Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Miscellaneous Frontmatter
- List of Illustrations
- 1 My mind beats on
- 2 A thirst, a leaping, wild unrest, a deep desire
- 3 Should I give up the fruitless struggle with the word?
- 4 So be it
- 5 What lies in wait for me here?
- 6 My head is heavy, my eyelids ache
- 7 I must go elsewhere, I must find a clearer sky, a fresher air
- 8 How much better to live, not words but beauty, to exist in it, and of it
- 9 The power of beauty sets me free
- 10 Yet I am driven on
- 11 O voluptuous days, O the joy I suffer
- 12 So the moments pass
- 13 And now, Phaedrus, I will go
- No epilogue, I pray you, for your play needs no excuse
- Acknowledgements
- Index
- Miscellaneous Endmatter
7 - I must go elsewhere, I must find a clearer sky, a fresher air
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 June 2023
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Miscellaneous Frontmatter
- List of Illustrations
- 1 My mind beats on
- 2 A thirst, a leaping, wild unrest, a deep desire
- 3 Should I give up the fruitless struggle with the word?
- 4 So be it
- 5 What lies in wait for me here?
- 6 My head is heavy, my eyelids ache
- 7 I must go elsewhere, I must find a clearer sky, a fresher air
- 8 How much better to live, not words but beauty, to exist in it, and of it
- 9 The power of beauty sets me free
- 10 Yet I am driven on
- 11 O voluptuous days, O the joy I suffer
- 12 So the moments pass
- 13 And now, Phaedrus, I will go
- No epilogue, I pray you, for your play needs no excuse
- Acknowledgements
- Index
- Miscellaneous Endmatter
Summary
Steuart didn't have to spend much longer at Oxford.
In his first term back, the English Opera Group paid a visit to the Oxford Playhouse, bringing The Turn of the Screw and Albert Herring, just nine months after Steuart's own performances in the theatre. He wrote to Britten:
Have you any idea which nights you will be conducting when the English Opera Group visits Oxford next month?
I am sorry to trouble you at such a hectic time but I would be awfully grateful to know. The advance publicity gives no information on this point and I am most anxious not to book for a performance which, however admirably directed, is bound to lack the authentic touch!
Is there any chance of seeing you when you come? I hope so.
Britten conducted two performances of The Turn of the Screw and Steuart went to them both.
I saw Ben after the first performance and told him I was also coming to the second, which was going to have a slightly different cast, including April Cantelo as the Governess.
I said, ‘Can I take you out for a cup of tea before the show?’
‘I’m afraid I can’t,’ he said. ‘I have a rehearsal before the show.’
‘A rehearsal? But how can it possibly get any better?’
‘Oh, it can always be better!’
Albert Herring was conducted by Bryan Balkwill. ‘But not very well,’ according to Steuart. In a letter to Pears, Britten described Balkwill as ‘pretty dreary’.
At the start of 1965, Steuart conducted Menotti's The Consul for the Opera Club. The evening after the last performance, he played the Second Brahms Piano Concerto, and two months later he stopped work on his thesis and left Oxford. Thomas Armstrong [Principal of the Royal Academy of Music, 1955–68] had offered him a professorship back at the Academy, an offer made even more tempting when John Streets, the Head of Opera, asked him to conduct some productions in his department. And he secured some work at Glyndebourne, where his mother had worked with Britten in the 1940s, as a répétiteur and music assistant.
I left for Glyndebourne in the summer term. My college rather approved of someone actually going out and getting a job, rather than sponging off the university.
I’m not naturally very ambitious.
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- Information
- Knowing Britten , pp. 90 - 103Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2021