Benjamin Britten

Edward Benjamin Britten was born on November 22, 1913, in the fishing town of Lowestoft on the Suffolk coast, the youngest of four children of Robert Britten, a dentist, and Edith Britten, an amateur singer active in the local choral society ^[1]. The date fell on the feast day of Saint Cecilia, patron of music, a coincidence the family enjoyed and the composer later marked with his Hymn to St Cecilia. His mother encouraged his gifts from the start, and the boy was composing by the age of five, producing hundreds of juvenile pieces before he left school ^[2].

At South Lodge preparatory school and later Gresham's School in Holt, Britten combined academic work with an unusual musical appetite. The decisive encounter of his youth came in 1927, when he heard the composer Frank Bridge conduct at the Norwich Festival. Bridge took the thirteen year old on as a private pupil and drilled him in technical discipline and clarity of intention, lessons Britten credited for the rest of his life ^[1]. In 1930 he won a scholarship to the Royal College of Music in London, where he studied composition with John Ireland and piano with Arthur Benjamin, though he found the institution conservative and looked instead to Continental figures such as Mahler, Stravinsky, and Berg ^[2].

Anyone asking who was Benjamin Britten in the mid 1930s would have found a young professional writing to order. After leaving the Royal College he joined the GPO Film Unit, composing scores for documentary films including Night Mail in 1936, which set the poetry of W. H. Auden to music with striking rhythmic invention ^[3]. The collaboration with Auden shaped his politics and his ambitions, drawing him into a circle of left leaning artists and confirming his lifelong pacifism. Concert works such as the Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge, premiered at the Salzburg Festival in 1937, announced a technician of rare fluency ^[2].

In 1937 he also met the tenor Peter Pears, who became his musical partner and companion for nearly forty years. In 1939, unsettled by the approach of war and following Auden across the Atlantic, Britten and Pears moved to North America, where he composed the Violin Concerto, the song cycle Les Illuminations, and the operetta Paul Bunyan ^[1]. Homesickness proved decisive. Reading an article by E. M. Forster about the Suffolk poet George Crabbe in 1941 convinced Britten that his subject matter lay on the coast where he was born, and the pair sailed back to England in 1942 ^[3].

As a conscientious objector during the Second World War, Britten was permitted to continue working, giving recitals with Pears while completing the opera that would change British musical history ^[1].

Peter Grimes opened at Sadler's Wells in London on June 7, 1945, and its success was immediate and lasting. The opera, drawn from Crabbe's poem The Borough, centers on a rough fisherman destroyed by the suspicion of his community, and its sea interludes quickly entered the orchestral repertoire ^[4]. It is widely regarded as the work that revived English opera after more than two centuries without a durable native tradition, and it made Britten an international figure at thirty one ^[2].

A remarkable run of stage works followed. Because large opera houses were costly, Britten helped found the English Opera Group in 1947 to perform chamber operas with small forces, producing The Rape of Lucretia, Albert Herring, and The Turn of the Screw. Larger canvases included Billy Budd in 1951, Gloriana for the coronation of Elizabeth II in 1953, A Midsummer Night's Dream in 1960, and Death in Venice in 1973 ^[1]. Alongside opera he wrote music that reached enormous audiences, most famously The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra of 1945, a set of variations on a theme by Henry Purcell that remains a staple of music education worldwide ^[4].

Among Benjamin Britten achievements, the War Requiem holds a singular place. Commissioned for the 1962 consecration of the rebuilt Coventry Cathedral, which had been destroyed by bombing in 1940, it interleaves the Latin Mass for the Dead with the war poetry of Wilfred Owen. Britten designed the solo parts for an English tenor, a German baritone, and a Russian soprano as a deliberate gesture of reconciliation, and the Decca recording of 1963 sold in extraordinary numbers for a contemporary classical work ^[5].

In 1947 Britten settled in Aldeburgh, a small town a few miles down the coast from his birthplace, and the following year he founded the Aldeburgh Festival with Pears and the librettist Eric Crozier. What began as a modest local gathering grew into one of the most respected music festivals in Europe, premiering many of Britten's own works and drawing performers of the first rank to a town of a few thousand people ^[6].

The festival's ambitions outgrew its parish churches and halls, and in 1967 Britten opened a concert hall converted from a Victorian industrial building at Snape, a few miles inland. Snape Maltings burned down on the opening night of the 1969 festival and was rebuilt in time for the next season, a recovery that became part of local legend ^[6]. The Aldeburgh enterprise reflected a conviction Britten voiced throughout his career: that a composer should be useful, rooted in a specific community, and writing for particular performers and occasions rather than for an abstract posterity ^[3].

Britten's relationship with Peter Pears was the central fact of his private life. The two men lived together openly from the 1940s, decades before the partial decriminalization of homosexuality in England in 1967, though they remained discreet in public statements ^[1]. Pears was the first interpreter of nearly all Britten's major tenor roles, from Grimes to Aschenbach in Death in Venice, and the composer wrote his song cycles, including the Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings and the Nocturne, around the particular colors of Pears's voice ^[2].

Britten was also a performing musician of high distinction. As a pianist he recorded celebrated accounts of Schubert and Schumann with Pears, and as a conductor he set down interpretations of his own works for Decca that remain reference recordings ^[4]. Friendships shaped his catalogue: the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich inspired a cello symphony and three solo suites, and the Russian soprano Galina Vishnevskaya sang in the War Requiem recording after Soviet authorities barred her from the Coventry premiere ^[5]. His pacifism, formed in the 1930s and tested by tribunal during the war, ran through works from the early Sinfonia da Requiem to the late opera Owen Wingrave ^[3].

By the late 1960s Britten was among the most honored musicians in Britain, appointed to the Order of Merit in 1965 and collecting honorary degrees on both sides of the Atlantic ^[1]. He kept composing at a steady pace, completing the three church parables for performance in Orford church, the television opera Owen Wingrave in 1971, and Death in Venice, his final opera and a demanding summation of his concerns, in 1973 ^[2].

His health broke during the composition of Death in Venice. In May 1973 he underwent surgery to replace a failing heart valve, and a stroke suffered during the operation weakened his right hand, ending his career as a pianist and conductor ^[1]. He continued to write, producing the dramatic cantata Phaedra for the mezzo soprano Janet Baker and a final String Quartet, his third, which received its premiere shortly after his death ^[6].

In June 1976 he was created Baron Britten of Aldeburgh, the first composer in British history to receive a life peerage ^[4]. He died of heart failure at his home, The Red House in Aldeburgh, on December 4, 1976, at the age of sixty three, and was buried in the churchyard of Aldeburgh parish church, where Pears was laid beside him a decade later ^[1].

Britten remains the most widely performed British opera composer, and Peter Grimes, Billy Budd, and The Turn of the Screw hold secure places in international repertory ^[2]. His practical bent produced a body of music for children and amateurs, from the community opera Noye's Fludde to the Missa Brevis, that few major composers have matched, and The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra continues to introduce new listeners to the instruments of the orchestra ^[4].

The institutions he built outlived him. The Aldeburgh Festival continues each June, Snape Maltings operates year round as a concert hall and center for artist development, and The Red House is preserved as a museum and archive holding his manuscripts and correspondence ^[6]. The centenary of his birth in 2013 brought performances in dozens of countries and a wave of new scholarship, including studies that examined his complicated attachments to the adolescent boys who sang in his works, a subject biographers continue to weigh against the testimony of the singers themselves ^[7]. Any honest Benjamin Britten biography ends where he insisted his music began, on the shingle beach at Aldeburgh, where the sea he set to music in Peter Grimes still breaks a short walk from his grave ^[3].