How a trip to Japan widened Benjamin Britten’s horizons

In the 1950s a five-month world trip, focused on Asia, must have been an ambitious undertaking. Aside from the cost, imagine organising an itinerary that was to cross Europe and take in Turkey, India, Singapore, Indonesia, Hong Kong, Japan and Sri Lanka. Of course, the composer Benjamin Britten and his partner, the tenor Peter Pears, were no ordinary travellers. For them, this was a working holiday with recitals in major cities along the way, and its wheels were oiled by assistance from the British Council, embassies and music enthusiasts.

An extensive travel diary, found after Pears’s death, gives a plentiful account of the trip, except for one leg of the journey, left in scanty note form. That is the period they spent in Japan, which is a shame as it includes an event that would have a big impact on Britten’s work.

On February 11 1956, the travellers attended a performance of the Noh play Sumidagawa at Suidōbashi Noh Theatre in Tokyo. This ancient art form, with its slow, stylised ritual, can be challenging, but Britten was entranced. Although eight years were to elapse before his music was to reveal any tangible influence, what emerged was one of the major works of his later years — Curlew River, the first of three “church parables”, not carbon copies of Noh, but a personal reworking of the genre.

It is not often that an opportunity comes around to see Sumidagawa and Curlew River together, but that is one of the main attractions of this summer’s Aldeburgh Festival in Suffolk in the east of England. The Noh play will be performed by a visiting company of Japanese artists, followed three days later by a new production of Curlew River, marking 60 years since the work’s premiere. Curlew River will subsequently be made into a television film for BBC broadcast.

It is a mark of Britten’s open-mindedness that he was keen to explore other cultures more deeply than most. Other creative artists in the west had been intrigued by Noh — Yeats wrote several plays influenced by the earliest English translations of Noh and there are elements to be found in the work of Brecht and Weill — but Britten was one of the first who had actually seen it being performed in Japan. We know what struck him because he summarised his feelings later: “The economy of style, the intense slowness of the action . . . the mixture of chanting, speech and singing which, with the three instruments, made up the strange music — it all offered a totally new operatic experience.”

Alan Cummings, head of the department of East Asian languages and cultures at Soas in London, says that by the time of Britten’s visit to Japan, the canon of Noh plays, including Sumidagawa, was more or less set in stone. “Today there are about 250 plays in the repertoire and all but one of those were written between the 14th and 16th centuries,” says Cummings. “People do still write new Noh plays, so there are Noh plays about Ophelia and Elvis Presley, and they will get performed two or three times while the author or collaborator remains alive, but then the piece tends to die with them. A lot of Japanese theatre is like that. You have a couple of centuries of innovation, but after the peak, it becomes more about preservation.”

Sumidagawa tells of a distraught woman who goes in search of her lost child, only to learn from a ferryman that he died a year before. In Curlew River, Britten reimagined the tale after the manner of a medieval mystery play and transported the story far from Japan to the Suffolk fenland around Aldeburgh, where he lived. Crucially, he also substituted Christianity for Buddhism.

“Buddhism is the cultural context within which Noh exists,” says Cummings. “It is also where Noh had its beginnings, because the earliest troupes were connected with temples and shrines and performed at festivals.” What Britten adds to Sumidagawa, says Cummings, “is the consolation that mother and child will be reunited in death — the Christian angle”.

With this and its music that seems to emanate from some mysterious “other” world, Curlew River can be a special experience. Time hangs in the air, the monks chant, the flute calls from afar and everywhere the plaintive song of the curlew casts its spell, as if echoing from the Suffolk marshes.

Aldeburgh has chosen the venues for the two performances carefully. Sumidagawa will be in Snape Maltings, the festival’s main concert hall, whereas Curlew River will be in Blythburgh church, where the angels carved on the ceiling will look down on Britten’s “parable for church performance”.

This year marks the 75th Aldeburgh Festival, co-founded by Britten in 1948, and the last to be headed by Roger Wright, chief executive of Britten Pears Arts, after 10 years at the helm. As formerly important music festivals such as Cheltenham, Dartington and Bath face reduced circumstances, Aldeburgh has never looked more significant, building an extensive campus, training young musicians and working in the community. Britten Pears Arts has recently announced a £13.4mn capital programme over three years to further its aims.

Alongside Curlew River, the festival is featuring other works influenced by Asian musical traditions. Two by Britten — the ballet The Prince of the Pagodas and the Suite from the opera Death in Venice — trace their origins back to the music Britten heard in Bali on that tour, while Holst’s haunting one-act opera Savitri looks to Indian myth.

In this, as in so much else, Aldeburgh is remaining true to its founders’ ideals. Wright points out that Britten was always respectful of other musical traditions: “In the early Aldeburgh festivals he featured a Hungarian puppet company, Indian music and other non-western cultures. With our wider cultural horizons today we can have that breadth of experience without difficulty,” but this was uncommon then. In the 1950s Britten was even vice-president of the Asian Music Circle. How ahead of his time he was.

The 75th Aldeburgh Festival runs June 7-23, brittenpearsarts.org