User:Sjones23/Benjamin Britten

Early years

Benjamin Britten was born in the town of Lowestoft in Suffolk, England. His father, Robert Victor Britten (1878–1934), was a dentist and was well-liked by his patients who worked with him.^[1] In 1901, he married Edith Rhoda Hockey (1874–1937),^[2] a talented amateur musician who worked as a secretary for the Lowestoft Choral Society.^[3] Benjamin was the last of their four children.^{[n 1]} Edith gave the young Britten his first lessons in piano and notation. He showed musical gifts very early in life, making his first attempts at composition aged five.^[3] He started piano lessons with a teacher from his pre-prep school, Ethel Astle, at the age of eight. He was able to accompany his mother and play duets with Charles Colman, the organist of Britten's local church.^[4] and viola lessons with Audrey Alston at the age of ten.

When Britten heard Frank Bridge’s orchestral poem The Sea at the Norfolk and Norwich Festival in 1927 he was, as he put it, ‘knocked sideways’.^[5] Alston was a family friend of Frank Bridge and arranged an introduction. After examining Britten's work, Bridge took him on as a composition pupil, and the first lesson took place on 10 January 1928, a few weeks after Britten's 14th birthday.^[6] One of the first pieces composed during the period of Bridge's tutelage was the Quatre Chansons Françaises for soprano and orchestra, though it appears that Britten's abilities as an orchestrator were essentially self-taught rather than learned from Bridge.^[7]

He was educated at Old Buckenham Hall in Suffolk, before moving onto Gresham's School, Holt in September 1928. In 1930, he won a Composition Scholarship at the Royal College of Music in London; his examiners were John Ireland, S.P. Waddington and Ralph Vaughan Williams. He continued his studies at the college, with Ireland as his composition teacher and Arthur Benjamin as his piano teacher. Britten also used his time in London to attend concerts and become better acquainted with the music of Igor Stravinsky, Gustav Mahler, and Dmitri Shostakovich. Britten also intended postgraduate study in Vienna with Alban Berg, Arnold Schoenberg's student, but was eventually dissuaded by his parents, at the advice of the College staff.^[8]

Britten was a prolific juvenile composer: some 800 works and fragments precede his early published works. His first compositions to attract wide attention were A Hymn to the Virgin (1930), the Sinfonietta, Op. 1 (1932), and a set of choral variations A Boy was Born, written in 1933^[9] for the BBC Singers, who first performed it the following year. In this same period he wrote Friday Afternoons, a collection of 12 songs mostly for unison singing, for the pupils of Clive House School, Prestatyn where Britten's brother, Robert, was headmaster.^[10]

Early professional life

In April 1935 he was approached by the film director Alberto Cavalcanti to write the film score for the documentary The King's Stamp, produced by the GPO Film Unit.^[11] He subsequently met W. H. Auden, who was also working for the GPO Film Unit; together they worked on the films Coal Face and Night Mail.^[12] They also collaborated on the song cycle Our Hunting Fathers Op. 8 (1936), radical both in politics and musical treatment, and subsequently other works including Cabaret Songs, On This Island, Paul Bunyan and Hymn to St. Cecilia.

Of more lasting importance to Britten was his meeting in 1937 with the tenor Peter Pears, who was to become his musical collaborator and inspiration as well as his life partner. In the same year he composed a Pacifist March (words, Ronald Duncan) for the Peace Pledge Union, of which, as a pacifist, he had become an active member, but the work was not a success and soon withdrawn. One of Britten's most noteworthy works from the 1930s was Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge for string orchestra, Op. 10, written in 1937.

Work in America 1939-1942

In April 1939 Britten and Pears followed W. H. Auden to the United States. There, in 1940, Britten composed Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo, the first of many song cycles for Pears (Britten composed his first individual work for Pears in 1937, as part of The Company of Heaven for the BBC).^[13] Already friends with the composer Aaron Copland, Britten encountered his latest works Billy the Kid and An Outdoor Overture, both of which manifestly influenced his own music.^[14] While in America Britten wrote his first music drama, Paul Bunyan, an operetta (to a libretto by Auden). The period in America was also remarkable for a number of orchestral works, including the Violin Concerto Op. 15, and Sinfonia da Requiem Op. 20 (for full orchestra).

In the meantime, Britten had had his first encounter with Balinese gamelan music through the transcriptions for two pianos made by the Canadian composer Colin McPhee. Britten first met McPhee at Stanton Cottage in the summer of 1939, and the two subsequently performed a number of McPhee's transcriptions for a recording.^[15] This musical encounter was to bear fruit decades later in several Balinese-inspired works including The Prince of the Pagodas,^[16] Noye's Fludde^[17] and Death in Venice.^[18]

Return to England

Britten and Pears returned to England in April 1942. Britten completed the choral works Hymn to St. Cecilia (his last large-scale collaboration with Auden) and A Ceremony of Carols during the long sea voyage. Both Britten and Pears applied for recognition as conscientious objectors; Britten was initially allowed only non-combatant service in the military, but gained unconditional exemption on appeal. He had already begun work on his opera Peter Grimes based on the writings of Suffolk poet George Crabbe; he worked on the piece whilst living at 45a St John’s Wood High Street, the address now marked by a memorial plaque.^[19] Another plaque marks Britten's residence at Halliford Street in Islington.^[20]

Launching the Aldeburgh Festival

Back in 1937, with the inheritance following the death of his mother, Britten had bought The Old Mill in Snape, Suffolk, which became his Suffolk home, and this is where he spent much of his time in 1944 working on Peter Grimes. The première of Peter Grimes at Sadler's Wells in 1945 was his greatest success thus far. His next opera, The Rape of Lucretia, was presented at the newly formed Glyndebourne English Opera Company in 1946, and went on tour. Following the financial loss of the tour, it was decided that Glyndebourne would not send out any more tours, and in response, Britten along with Peter Pears, his librettist Eric Crozier and designer John Piper set up The English Opera Group with the express role of presenting new opera on tour. Britten wrote Albert Herring for the English Opera Group in 1947, and it was while on tour that Pears came up with the idea of mounting a Festival in the small Suffolk seaside town of Aldeburgh, six miles from Snape, where Britten had now moved to a house on Crag Path.

The Aldeburgh Festival was duly launched in June 1948, with Albert Herring playing at the Jubilee Hall and Britten’s new cantata for tenor, chorus and orchestra, Saint Nicolas, in the Parish Church. The Festival was an immediate success, and became an annual festival that continues to this day. New works by Britten featured in virtually 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.

Late 1940s and the 1950s

From 1949 to 1951 he had his only private pupil, Arthur Oldham. One of Oldham's achievements was the setting for full orchestra of Britten's Variations on a Theme by Frank Bridge, for the Frederick Ashton ballet Le Rêve de Léonor (1949).^[21]

Peter Grimes was the first in a series of English operas, of which Billy Budd (1951) and The Turn of the Screw (1954) were particularly admired. His Shakespeare opera, A Midsummer Night's Dream, followed in 1960. These operas share common themes. Even in his comic opera Albert Herring of 1947, all feature an 'outsider' character excluded or misunderstood by society. Often this is the eponymous protagonist, as in Peter Grimes and Owen Wingrave (1970). He composed Gloriana (1953) for the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, to celebrate the coronation of HM Queen Elizabeth II.

Britten was appointed a Companion of Honour (CH) in the Coronation Honours, 1953.^[22]

An increasingly important influence was the music of the East, an interest that was fostered by a tour with Pears in 1957, when Britten was struck by the music of the Balinese gamelan and by Japanese Noh plays. The fruits of this tour include the ballet The Prince of the Pagodas (1957) and the series of semi-operatic "Parables for Church Performance": Curlew River (1964), The Burning Fiery Furnace (1966) and The Prodigal Son (1968). One of Britten’s greatest achievements in the 1960s was his War Requiem, written for the 1962 consecration of the newly reconstructed Coventry Cathedral.

Britten developed close friendships with Russian musicians Dmitri Shostakovich and Mstislav Rostropovich in the 1960s. He composed his Cello Suites, Cello Symphony and Cello Sonata for Rostropovich, premiered at the Aldeburgh Festival. Britten dedicated The Prodigal Son (the third and last of the 'Church Parables') to Shostakovich. He was honoured again by appointment to the Order of Merit (OM) on 23 March 1965.^[23]

Developing the Aldeburgh Festival

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, down the road from where Britten used to live, became available to hire. Britten had the vision that the largest of the malthouses could be converted to become a Concert Hall and Opera House. The converted 830-seat Snape Maltings Concert Hall was opened by HM The Queen on the opening of the twentieth Aldeburgh Festival on 2 June 1967 and was immediately hailed as one of the best concert halls in the country. At last the Aldeburgh Festival had a venue that could house larger orchestral works. Britten conducted the first Western performance of Shostakovich's Fourteenth Symphony at Snape in 1970. Shostakovich had dedicated this score to Britten, and often spoke very highly of his music. The Concert 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 duly was. The Queen once again attended the opening performance in 1970.

From the very start of the Aldeburgh Festival in 1948, Britten appeared as a performer and conductor, frequently accompanying Pears. However, in his last decade, Britten's health deteriorated. A heart operation in 1973 left Britten partially disabled and ended his performing career. His later works became more and more sparse in texture. They include the operas Owen Wingrave (1970) and Death in Venice (1971–1973), the Suite on English Folk Tunes "A Time There Was" (1974) and Third String Quartet (1975)— which drew on material from Death in Venice— as well as the dramatic cantata Phaedra (1975), written for Janet Baker.

Last years

Having previously declined a knighthood, Britten accepted a life peerage – the first composer to have been so honoured – on 2 July 1976 as Baron Britten, of Aldeburgh in the County of Suffolk.^[24] After the 1976 Aldeburgh Festival, Britten and Peers traveled to Norway, where Britten began writing Praise We Great Men, an unfinished composition for voices and orchestra based on the poem by Edith Sitwell.^[25] He returned to Aldeburgh in August, and wrote Welcome Ode for children's choir and orchestra.^[26] In November, Britten realised that he could no longer compose.^[27] On 22 November, Rita Thomson organised a champagne party and invited his friends, as well as Britten's sisters Barbara and Beth, to bid farewell to the composer.^[28] After Rostropovich made his farewell visit a few days later, Britten gave what he wrote of Praise We Great Men.^[28]

Britten died of congestive heart failure, aged 63, at his Aldeburgh house on 4 December 1976;^[29] his funeral service was held at the Aldeburgh Parish Church three days later,^[28] and he was buried in Aldeburgh Cemetery,^[26] with a gravestone carved by Reynolds Stone. The grave of his partner, Sir Peter Pears (knighted in 1978), lies next to his, and near to that of Imogen Holst, a close friend and colleague. A memorial stone to him was unveiled in the north choir aisle of Westminster Abbey in 1978.

Operas

Britten's operas are firmly established in the international repertoire. According to Operabase, he has more operas played worldwide than any other composer born in the twentieth century,^[30] and only Puccini and Richard Strauss come ahead of him if the list is extended to all operas composed after 1900.^[31]

Other genres

Britten was an accomplished pianist, frequently performing chamber music and accompanying lieder and song recitals. However, apart from the Holiday Diary (1934), Piano Concerto (1938), Young Apollo (1939), Diversions (written for Paul Wittgenstein in 1940), Scottish Ballad (1941), he wrote relatively little music that puts the piano in the spotlight, and in a 1963 interview for the BBC said that he thought of it as "a background instrument".

One of Britten's best known works is The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra (1946), which was composed to accompany Instruments of the Orchestra, an educational film produced by the British government, narrated and conducted by Malcolm Sargent. Its subtitle is Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Purcell; the theme is a melody from Henry Purcell's Abdelazer. Britten gives individual variations to each of the sections of the orchestra, starting with the woodwind, then the string instruments, the brass instruments and finally the percussion. Britten then brings the whole orchestra together again in a fugue before restating the theme to close the work. The original film's spoken commentary is often omitted in concert performances and recordings.

Britten's church music is also considerable: it contains frequently performed 'classics' such as Rejoice in the Lamb, composed for St Matthew's Northampton (where the Vicar was Revd Walter Hussey), as well as A Hymn to the Virgin, and Missa Brevis for boys' voices and organ.

As a conductor, Britten performed the music of many composers, as well as his own. Among his celebrated recordings are versions of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's 40th Symphony and Elgar's The Dream of Gerontius (with Pears as Gerontius), and an album of works by Grainger in which Britten features as pianist as well as conductor.

Nocturnal after John Dowland for guitar (1963) has an important place in the repertoire of its instrument. This work is typically spare in his late style, and shows the depth of his lifelong admiration for Elizabethan lute songs. In each of the eight variations Britten focuses on a different feature of the work's theme, Dowland's song Come, Heavy Sleep, or its lute accompaniment, before the theme emerges complete at the close of the work.

In 2005, the Britten-Pears Foundation, in partnership with the University of East Anglia, was awarded funding from the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) to produce a thematic catalogue of Britten's works. The project is distinguished by being the first composer thematic catalogue to be published initially online. (All previous thematic catalogues have been print publications, though some have been published online later.) The work involves gathering and cataloguing manuscript and published notation and published recordings, producing a chronology, and assigning identifiers to Britten's works. These identifiers are in addition to Britten's own opus numbers and, after the style of preceding thematic catalogues such as BWV for J.S. Bach, comprise the letters 'BTC' followed by numbers assigned in chronological order. The catalogue includes numerous unpublished works and is expected, when completed in 2013, to include around 1,200 works. (Britten's published output includes around two hundred works, of which ninety five works were assigned opus numbers.)

Awards

• UNESCO’s International Rostrum of Composers 1961, (for A Midsummer Night's Dream)
• Grammy Awards 1963 – Classical Album of the Year, Best Classical Composition by a Contemporary Composer, Best Classical Performance – Choral (Other Than Opera) (all for War Requiem)
• Royal Philharmonic Society Gold Medal, 1964
• Sonning Award 1967 (Denmark)
• Ernst von Siemens Music Prize 1974
• BRIT Awards 1977 – Best Orchestral Album (of the past 25 years) (for War Requiem)
• Grammy Hall of Fame Award 1998 (for War Requiem)

Recordings by Britten

• Facets of Benjamin Britten Pearl, Pavilion Records (0220 GEM)
• Benjamin Britten – Premiere recordings 1938–46 Pearl, Pavilion Records (0002 GEM)
• Britten the Performer (BBC Legends Music)
• Benjamin Britten: In Rehearsal and Performance with Peter Pears

Biographies and profiles

• MusicWeb International. Benjamin Britten (1913–1976), by Rob Barnett
• Gresham College. 'Britten and Bridge', lecture and performance investigating the relation between the two composers, 5 February 2008 (available for download as text, audio or video file).
• On An Overgrown Path (blog). Photo essay on Britten's childhood home, November 2008.
• BBC. Audio (.ram files) of 1957 and 1963 interviews

Portraits

• National Portrait Gallery. Benjamin Britten, Baron Britten (1913–1976), 109 portraits.

Worklists and performances

• Scott Eric Smith. An extensive list of Benjamin Britten's works (archived / current)
• Britten-Pears Foundation/AHRC. A thematic catalogue of Britten's works (under development)
• Operabase. Recent and future performances of Britten operas.

Interpretations

• Britten: A Ceremony of Carols (op. 28). Choir of Trinity College, Cambridge/ Harp: Frances Kelly/ Conductor: Richard Marlow (1997)
• Britten: On This Island, Kishani Jayasinghe
• Britten: Cello Symphony performed by cellist Julian Lloyd Webber and the Academy of St Martin in the Fields conducted by Sir Neville Marriner
• University of Iowa. Audio recording of Lachrymae, Viola: Christine Rutledge, piano: Darlene Lawrence. Clapp Recital Hall (1998).