Benjamin Britten's Operas (Outlines)

Book by Wilcox, Michael

The popular modern composer (1913-1976) of operas from Turn of the Screw to Death in Venice is given a title in the series of "Outlines" on the lives of gay and lesbian creators. Unlike a previous series volume, Peter Adam's solid memoir of his friend the painter David Hockney, this book seems all too lightweight, given the vast Britten bibliography already available. As its British title, Benjamin Britten's Operas, suggests, this is an opera-by-opera look at the composer's oeuvre with personal asides, mostly having to do with his sexuality. But here, Wilcox, a playwright and librettist, is almost totally dependent on other authors like Britten biographer Humphrey Carpenter and Christopher Headington, who wrote about Britten's lover and lifelong companion, Peter Pears. Whether Britten was truly in a lifelong sexual relationship with Pears or used Pears in part as a mask for his true desire, fulfilled or not, for pre-pubescent boys, remains a mystery. Britten's anxiety as a homosexual, at a time when consenting sex between adult males was illegal in England, may have been worsened if indeed he was a sexually active pederast. A more truly searching and conclusive text, examining all the repercussions of Britten's personal life and his works, would need more original research and testimonies than this book offers. Readers would do better with the titles by Carpenter and Donald Mitchell or with David Herbert's valuable compilation of essays on the operas and their librettos, The Operas of Benjamin Britten.

Copyright 1997 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

These two titles are the first offering in the new "Outlines" series, which promises to bring out small, affordably priced biographies of gay artists, writers, actors, and composers. Probably the publisher's location in Britain led the editors to choose Benjamin Britten as one of the first entries, a choice unlikely to make the book as successful on this side of the Atlantic. To make matters worse, in this slim volume TV and screenwriter Wilcox (Gay Plays Five, Heinemann, 1995) finds most of the operas wanting in many ways, and 18 exceedingly brief essays do little but catalog hidden gay subtext within each piece?allusions that would have been created by the librettist in most cases. Art historian and filmmaker Adam's work on the English painter David Hockney is by far the more successful of the two. The sensual, the libidinal, the homosexual have always infused Hockney's art, and the author clearly, almost lovingly, opens up the artist's personal life to explain how it came to inhabit his professional body of work. Hockney chose friends, lovers, and family members for his pastel-colored portraits and poolside paintings that forever transformed Western art's previous idealized and allegorical image of the male nude to a more honest and natural one, from the heroic to the erotic. Not meant to provide in-depth biography or academic analysis, "Outlines" is a promising new series whose second offering, on Hockney, is recommended for most collections.?Jeffery Ingram, Newport P.L., Ore.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.