Benjamin Britten
Biography by Michael Rodman
1913 – 1976
With the arrival of Benjamin Britten on the international music scene, many felt that English music gained its greatest genius since Purcell.
Life and Music
- Britten's father was a prosperous oral surgeon in the town of Lowestoft, Suffolk; his mother was a leader in the local choral society.
- Britten found in the human voice a special source of inspiration, an affinity that resulted in a remarkable body of work, ranging from operas like Peter Grimes (1944-1945) and Death in Venice (1973) to song cycles like the Serenade for tenor, horn, and strings (1943) to the massive choral work War Requiem (1961).
- He also produced much music for orchestra and chamber ensembles, including symphonies, concerti, and chamber and solo works.
- When Benjamin's musical aptitude became evident, the family engaged composer Frank Bridge to supervise his musical education.
- Bridge's tutelage was one of the formative and lasting influences on Britten's compositional development; Britten eventually paid tribute to his teacher in his Op. 10, the Variations on a Theme by Frank Bridge (1937).
- Working on a tight budget, Britten learned how to extract the maximum variety of musical effectiveness from the smallest combinations of instruments, producing dozens of such scores from 1935 to 1938.
- Britten left England in 1939 as war loomed over Europe. He spent four years in the United States and Canada, his compositional pace barely slackening, evidenced by the production of works such as the Sinfonia da Requiem (1940), the song cycle Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo (1940), and his first effort for the stage, Paul Bunyan (1940-1941).
- Among the most important of his professional associates were literary figures like W.H. Auden, and later, E.M. Forster.
- The tenor Peter Pears was Britten's closest intimate, both personally and professionally, from the late '30s to the composer's death.
- With a Koussevitzky Commission backing him, the composer wrote the enormously successful opera Peter Grimes (1944-45), which marked the greatest turning point in his career.
- Britten over the next several decades wrote a dozen more operas, several of which — Albert Herring (1947), Billy Budd (1951), The Turn of the Screw (1954), A Midsummer Night's Dream (1960), Death in Venice (1973) — became instant and permanent fixtures of the repertoire.
- Britten produced much vocal, orchestral, and chamber music, including Songs and Proverbs of William Blake (1965), the three Cello Suites (1961-1964) and the Cello Symphony (1963) and the Third String Quartet (1975).
- Britten suffered a stroke during heart surgery in 1971, which resulted in something of a slowdown in his creative activities. Yet he continued to compose until his death in 1976, by which time he was recognized as one of the principal musical figures of the twentieth century.
Did you know?
His most famous piece, which some would say is the crowning pinnacle of his entire career - is the War Requiem, premiered in 1962 to celebrate the opening of the new Coventry Cathedral.
