Queen's musician in attack on Britten

The debate over whether the composer Benjamin Britten should be honoured with a statue in his Suffolk home town was re-ignited yesterday, when Malcolm Williamson, Master of the Queen's Music, came out against the idea. "In my opinion, Britten's music is ephemeral. It will not last," he said.

Dr Williamson spoke out after it emerged on Wednesday that Aldeburgh town council had rejected a district council suggestion that a statue of Britten be erected in the town where he is buried and lived for 30 years.

"Elgar - a much greater composer - had to wait 50 years after his death for a statue to be put up to him in his home town of Worcester. I think it is eminently suitable to consider the amount to which Britten is already commemorated in Aldeburgh," he said.

Dr Williamson added that the composer's reputation was likely to come under increasing fire, after having been protected for the two decades since his death by admirers such as Donald Mitchell, Britten's editor at Faber & Faber.

Humphrey Carpenter reported some of the truth in his 1992 biography of Britten, which revealed that he kissed and cuddled boy singers - but only platonically.

"A huge amount of literature is coming out now, since Ben's death," Dr Williamson said. "The homosexual, paedophilia thing is coming to fore and there's going to be a terrific swing against him. That's nothing to me - he was a friend, although an ambidextrous friend: a backstabber, too."

"More and more facts are coming out about Britten and his dirty tricks and the fact that he spent the war in America to escape, while other people, like Michael Tippett, who is a great composer and still with us, stayed here and went to prison as a conscientious objector."

Britten had fallen out with the novelist E M Forster after taking up his suggestion that he turn Crabbe's poem Peter Grimes into an opera, he added. "The emphasis was all on wicked men and small boys. He was furious and never spoke to Ben for years."

The composer of Noye's Flood and Billy Budd had enormous charm, he went on. "But he was curiously schizophrenic. I knew him for 40 years. He was very good to me and exceedingly cruel ...

"He nominated me to be Master of the Queen's music because he knew he was dying and couldn't do it himself. I have great gratitude for him, but he was terribly double, as the French would say.

"There is a backlash. People are coming out, like me, and suddenly getting the courage to speak. It's now 20 years since Ben died and I did the BBC TV obituaries and the World Service obituaries of him, and I had to steel my teeth not to say anything out of order."