The New Elizabethans: Sixty Portraits of our Age. James Naughtie

in The Prince and the Showgirl in 1957, and then came Osborne’s second play, The Entertainer, at the Royal Court Theatre in London.

      Olivier was a picture of despair on stage, revealing Archie Rice as a broken, empty vessel brought face to face with his all-consuming failure. So by the sixties he was taking on new roles, full of energy, still capable of dominating in Shakespeare but turning to Tom Stoppard too, in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.

      And the National Theatre was back. The Old Vic would house the company until a new theatre was built, but, even without a proper home, it would exist. Olivier was in charge and throughout the sixties, as the Royal Shakespeare Company, founded in 1960, was beginning to develop a personality and style, he was powering ahead in parallel, leading a company that seemed to deserve a home. By the time it was built, on the South Bank in London in the early seventies, the board had decided that it shouldn’t be Olivier who would lead it in its new home, but Peter Hall, who’d built up the RSC. Time had moved on. But the biggest theatre at the National would be the Olivier, which it still is.

      By the time it opened, Olivier’s career was past its zenith. He took on too many second-rate films for the money, and in the seventies became, quite quickly, an actor who stirred great memories rather than gave fine performances. With Joan Plowright, his third wife, he represented a kind of aristocracy of the theatre that was losing its power, and gradually he slipped from view. As he put it in a interview with Newsweek in 1979, perhaps half disingenuous and half self-pitying: ‘I can’t disguise myself any more. I’m afraid the audience know me too well. They know every shade of the voice, every trick, every goddam movement I can make.’

      But when he died, in 1989 at the age of 82 after a long, wasting illness that sapped his strength, the memories came pouring back, etched for ever in the minds of those who had enjoyed him on stage and shared his story. His actor friend Anthony Quayle, when he heard of Olivier’s death, said that it marked ‘the closing of a very great book’.

Benjamin Britten

      Benjamin Britten was a musician who was English in every way – in social habit and in manner, by religion and upbringing, in his sensibilities and outlook – who spoke to the whole world as an outsider, with a voice that was his alone. The Russian giant Dmitri Shostakovich, the most celebrated symphonist of the twentieth century, once said to him: ‘You great composer; I little composer.’

      He was original in chamber music and opera, in choral arrangement and song, in orchestral works of every kind. He had a gift for writing for children’s voices that was unique, and he was a pianist of brilliance, producing what was once described as the shimmer of sound like the shudder of electricity. He was the complete musician, whose character was stamped on his work and gleamed through every note. But Leonard Bernstein noted that his power came from being ‘at odds with the world’, and Britten himself said of music: ‘It has the beauty of loneliness, of pain; of strength and freedom; the beauty of disappointment and never-satisfied love.’

      As a description of himself, it is a good start; like his confession that two of the things he cherished most were night and silence. Behind the confidence of a musician of all the talents lay a vulnerability that never left him. Music had always offered him thrilling excitement, but solace too. In the sixties he recalled from schooldays ‘the vocal and energetic surprise with which the other small boys caught me reading orchestral scores in bed’. His emotions were released by music, and soothed by it, from an early age. He wrote a symphony when he was 12 and at 14 started taking lessons from the composer Frank Bridge; by the time he graduated from the Royal College of Music he was writing for the orchestra and the musical stage with astonishing verve. In his twenties he was commissioned to cooperate with the poet W.H. Auden on a Post Office film. The result was Night Mail, and Auden told him that he was ‘the white hope of music’.

      Soon afterwards came war, and the experience caused Britten to walk through fire and, more than any other event, shaped the musician who would be the unquestioned master of the era that followed, to the day of his death in December 1976, at the age of 63. If he had suspected as a boy that he was destined to be an outsider, the war confirmed it. He couldn’t put aside his pacifist convictions, and decided to remain in the United States, where he’d travelled with his friend Peter Pears and joined the circle dominated by Auden and Christopher Isherwood. Though he was still in his twenties, he said: ‘The whole of my life has been devoted to creation, and I cannot take part in acts of destruction.’ For two and a half years of the war he stayed away from home, and by the time he came back his life had taken another decisive turn: his relationship with Pears had solidified and they would be companions for the rest of his life, proudly and defiantly (in a country where homosexuality remained illegal until Britten was in his fifties). He was excused military service because of his contribution to cultural life and threw himself into work.

      Those years marked the start of his transformation into a master composer. On the Swedish freighter that carried him and Pears back across the Atlantic he wrote his plangent unaccompanied Hymn to St Cecilia (he was born on St Cecilia’s Day) and when he landed in Liverpool he set about having a libretto written for an opera that was taking shape in his mind, inspired by reading while in America George Crabbe’s poem ‘The Village’, which took him back to his childhood on the Suffolk coast. The result was Peter Grimes, for many people the greatest opera written in English in the twentieth century.

      The picture of dark loneliness in the fisherman Grimes is unforgettable, picturing a solitude that is impenetrable and shivering with violence, confronted as he is by the claustrophobic power that a community can summon up when in the grip of fear. The opera had its first night at Sadler’s Wells in London a month after the end of the war in Europe in 1945, and although Britten spent the whole three hours stalking around the back of the stalls in agitation it was an immediate success. There’s a famous story of a conductor on a Number 38 bus shouting to passengers as it turned into Rosebery Avenue: ‘Any more for Peter Grimes, the sadistic fisherman?’

      It was the opera that lifted Britten to a new level, and over the next fifteen years he produced a string of them that would be performed around the world – Billy Budd, The Turn of the Screw and A Midsummer Night’s Dream the most celebrated – and then in 1962 came another landmark, a commission that brought together his feeling for the voice and some of his deepest passions. He was asked to write a requiem to be performed at the rededication of Coventry Cathedral, bombed in the Second World War. He had the idea of bringing together the Latin mass and the poetry of Wilfred Owen, who had died in the Great War, and the result was a War Requiem that spoke with a directness that much contemporary classical music of the time was avoiding, as if it might somehow compromise the art. The recording of that first performance sold 200,000 copies in that year, and Britten’s juxtaposition of private grief and suffering with the public business of war made an indelible mark. The German baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, who sang in the première, said of it: ‘I was completely undone. I did not know where to hide my face. Dead friends and past suffering arose in my mind.’ The poet Edith Sitwell, a friend of Britten, said she felt as if her tears were turning to blood.

      The recording was issued just after the Cuban missile crisis, during which the British were asked to contemplate the possibility of a nuclear holocaust in a confrontation over which they had no control, and for Britten the public appetite for serious music was an affirmation of what he had always believed. Popular culture was about to change, with the liberating torrent of rock and pop about to be unleashed, but he was able to believe that his place as the inheritor of the classical tradition, which he turned to his own purposes, was secure.

      By now he and Pears were settled at the Red House at Aldeburgh, on a lonely stretch of the Suffolk shore, a place of pebbled beaches and reed beds, flat farmland and sturdy Norman churches. There they had founded in the forties the Aldeburgh Festival, which became a lodestar for composers and performers from around the world. Visitors came to the Red House as to a shrine: Shostakovich and Bernstein, the world’s great singers and instrumentalists, the conductors who were the guardians of the European tradition. Britten would play with them, and write for