The year is 1937, and at a farmhouse in a village on the edge of the Chilterns named Fawley Bottom, two of the greatest artists of the 20th century have retired to the piano. It is August bank holiday weekend and as “rows – and more rows” detonate around them, Wystan Hugh Auden picks out the melody to Stormy Weather with a single finger, while Benjamin Britten improvises a masterful accompaniment.
Auden, Britten and others including the poet Stephen Spender had been summoned to the home of the artist John Piper for the Group Theatre congress. It is an occasion that, like so many air-clearing exercises for artistic collectives before and since, no doubt seemed very important to its participants at the time, but was actually a storm in a teacup. The only reason it’s remembered at all is because of what each of these men did next. (What Britten actually did next, he wrote in his diary, was “smoke two cigarettes … with disastrous consequences in the morning. Never again.”)
