Middlebrow Modernism: Benjamin Britten’s Use of Topoi in the Three Suites for Solo Cello

Abstract

While the broad appeal of Benjamin Britten’s music did wonders for his popularity among the listening public, his often-eclectic fusion of “high” modernist elements and more familiar “populist” elements made his work an easy target for the twentieth century’s aesthetic purists. For Theodor Adorno, Britten was emblematic of a generation of composers who had “adjusted to mass culture by means of calculated feeble-mindedness”. Similarly, commentators such as Clement Greenberg derided Britten’s works as (albeit highly skilful) counterfeits of authentic modernist writing. In his 2018 monograph Middlebrow Modernism, Christopher Chowrimootoo interrogated the role that these accusations of middlebrow inauthenticity played in the early reception of Britten’s operas. However, the aspects of Britten’s musical style that might have been at the root of these critiques have not been examined in detail. This study proposes that it was in fact Britten’s use of codified musical patterns, termed topoi by Leonard G. Ratner, that led critics and theorists alike to dismiss Britten’s music as irredeemably middlebrow. Topic theory, the field of enquiry that derives from Ratner’s work, has been most fruitfully applied to eighteenth-century music, but a range of recent studies have shown that vestiges of topoi are quite common in nineteenth- and twentieth-century music. Continuing from Raymond Monelle’s observation that “Britten was peculiarly sensitive to topical reference”, this study offers analyses of various movements from Britten’s Three Suites for Solo Cello (Opp. 72, 80, and 87), which were written in the 1960s and 1970s. My work shows that these Suites are rich with topical material, and I analyse the various ways that Britten has incorporated these topical patterns into his own stylistic idiom. The rhetoric of high modernism has tended to emphasise the creative autonomy and isolation of twentieth-century composers, and musicology’s Austro-German origins have meant that this historiographical notion has become entrenched. By examining Britten’s use of topics, my work foregrounds the ways that twentieth-century composers in fact often drew on the musical style of previous generations, and thus resists the historiographical trope of dramatic stylistic rupture in the first decades of the twentieth century.