Chapter 15 - Benjamin Britten and Folk Song

Summary

Commentators on Britten tend to view him as unreceptive to folk song; or if mildly sympathetic, as treating it in isolation from the mainstream of the English Folk Revival. While he steered clear of the revivalist ‘hard line’ represented by Ralph Vaughan Williams and Cecil Sharp, he nonetheless engaged creatively with an ‘alternative’ revival embodied by Percy Grainger and the song collectors Frank Kidson and Lucy Broadwood. This chapter considers Britten’s folk-song arrangements and essays to demonstrate his debt to this ‘forgotten’ tradition of folk-song research. His editorial handling of folk song is examined in light of its theories, while his personal links to Violet Alford, E. J. Moeran, Francesca Allinson, William Plomer, and W. H. Auden – figures who expressed similarly capacious views of ‘folk process’ – are discussed. The emerging ‘heritage movement’ of the 1930s and 1940s, whereby English cultural ‘insularity’ became a source of national celebration and artistic focus, is also assessed. These influences suggest an unsuspected role for folk song in Britten’s construction of a cosmopolitan ‘Englishness’ rooted in the local and the particular.