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Benjamin Britten: the story on HearLore | HearLore
Benjamin Britten
Edward Benjamin Britten was born on the 22nd of November 1913, the feast day of Saint Cecilia, the patron saint of music, in the fishing port of Lowestoft on the east coast of England. He was the youngest of four children born to Robert Victor Britten, a dentist who had abandoned his youthful ambition to become a farmer, and Edith Rhoda, a talented amateur musician who served as secretary of the Lowestoft Musical Society. When Britten was three months old, he contracted pneumonia and nearly died, leaving him with a damaged heart that doctors warned would prevent him from leading a normal life. He recovered more fully than expected, growing into a keen tennis player and cricketer, but his true destiny lay in the music that filled his home. His mother gave him his first piano lessons and notation training, and by the age of five, he was making his first attempts at composition. Unlike his sisters, who inherited their father's indifference to music, or his brother Robert, who was interested only in ragtime, young Britten was an outstandingly musical child. His father refused to have a gramophone or radio in the house, ensuring that Britten was one of the last composers brought up on exclusively live music. This isolation from recorded sound forced him to listen with an intensity that would define his orchestral voice, as he heard the sea, the church bells, and the voices of his community as the raw material of his art.
The Teacher Who Knocked Him Sideways
At the age of eleven, Britten attended a symphony concert in Norwich where he heard Frank Bridge's orchestral poem The Sea, conducted by the composer himself. It was the first substantial piece of modern music he had ever encountered, and in his own phrase, he was knocked sideways by it. Bridge, a friend of Britten's viola teacher Audrey Alston, was impressed with the boy and invited him to London to take lessons. Robert Britten, supported by the headmaster of his school, doubted the wisdom of pursuing a composing career, but a compromise was reached: the boy would attend his public school while making regular day-trips to London to study composition with Bridge and piano with his colleague Harold Samuel. Bridge impressed on Britten the importance of scrupulous attention to the technical craft of composing and the maxim that you should find yourself and be true to what you found. The earliest substantial works Britten composed while studying with Bridge are the String Quartet in F, completed in April 1928, and the Quatre Chansons Françaises, a song-cycle for high voice and orchestra. While authorities differ on the extent of Bridge's influence on his pupil's technique, the encounter opened Britten's eyes to the music of Debussy, Ravel, Schoenberg, and Berg, expanding his horizons beyond the classical masters his mother had hoped he would emulate. Bridge's influence was profound, yet Britten's abilities as an orchestrator were essentially self-taught, a fact that would allow him to develop a unique sonic identity distinct from his teacher.
Common questions
When and where was Benjamin Britten born?
Edward Benjamin Britten was born on the 22nd of November 1913 in the fishing port of Lowestoft on the east coast of England. He was born on the feast day of Saint Cecilia, the patron saint of music.
Who were the key musical influences on Benjamin Britten during his early training?
Frank Bridge served as Benjamin Britten's primary composition teacher and introduced him to modern composers like Debussy and Ravel. Harold Samuel taught Benjamin Britten piano while he attended public school and made regular day-trips to London for lessons.
When did Benjamin Britten meet Peter Pears and how did their relationship develop?
Benjamin Britten met the tenor Peter Pears in 1937 while clearing out a mutual friend's country cottage. They consummated their relationship in April 1939 and remained partners in both professional and personal lives until Benjamin Britten's death.
What major opera did Benjamin Britten compose after returning to England from the United States?
Benjamin Britten composed the opera Peter Grimes based on a poem by the poet George Crabbe after reading the work in 1942. The opera opened in June 1945 and was hailed as the first genuinely successful British opera since Purcell.
When was the Snape Maltings concert hall opened and what was its significance to the Aldeburgh Festival?
The 830-seat Snape Maltings hall was opened by the Queen at the start of the twentieth Aldeburgh Festival on the 2nd of June 1967. It provided a venue that could comfortably house large orchestral works and operas after the original festival venues were outgrown.
When and how did Benjamin Britten die and where was he buried?
Benjamin Britten died of congestive heart failure on the 4th of December 1976 at the age of 63. He was buried in the churchyard of Aldeburgh Parish Church three days later, side by side with the future grave of Peter Pears.
In 1935, at Bridge's instigation, Britten was invited to a job interview by the BBC's director of music Adrian Boult, but what emerged was an invitation to write the score for a documentary film, The King's Stamp. Britten became a member of the film unit's small group of regular contributors, another of whom was W. H. Auden. Together they worked on the documentary films Coal Face and Night Mail in 1935, and collaborated on the song cycle Our Hunting Fathers, radical both in politics and musical treatment. Auden was a considerable influence on Britten, encouraging him to widen his aesthetic, intellectual and political horizons, and also to come to terms with his homosexuality. Auden was cheerfully and guiltlessly promiscuous, while Britten, puritanical and conventional by nature, was sexually repressed. In the three years from 1935 to 1937, Britten wrote nearly 40 scores for the theatre, cinema and radio, including The Ascent of F6 and The Sword in the Stone. In 1937, two events of huge importance occurred: his mother died, and he met the tenor Peter Pears. Although Britten was extraordinarily devoted to his mother and was devastated at her death, it also seems to have been something of a liberation for him. Only after that did he begin to engage in emotional relationships with people his own age or younger. Later in the year, he got to know Pears while they were both helping to clear out the country cottage of a mutual friend who had died in an air crash. Pears quickly became Britten's musical inspiration and close friend, and Britten's first work for him was composed within weeks of their meeting.
The American Exile And The Return
In April 1939, Britten and Pears sailed to North America, going first to Canada and then to New York. They had several reasons for leaving England, including the difficult position of pacifists in an increasingly bellicose Europe, the success that Frank Bridge had enjoyed in the US, and hostile or belittling reviews of Britten's music in the English press. Britten and Pears consummated their relationship and from then until Britten's death they were partners in both their professional and personal lives. When the Second World War began, they were told by the British embassy in Washington that they should remain in the US as artistic ambassadors. Already a friend of the composer Aaron Copland, Britten encountered his latest works Billy the Kid and An Outdoor Overture, both of which influenced his own music. In 1940, Britten composed Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo, the first of many song cycles for Pears. While in the US, Britten had his first encounter with Balinese gamelan music, through transcriptions for piano duo made by the Canadian composer Colin McPhee. The two met in the summer of 1939 and subsequently performed a number of McPhee's transcriptions for a recording. This musical encounter bore fruit in several Balinese-inspired works later in Britten's career. Moving to the US did not relieve Britten of the nuisance of hostile criticism, as Virgil Thomson was consistently severe and spiteful, describing Les Illuminations as little more than a series of bromidic and facile effects. In 1942, Britten read the work of the poet George Crabbe for the first time. The Borough, set on the Suffolk coast close to Britten's homeland, awakened in him such longings for England that he knew he must return. He also knew that he must write an opera based on Crabbe's poem about the fisherman Peter Grimes. Before Britten left the US, Koussevitzky offered him a $1,000 commission to write the opera. Britten and Pears returned to England in April 1942.
The Opera That Shook A Nation
Peter Grimes opened in June 1945 and was hailed by public and critics, its box-office takings matching or exceeding those for La bohème and Madame Butterfly, which were staged during the same season. The opera administrator Lord Harewood called it the first genuinely successful British opera, Gilbert and Sullivan apart, since Purcell. Dismayed by the in-fighting among the company, Joan Cross, Britten and Pears severed their ties with Sadler's Wells in December 1945, going on to found what was to become the English Opera Group. A month after the opening of Peter Grimes, Britten and Yehudi Menuhin went to Germany to give recitals to concentration camp survivors. What they saw, at Belsen most of all, so shocked Britten that he refused to talk about it until towards the end of his life, when he told Pears that it had coloured everything he had written since. Colin Matthews comments that the next two works Britten composed after his return, the song-cycle The Holy Sonnets of John Donne and the Second String Quartet, contrast strongly with earlier, lighter-hearted works such as Les Illuminations. Britten recovered his joie de vivre for The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra, written for an educational film, which became and remained his most often played and popular work. His next opera, The Rape of Lucretia, was presented at the first post-war Glyndebourne Festival in 1946. It was then taken on tour to provincial cities under the banner of the Glyndebourne English Opera Company, an uneasy alliance of Britten and his associates with John Christie, the autocratic proprietor of Glyndebourne. The tour lost money heavily, and Christie announced that he would underwrite no more tours. Britten and his associates set up the English Opera Group, the librettist Eric Crozier and the designer John Piper joining Britten as artistic directors. The group's express purpose was to produce and commission new English operas and other works, presenting them throughout the country.
The Festival And The Maltings
The Aldeburgh Festival was launched in June 1948, with Britten, Pears, and Crozier directing. Albert Herring played at the Jubilee Hall, and Britten's new cantata for tenor, chorus, and orchestra, Saint Nicolas, was presented in the parish church. The festival was an immediate success and became an annual event that has continued into the 21st century. New works by Britten featured in almost every festival until his death in 1976, including the premieres of his operas A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Jubilee Hall in 1960 and Death in Venice at Snape Maltings Concert Hall in 1973. By the 1960s, the Aldeburgh Festival was outgrowing its customary venues, and plans to build a new concert hall in Aldeburgh were not progressing. When redundant Victorian maltings buildings in the village of Snape, six miles inland, became available for hire, Britten realised that the largest of them could be converted into a concert hall and opera house. The 830-seat Snape Maltings hall was opened by the Queen at the start of the twentieth Aldeburgh Festival on the 2nd of June 1967. It was immediately hailed as one of the best concert halls in the country. The hall was destroyed by fire in 1969, but Britten was determined that it would be rebuilt in time for the following year's festival, which it was. The Queen again attended the opening performance in 1970. The Maltings gave the festival a venue that could comfortably house large orchestral works and operas. Britten conducted the first performance outside Russia of Shostakovich's Fourteenth Symphony at Snape in 1970. Shostakovich, a friend since 1960, dedicated the symphony to Britten, and he was himself the dedicatee of The Prodigal Son. Two other Russian musicians who were close to Britten and regularly performed at the festival were the pianist Sviatoslav Richter and the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich. Britten composed his cello suites, Cello Symphony and Cello Sonata for Rostropovich, who premiered them at the Aldeburgh Festival.
The War Requiem And The Final Years
One of the best known of Britten's works, the War Requiem, was premiered in 1962. He had been asked four years earlier to write a work for the consecration of the new Coventry Cathedral, a modernist building designed by Basil Spence. The old cathedral had been left in ruins by an air-raid on the city in 1940 in which hundreds of people died. Britten decided that his work would commemorate the dead of both World Wars in a large-scale score for soloists, chorus, chamber ensemble and orchestra. His text interspersed the traditional Requiem Mass with poems by Wilfred Owen. Matthews writes, With the War Requiem Britten reached the apex of his reputation: it was almost universally hailed as a masterpiece. Shostakovich told Rostropovich that he believed it to be the greatest work of the twentieth century. By the 1960s, Britten found composition much slower than in his prolific youth; he told the 28-year-old composer Nicholas Maw, Get as much done now as you can, because it gets much, much more difficult as you grow older. In September 1970, Britten asked Myfanwy Piper to turn Thomas Mann's novella Death in Venice into a libretto. At an early stage in composition, Britten was told by his doctors that a heart operation was essential if he was to live for more than two years. He was determined to finish the opera and worked urgently to complete it before going into hospital for surgery. After the completion of the opera, Britten went into the National Heart Hospital and was operated on in May 1973 to replace a failing heart valve. The replacement was successful, but he suffered a slight stroke, affecting his right hand. This brought his career as a performer to an end. While in hospital, Britten became friendly with a senior nursing sister, Rita Thomson, who moved to Aldeburgh in 1974 and looked after him until his death.
The Last Note And The Legacy
In June 1976, the last year of his life, Britten accepted a life peerage, the first composer so honoured, becoming Baron Britten, of Aldeburgh in the County of Suffolk. After the 1976 Aldeburgh Festival, Britten and Pears travelled to Norway, where Britten began writing Praise We Great Men, for voices and orchestra based on a poem by Edith Sitwell. He returned to Aldeburgh in August, and wrote Welcome Ode for children's choir and orchestra. In November, Britten realised that he could no longer compose. On his 63rd birthday, the 22nd of November, at his request, Rita Thomson organised a champagne party and invited his friends and his sisters Barbara and Beth, to say their goodbyes to the dying composer. When Rostropovich made his farewell visit a few days later, Britten gave him what he had written of Praise We Great Men. Britten died of congestive heart failure on the 4th of December 1976. His funeral service was held at Aldeburgh Parish Church three days later, and he was buried in its churchyard, with a gravestone carved by Reynolds Stone. The authorities at Westminster Abbey had offered burial there, but Britten had made it clear that he wished his grave to be side by side with that, in due course, of Pears. A memorial service was held at the Abbey on the 10th of March 1977, at which the congregation was headed by Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother. Despite his large number of works on Christian themes, Britten has sometimes been thought of as an agnostic, though in the 1960s he called himself a dedicated Christian. Politically, Britten was on the left, telling Pears that he always voted either Liberal or Labour and could not imagine ever voting Conservative. Physically, Britten was never robust, suffering from 20 illnesses over the years before his final heart complaint developed. Emotionally, according to some commentators, Britten never completely grew up, retaining in his outlook something of a child's view of the world. He was not always confident that he was the genius others declared him to be, and though he was hypercritical of his own works, he was acutely, even aggressively sensitive to criticism from anybody else. Britten was, as he himself acknowledged, notorious for dumping friends and colleagues who either offended him or ceased to be of use to him, his corpses. Among other corpses were his librettists Montagu Slater and Eric Crozier. The latter said in 1949, He has sometimes told me, jokingly, that one day I would join the ranks of his corpses and I have always recognized that any ordinary person must soon outlive his usefulness to such a great creative artist as Ben. Dame Janet Baker said in 1981, I think he was quite entitled to take what he wanted from others... He did not want to hurt anyone, but the task in hand was more important than anything or anybody. Matthews feels that this aspect of Britten has been exaggerated, and he observes that the composer sustained many deep friendships to the end of his life.