Benjamin Britten
Edward Benjamin Britten, Baron Britten OM CH (22 November 1913 – 4 December 1976, aged 63) was an English composer, conductor, and pianist. He was a central figure of 20th-century British music, with a range of works including opera, other vocal music, orchestral and chamber pieces. His best-known works include the opera Peter Grimes (1945), the War Requiem (1962) and the orchestral showpiece The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra (1945).
"Britten" redirects here. For other uses, see Britten (disambiguation).
Born in Lowestoft, Suffolk, the son of a dentist, Britten showed talent from an early age. He studied at the Royal College of Music in London and privately with the composer Frank Bridge. Britten first came to public attention with the a cappella choral work A Boy Was Born in 1934. With the premiere of Peter Grimes in 1945, he leapt to international fame. Over the next 28 years, he wrote 14 more operas, establishing himself as one of the leading 20th-century composers in the genre. In addition to large-scale operas for Sadler's Wells and Covent Garden, he wrote chamber operas for small forces, suitable for performance in venues of modest size. Among the best known of these is The Turn of the Screw (1954). Recurring themes in his operas include the struggle of an outsider against a hostile society and the corruption of innocence.
Britten's other works range from orchestral to choral, solo vocal, chamber and instrumental as well as film music. He took a great interest in writing music for children and amateur performers, including the opera Noye's Fludde, a Missa Brevis, and the song collection Friday Afternoons. He often composed with particular performers in mind. His most frequent and important muse was his personal and professional partner, the tenor Peter Pears; others included Kathleen Ferrier, Jennifer Vyvyan, Janet Baker, Dennis Brain, Julian Bream, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Osian Ellis and Mstislav Rostropovich. Britten was a celebrated pianist and conductor, performing many of his own works in concert and on record. He also performed and recorded works by others, such as Bach's Brandenburg Concertos, Mozart symphonies, and song cycles by Schubert and Schumann.
Together with Pears and the librettist and producer Eric Crozier, Britten founded the annual Aldeburgh Festival in 1948, and he was responsible for the creation of Snape Maltings concert hall in 1967. In his last year, he was the first composer to be given a life peerage.
Education[edit]
Lowestoft[edit]
When he was seven Britten was sent to a dame school, run by the Misses Astle. The younger sister, Ethel, gave him piano lessons; in later life he said that he remained grateful for the excellence of her teaching.[17] The following year he moved on to a prep school, South Lodge, Lowestoft, as a day boy.[18] The headmaster, Thomas Sewell, was an old-fashioned disciplinarian; the young Britten was outraged at the severe corporal punishments frequently handed out, and later he said that his lifelong pacifism probably had its roots in his reaction to the regime at the school.[19] He himself rarely fell foul of Sewell, a mathematician, in which subject Britten was a star pupil. The school had no musical tradition, and Britten continued to study the piano with Ethel Astle. From the age of ten he took viola lessons from a friend of his mother, Audrey Alston, who had been a professional player before her marriage.[20] In his spare time he composed prolifically. When his Simple Symphony, based on these juvenilia, was recorded in 1956, Britten wrote this pen-portrait of his young self for the sleeve note:
Career[edit]
Early professional life[edit]
In February 1935, at Bridge's instigation, Britten was invited to a job interview by the BBC's director of music Adrian Boult and his assistant Edward Clark.[42] Britten was not enthusiastic about the prospect of working full-time in the BBC music department and was relieved when what came out of the interview was an invitation to write the score for a documentary film, The King's Stamp, directed by Alberto Cavalcanti for the GPO Film Unit.[43]
Pianist and conductor[edit]
Britten, though a reluctant conductor and a nervous pianist, was greatly sought after in both capacities.[230] The piano accompanist Gerald Moore wrote in his memoirs about playing at all the main music festivals except for Aldeburgh, because "as the presiding genius there is the greatest accompanist in the world, my services are not needed."[231][n 21] Britten's recital partnership with Pears was his best-known collaboration, but he also accompanied Kathleen Ferrier, Rostropovich, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, James Bowman and John Shirley-Quirk, among others.[233] Though usually too nervous to play piano solos, Britten often performed piano duets with Clifford Curzon or Richter, and chamber music with the Amadeus Quartet.[233] The composers whose works, other than his own, he most often played were Mozart and Schubert; the latter, in Murray Perahia's view, was Britten's greatest idol.[234] As a boy and young man, Britten had intensely admired Brahms, but his admiration waned to nothing, and Brahms seldom featured in his repertory.[n 22]
Singers and players admired Britten's conducting, and David Webster rated it highly enough to offer him the musical directorship of the Covent Garden Opera in 1952.[n 23] Britten declined; he was not confident of his ability as a conductor and was reluctant to spend too much time performing rather than composing.[238] As a conductor, Britten's repertory included Purcell, Bach, Haydn, Mozart and Schubert, and occasional less characteristic choices including Schumann's Scenes from Goethe's Faust; Elgar's The Dream of Gerontius and Introduction and Allegro; Holst's Egdon Heath and short pieces by Percy Grainger.[233][239]
Recordings[edit]
Britten, like Elgar and Walton before him, was signed up by a major British recording company,[n 24] and performed a considerable proportion of his output on disc. For the Decca Record Company he made some monaural records in the 1940s and 1950s, followed, with the enthusiastic support of the Decca producer John Culshaw, by numerous stereophonic versions of his works.[233] Culshaw wrote, "The happiest hours I have spent in any studio were with Ben, for the basic reason that it did not seem that we were trying to make records or video tapes; we were just trying to make music."[242][n 25]
In May 1943 Britten made his debut in the Decca studios, accompanying Sophie Wyss in five of his arrangements of French folk songs. The following January he and Pears recorded together, in Britten's arrangements of British folk songs, and the following day, in duet with Curzon he recorded his Introduction and Rondo alla burlesca and Mazurka elegiaca. In May 1944 he conducted the Boyd Neel string orchestra, Dennis Brain and Pears in the first recording of the Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings, which has frequently been reissued, most recently on CD.[233]
Britten's first operatic recording was The Turn of the Screw, made in January 1955 with the original English Opera Group forces. In 1957 he conducted The Prince of the Pagodas in an early stereo recording, supervised by Culshaw.[233] Decca's first major commercial success with Britten came the following year, with Peter Grimes, which has, at 2013, never been out of the catalogues since its first release.[233] From 1958 Britten conducted Decca recordings of many of his operas and vocal and orchestral works, including the Nocturne (1959), the Spring Symphony (1960) and the War Requiem (1963).[233] The last sold in unexpectedly large numbers for a classical set, and thereafter Decca unstintingly made resources available to Culshaw and his successors for Britten recordings.[244] Sets followed of Albert Herring (1964), the Sinfonia da Requiem (1964), Curlew River (1965), A Midsummer Night's Dream (1966), The Burning Fiery Furnace (1967), Billy Budd (1967) and many of the other major works.[233] In 2013, to mark the anniversary of Britten's birth, Decca released a set of 65 CDs and one DVD, Benjamin Britten – Complete Works.[n 26] Most of the recordings were from Decca's back catalogue, but in the interests of comprehensiveness a substantial number of tracks were licensed from 20 other companies including EMI, Virgin Classics, Naxos, Warner and NMC.[245]
As a pianist and conductor in other composers' music, Britten made many recordings for Decca. Among his studio collaborations with Pears are sets of Schubert's Winterreise and Die schöne Müllerin, Schumann's Dichterliebe, and songs by Haydn, Mozart, Bridge, Ireland, Holst, Tippett and Richard Rodney Bennett.[233] Other soloists whom Britten accompanied on record were Ferrier, Rostropovich and Vishnevskaya. As a conductor he recorded a wide range of composers, from Purcell to Grainger. Among his best-known Decca recordings are Purcell's The Fairy-Queen, Bach's Brandenburg Concertos, Cantata 151, Cantata 102 and St John Passion, Elgar's The Dream of Gerontius and Mozart's last two symphonies.[233]