues encountered so far in exploring and attempting to classify this material, most of which falls under the broad heading of juvenilia.

Britten's juvenilia comprises an unusually large number of manuscripts. As Michael Berkeley writes, "Clearly his was a fecundity of Mozartian proportions. There are ... altogether between 300 and 400 scores"; (4) Imogen Holst reported "Stacks and stacks of manuscripts written while he was at prep school: immense full scores with beautifully clear writing .... "; (5) and Britten himself said in 1946 "... I wrote symphony after symphony, song after song...." (6) Yet it is perhaps not appreciated quite how large the collection is. Berkeley underestimates it by about 700, for there are approximately 1,000 individual manuscript sources constitution some 800 or so distinct works, all composed by Britten between the ages of six and eighteen.

Preparing any catalog of works requires the compiler to address a huge number of questions, ranging from the biographical and bibliographical (or even philosophical) through more practical questions of space, time, and money; but two questions in particular have become key with respect to the organization of this huge collection of juvenilia: how much of it can we realistically include in this catalog and how much of it will be of significant scholarly value? The first question, a practical one, can be dealt with quickly: we can realistically include all of the juvenilia. This is because, for the online catalog at any rate, we are not constrained by the size of the finished product or by the cost of printing. (7) The online resource is almost infinitely expandable, and thus we will be able to present a complete picture of Britten's compositional life from 1919 to 1976. Such commitment to completeness, however--and given the vast number of early works compared to the later compositions--does mean that the catalog may appear somewhat "bottom-heavy" with what might seem an absurdly disproportionate emphasis on a body of works written even before, say, A Hymn to the Virgin for SATB double chorus (1930, rev. 1934, currently residing at number 717 on the list). All of this clearly necessitates the second question, one of a more philosophical nature: how much of this material will be of significant scholarly value?

A few writers have tackled the question of the "value" of what Berkeley calls "bottom-drawer" manuscripts: childhood works, or material unpublished for other reasons. Berkeley's article addresses in particular the responsibilities held by the trustees of artists' estates which may extend either to protecting the posthumous reputation of the artist in question, (8) or to allowing unpublished material to be made public. In the case of Britten's unpublished pieces, Berkeley points out that the composer "hoarded" his early works "and did not specifically ban their publication--but neither did he push for it." (9) In "Major Minors," an article that (oddly) barely mentions Britten, Barry Cooper addresses in more detail the question of the "value" of childhood compositions, pointing out that as a "genre" of sorts, childhood works are more or less ignored in musicology and tend to find recognition only as biographical color. (10) I shall return to these points shortly, but it might be useful first of all to turn to Britten himself for a possible answer.

Britten took his childhood compositions with him wherever he moved. David Spenser, the first Harry in Albert Herring, recalls helping Britten carry "piles of manuscripts" down the stairs at the Old Mill in Snape when Britten was moving house in 1947. (11) In 1955 the manuscripts were evidently with him: "they are still lying in an old cupboard to this day--string quartets (six of them); twelve piano sonatas; dozens of songs; sonatas for violin ...,"etc. (12) Later, in the 1960s, one of Rosamund Strode's first duties as Britten's music assistant was to help sort and date some of the manuscripts in an attempt to order them chronologically--an enormous task which was only partially and roughly complete. (13) Despite Britten's own often self-deprecating remarks ("there are some quite nice little tunes--very derivative of course as you might imagine ... "), (14) these "piles of manuscripts" were scrupulously retained.