Travel Diaries, 1936-1978

Peter Pears's reputation as a gifted and distinctive tenor is grounded in his interpretations of Benjamin Britten's works; their partnership of thirty years significantly shaped and defined musical developments not only in England but on a broader plane. Throughout their busy professional lives they travelled extensively, on concert tours and on holiday, finding fresh stimulus in change. Pears's twelve travel diaries, brought together for the first time in this volume, record much of that travel and provide valuable contextual material on the musical development of both Pears and Britten.

At the height of their careers, tenor Peter Pears and composer Benjamin Britten traveled the globe, both to give performances and for pleasure. Pears, not a diarist in his daily life, had the habit of keeping journals while he was away--though even those were irregular. His diaries, most from the mid-1950s to the late '70s, are sometimes sketchy, even cryptic, but have been supplemented by Philip Reed's excellent editing and by letters and other material. The sections that were previously published (often in the Aldeburgh Festival's annual program book) have the virtue of a full narrative flow, and Pears reveals himself as an alert if unremarkable observer of food, art, flora, fauna, and people.

The couple's Asian tour in 1955-56 was deeply significant for Britten's subsequent output, especially his Church Parables. Pears describes their attendance at a performance (by a Japanese school group) of the Noh play Sumidagawa--the basis, eight years later, of Britten's first parable, Curlew River. The experience was thrilling to them both. Pears's comments are less worthwhile for their insight into the composer's thinking than for the sensation they give of being in the room at a moment of inspiration. The diaries are filled with celebrated friends and the aura that attended two famous musicians (traveling from Moscow to Armenia, a planeload of people bursts into applause when it is announced that Britten and Pears are among the passengers). The final segments were written when Pears made his Metropolitan Opera debut (at 64) in Death in Venice, and when he returned four years later, after Britten's death, to appear in Billy Budd.

This volume, essentially a footnote to studies on Britten and Pears, is one of the Aldeburgh Studies in Music series, which comprises a usefully broad range of titles examining Britten's techniques and influences. --David Olivenbaum