Benjamin Britten

• 1. Introduction

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  Benjamin Britten was born on the 22nd of November 1913 in the fishing port of Lowestoft, Suffolk, and that birth date is no accident: it fell on the feast day of Saint Cecilia, the patron saint of music. By the time he died on the 4th of December 1976, he had written 15 operas, a War Requiem that Shostakovich called the greatest work of the twentieth century, and a Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra that became his most-played piece worldwide. He had founded a festival in a small seaside town and converted an old maltings building into one of Britain's finest concert halls. He had been the first composer ever granted a life peerage. Yet for much of his life he was a pacifist and a homosexual in a country that made both those positions deeply uncomfortable, and that tension runs like a fault line through almost everything he created. What made Britten the composer he became? And what did it cost him?

• 2. A Suffolk Childhood

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  Robert Britten, Benjamin's father, had wanted to be a farmer but settled for dentistry, a profession he practised, according to biographers, successfully but without pleasure. His wife Edith, a talented amateur musician and secretary of the Lowestoft Musical Society, used music to maintain the family's social standing in a provincial England where class distinctions were taken very seriously. Into this household Benjamin arrived as the youngest of four children, and almost immediately nearly died: at three months old he contracted pneumonia and was left with a damaged heart. Doctors warned his parents he would probably never lead a normal life. He recovered better than expected and became a keen tennis player and cricketer, but the damaged heart would shadow him to the end.

  Edith gave the boy his first piano and notation lessons, and he began attempting composition when he was five. His father, an agnostic who refused to have a gramophone or a radio in the house, ensured that Benjamin was one of the last composers raised entirely on live music. By the time he was ten he was taking viola lessons from Audrey Alston, a professional player and family friend, who was to become a critical figure in his development. At fourteen, attending the triennial Norfolk and Norwich Festival in October 1924, he heard Frank Bridge conduct his own orchestral poem The Sea. It was the first substantial piece of modern music Britten had ever encountered, and he described being "knocked sideways" by it. Alston knew Bridge; when Bridge returned for the next festival in 1927, she brought her not-quite-fourteen-year-old pupil to meet him. Bridge was impressed, invited the boy to London for lessons, and the encounter would shape Britten's entire creative life.

• 3. The Making of a Composer

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  Frank Bridge drilled into Britten the importance of scrupulous craft and left him one guiding maxim: "you should find yourself and be true to what you found." Authorities disagree on how much Bridge shaped Britten's technique, but everyone agrees on the breadth of repertoire Bridge opened up. Through Bridge, Britten discovered Debussy and Ravel, which gave him a model for orchestral sound. Bridge also steered him toward Schoenberg and Berg; Berg's death in 1935 affected Britten deeply. At the Royal College of Music in London, where Britten studied from 1930 to 1933, he found himself underwhelmed. He described his fellow students as "amateurish and folksy" and the staff as inclined to suspect technical brilliance of being superficial. He learned little from his composition teacher John Ireland, though he later praised Ireland for nursing him gently through a "very, very difficult musical adolescence."

  His time in London did sharpen his appetite for 20th-century music. He attended concerts, absorbed Stravinsky, Shostakovich, and Mahler. He heard Mahler's Fourth Symphony in September 1930, when Mahler was little regarded in English concert halls, and was struck by its scoring: "entirely clean and transparent...the material was remarkable, and the melodic shapes highly original, with such rhythmic and harmonic tension from beginning to end." Of Das Lied von der Erde he wrote to a friend, "It is cruel, you know, that music should be so beautiful." A planned postgraduate stint in Vienna with Alban Berg was blocked by his parents on the advice of the RCM staff, a decision Britten would long regret. At the RCM he did win prizes and began the works that would first bring him public notice, including the choral variations A Boy Was Born, performed by the BBC Singers in 1934. His Gresham's School years had been miserable. He had hated the bullying, despised the music master, and confided to his diary thoughts of running away. It was at that school that he became convinced his lifelong pacifism had its roots in seeing the severe corporal punishments the headmaster regularly handed out.

• 4. W. H. Auden and the Film Unit Years

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  In February 1935, at Bridge's instigation, Britten was invited to interview with the BBC but was relieved when the meeting led instead to a commission to score a documentary film, The King's Stamp, for the GPO Film Unit. It was at the film unit that he met W. H. Auden, and the two men collaborated on Coal Face and Night Mail in 1935. Auden's influence went well beyond artistic collaboration. He pushed Britten to widen his intellectual and political horizons, and he encouraged Britten to come to terms with his homosexuality. Auden was, in one scholar's phrase, "cheerfully and guiltlessly promiscuous"; Britten, puritanical by nature, was not. The creative friction between them produced some of Britten's most politically charged work, including Our Hunting Fathers in 1936, described as radical in both politics and musical treatment.

  In the three years from 1935 to 1937 Britten wrote nearly 40 scores for theatre, cinema, and radio. Then 1937 brought two events that changed everything. His mother died, and he met the tenor Peter Pears. Though he was devastated by Edith's death, it also seems to have been a liberation: only after that did Britten begin forming emotional relationships with people his own age. He and Pears met while both were clearing out the cottage of a mutual friend killed in an air crash. Pears quickly became Britten's close friend and musical inspiration. The first composition Britten wrote for him, a setting of an Emily Bronte poem for tenor and strings, came within weeks of their meeting. The Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge, completed that same year, became the first of Britten's works to achieve the status of a popular classic, performed in Toronto, New York, Boston, Chicago, and San Francisco.

• 5. America and the Road to Peter Grimes

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  In April 1939 Britten and Pears sailed to North America, driven partly by the increasingly bellicose atmosphere in Europe, partly by hostile reviews in the English press, and partly by Auden's own departure for the US. While there, Britten had his first serious encounter with Balinese gamelan music, through piano transcriptions made by the Canadian composer Colin McPhee. The two met in the summer of 1939 and performed McPhee's transcriptions for a recording; the encounter planted seeds that would flower in several works decades later. Britten and Pears also consummated their relationship during this period, and remained partners in both professional and personal life from then until Britten's death.

  The decisive moment came in 1942 when Britten read George Crabbe's narrative poem The Borough, set on the Suffolk coast near his homeland. The longing it triggered was so acute that Britten knew he had to return to England and write an opera based on Crabbe's story of the fisherman Peter Grimes. Before he left, Serge Koussevitzky offered him a commission of one thousand dollars to write the opera. During the long sea crossing home, Britten completed A Ceremony of Carols and Hymn to St Cecilia, the latter his final large-scale collaboration with Auden. The opening of Peter Grimes in June 1945 was an event. Its box-office takings matched or exceeded those for La boheme and Madame Butterfly in the same season. The opera administrator Lord Harewood called it "the first genuinely successful British opera, Gilbert and Sullivan apart, since Purcell." A month after the premiere, Britten and Yehudi Menuhin visited concentration camp survivors in Germany; what they saw at Belsen so shocked Britten that he refused to discuss it until near the end of his life, when he told Pears it had coloured everything he had written since.

• 6. The Aldeburgh Years

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  Aldeburgh, a small seaside town in Suffolk, became Britten's principal place of residence from 1947 for the rest of his life. Together with Pears and the librettist Eric Crozier, he launched the Aldeburgh Festival in June 1948. The inaugural festival included Albert Herring at the Jubilee Hall and the premiere of the cantata Saint Nicolas at the parish church. The festival became an immediate annual fixture and continued into the twenty-first century. New Britten premieres featured in almost every festival until his death in 1976, including A Midsummer Night's Dream in 1960 and Death in Venice in 1973.

  By the 1960s the festival had outgrown its venues. When a set of redundant Victorian maltings buildings in the village of Snape, six miles inland, became available, Britten recognized that the largest could be converted into a concert hall. The 830-seat Snape Maltings hall was opened by the Queen on the 2nd of June 1967 at the start of the twentieth Aldeburgh Festival and was immediately praised as one of the finest concert halls in the country. Fire destroyed the hall in 1969, but Britten was determined it would be rebuilt in time for the following year's festival, and it was. The Queen attended the reopening in 1970. Britten conducted the first performance outside Russia of Shostakovich's Fourteenth Symphony at Snape that same year. Shostakovich, a friend since 1960, had dedicated the symphony to Britten; Britten was himself the dedicatee of The Prodigal Son. The cellist Mstislav Rostropovich was another close Russian friend who regularly performed at the festival; Britten composed his cello suites, Cello Symphony, and Cello Sonata with Rostropovich specifically in mind.

• 7. The War Requiem and Late Works

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  Four years before the Snape Maltings opened, Britten had been asked to write a work for the consecration of the new Coventry Cathedral, a modernist building designed by Basil Spence on the site of a cathedral left in ruins by an air raid in 1940 in which hundreds of people died. He decided his work would commemorate the dead of both World Wars, weaving Wilfred Owen's poetry through the traditional Latin Requiem Mass. The War Requiem was premiered in 1962 and was, in Colin Matthews's account, "almost universally hailed as a masterpiece." Shostakovich told Rostropovich that he believed it to be the greatest work of the twentieth century.

  Britten's final opera, Death in Venice, began when in September 1970 he asked Myfanwy Piper to adapt Thomas Mann's novella into a libretto. Early in composition, doctors told him a heart operation was essential if he was to survive more than two years. He worked urgently to finish the opera before surgery. His colleague Colin Graham wrote that of all Britten's works this one "went deepest into Britten's own soul," with cross-currents between Britten himself, his health, and the dying protagonist Aschenbach. Surgery at the National Heart Hospital in May 1973 replaced a failing heart valve successfully, but a slight stroke left his right hand impaired, ending his career as a performer. His last completed major work was the Third String Quartet in 1975, which drew on material from Death in Venice. In June 1976, the last year of his life, Britten accepted a life peerage, the first composer ever so honoured, becoming Baron Britten of Aldeburgh. On his sixty-third birthday, the 22nd of November 1976, he held a champagne party for his sisters and friends at his request, to say goodbye. When Rostropovich made his farewell visit a few days later, Britten gave him what he had written of his final, unfinished work, Praise We Great Men.

• 8. A Voice Too Dangerous to Imitate

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  Philip Brett described Britten as "inimitable, possessed of a voice and sound too dangerous to imitate," and the comment points at something real: Britten's operas are performed worldwide more than those of any other composer born in the twentieth century. Michael Tippett called him "simply the most musical person I have ever met." Leonard Bernstein heard something darker: "if you hear it, not just listen to it superficially, you become aware of something very dark." The tenor Robert Tear, who worked closely with Britten in his final years, spoke of "a great, huge abyss in his soul."

  Britten defined his own mission in simpler terms: composers should aim at "pleasing people today as seriously as we can." Brett believed he affected every subsequent British composer to some extent and called him "a key figure in the growth of British musical culture in the second half of the 20th century." Oliver Knussen, speaking for a younger generation of English composers, called him "a phenomenal father-figure." The pianist Gerald Moore, who played at all the major British music festivals except Aldeburgh, explained his absence there plainly: "the presiding genius there is the greatest accompanist in the world, my services are not needed." Britten was buried in the churchyard of Aldeburgh Parish Church, his grave carved by Reynolds Stone, beside the plot reserved for Pears. Westminster Abbey had offered burial there, but Britten had been clear: he wanted to lie side by side with his partner.