Benjamin Britten

British composer and pianist

• Born: November 22, 1913
• Birthplace: Lowestoft, Suffolk, England
• Died: December 4, 1976
• Place of death: Aldeburgh, Suffolk, England

The outstanding British composer of the mid-twentieth century, Britten established English opera as a viable form and produced a distinguished body of compositions for both professional and amateur musicians. He also was a skilled pianist and conductor, of both his own works and those of other composers.

Early Life

Benjamin Britten was born to Edith Roda (née Hockey) Britten, the secretary of the Lowestoft Choral Society and a fine amateur singer, and Robert Victor Britten, a successful dentist. Britten studied piano, first with his mother and then with a local teacher. He began composing at age five and continued while attending South Lodge Preparatory School in Lowestoft as a day student. He also studied viola, and when he was twelve, his teacher introduced him to the composer Frank Bridge, with whom he arranged private composition studies. Bridge, with whom he continued to work for many years, was the outstanding influence on Britten’s development as a composer and musician. Britten later remembered his childhood as idyllic, and this contributed to his later interest in writing music for children and his treatment of the theme of innocence betrayed.

In 1928, Britten embarked on two not very happy years at Gresham’s School in Holt, Norfolk, while at the same time beginning piano lessons with Harold Samuel in London and continuing his studies with Bridge. At age seventeen, deciding that music would be his career, he enrolled at the Royal College of Music in London, winning an open scholarship in composition. During his three years there, he made good progress in his piano studies with Arthur Benjamin, eventually taking his diploma as a performer. His composition studies with John Ireland were a disappointment, especially since he had already developed formidable technical skills from his studies with Bridge.

Britten had difficulty getting his works performed at the college, and his official Opus 1, the Sinfonietta for ten instruments, was premiered at a private concert in January, 1933. His other important works of this period included a String Quartet in D of 1931, the Phantasy Quartet for oboe and strings, first broadcast in 1933, and the choral variations A Boy Was Born of 1933. Many of these were later substantially revised. At the end of 1933, abandoning a plan to study composition with Alban Berg in Vienna owing to opposition from the college authorities, Britten settled down in London to make his living as a composer. One of his first tasks was to transform some of his earliest effort at composing into the Simple Symphony (1925) for performance in early 1934. His Phantasy Quartet was played at an International Society for Contemporary Music concert in Florence that April. On his return, he found that his father had died.

Photographs of Britten at this time show a serious but boyish-looking man with curly hair and a prominent nose, and he retained this appearance until his heart problems in the late 1960’s. Most portraits also show a trace of a smile that hints at his underlying sense of humor, but the eyes betray both his enormous determination and the high standards that he demanded of himself and his colleagues. He long retained the physique of the cricket player that he had been in his youth, but his outward relaxation only partly concealed inner tensions.

Britten was the consummate professional, both as composer and as performer, and he demanded no less of others. Although he believed strongly that music should be made available to performers at all levels, and himself wrote a distinguished body of works for nonprofessionals, he could not abide compositions or performances that were amateurish, sloppy, or poorly conceived. Britten was, however, deeply sensitive to criticism of his own work throughout his life.

Life’s Work

Britten’s first work as a professional composer was to provide music for films produced by the General Post Office Film Unit from 1934 to 1937. There he met the poet W. H. Auden, with whom he collaborated on such films as Coal Face (1936) and Night Mail (1936). Auden made a profound impact on Britten, stimulating his interest in poetry, espousing his own antibourgeois and generally leftist political views, and introducing the young composer to a group of like-minded, primarily gay intellectuals, which included himself and Christopher Isherwood. During this period, Britten also contributed music to a number of theatrical productions. His major composition was Our Hunting Fathers , a song cycle for soprano and large orchestra to a biting text by Auden concerning the relationship of humans to animals. It premiered at the Norwich Festival in 1936 and received a cool reception.

In 1937, Britten lost the support of his mother, who died in January, and the inspiration of Auden, who left England to participate in the Spanish Civil War. He did, however, form a lasting professional and personal relationship with the tenor Peter Pears. They gave their first song recital together later that year and virtually all of Britten’s solos for tenor voice were written for Pears’s unique talents. In the same year, Britten wrote his Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge for the Boyd Neel Orchestra to perform at the Salzburg Festival. This series of ten variations for string orchestra, both a technical tour de force and an affectionate tribute to his teacher, was a triumph and established Britten’s reputation beyond England.

Beginning in late 1937, Britten composed his song cycle On This Island (text by Auden), Mont Juic, an orchestral suite of Catalan dances written jointly with Lennox Berkeley, and the Piano Concerto (revised in 1945). By March, 1939, he had completed his Ballad of Heroes (text by Auden and Randall Swingler) in memory of Britons killed in Spain. In early 1939, against a background of worldwide economic depression and impending war, Auden and Isherwood left England for the United States intending to emigrate. Britten and Pears followed in May, traveling to Canada and then to New York. That year, Britten wrote his Violin Concerto, his Young Apollo for piano, string quartet, and string orchestra (withdrawn until 1979), the orchestral overture Canadian Carnival, and the song cycle for high voice and string orchestra Les Illuminations (text by Arthur Rimbaud). Britten was ill and homesick in early 1940 but still managed to complete his Sinfonia da Requiem, Diversions, and Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo for tenor and piano.

Britten’s major work from this period was the American folk opera Paul Bunyan (libretto by Auden), which premiered in May, 1941, deemed a failure and withdrawn. The most significant event of the period occurred in Los Angeles that summer when Britten read the transcript of a British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) radio talk by E. M. Forster on the Suffolk poet George Crabbe. After reading Crabbe’s poem The Borough (1810), Britten was struck with the realization that his own roots were in Suffolk and that the section of the poem describing the renegade fisherman Peter Grimes would make a suitable subject for an opera. In January, 1942, he received a commission for such an opera from the Koussevitzky Foundation, and he and Pears embarked for England by sea. During the voyage, he completed two of his most personal and enduring shorter works, A Hymn to St. Cecilia (text by Auden) for unaccompanied chorus, and Ceremony of Carols for treble voices and harp to mostly medieval texts.

On their return to Great Britain, the two musicians were granted conscientious objector status on the condition that they give recitals under the auspices of what was later to become the Arts Council of Great Britain. Britten’s American works were performed, and the next year, 1943, he composed his moving Serenade for tenor, horn, and string orchestra, the Prelude and Fugue for eighteen-part string orchestra, and several smaller choral works, including the cantata for chorus and organ Rejoice in the Lamb (text by Christopher Smart).

All this work was overshadowed by the composition of the opera Peter Grimes (libretto by Montague Slater) completed in February, 1945. It was chosen for the postwar reopening of Sadler’s Wells Theatre in June, 1945, with Pears in the title role. Despite difficulties encountered in rehearsals, it was a spectacular success. Within three years, it had been performed in Sweden, Switzerland, Germany, and the United States, and virtually by itself made English opera a viable form.

Peter Grimes was followed in 1946 by The Rape of Lucretia (libretto by Ronald Duncan), a chamber opera written for a breakaway group from the Sadler’s Wells Opera Company in conjunction with the new Glyndebourne Festival. It was not a success and was especially criticized for inserting Christian moralizing into a classical story. Other new works, written under the influence of the 250th anniversary of the death of Henry Purcell, were the song cycle The Holy Sonnets of John Donne (1945), the String Quartet no. 2 in C, and the Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Henry Purcell (1945), better known as The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra.

The failure of The Rape of Lucretia led to a rift with Glyndebourne and the creation of the nonprofit English Opera Group, dedicated to the creation of a repertory of English opera. Britten’s first work for the company, the comic chamber opera Albert Herring (libretto by Eric Crozier, based on a short story by Guy de Maupassant), written in 1947, was both a popular and a critical success. In the same year, Britten and Pears moved to the Suffolk village of Aldeburgh and launched the Aldeburgh Festival, designed to provide a platform for Britten’s own works and for the old and new music that he believed deserved a hearing. Britten appeared as artistic director, conductor, and pianist, as well as composer. His new work for the first festival in 1948 was the cantata Saint Nicolas, the first in a line of works in which he combined amateur and professional performers and required audience participation. The most famous of these were The Little Sweep in the 1949 “entertainment” Let’s Make an Opera, and Noye’s Fludde from 1957.

In 1947, Britten also wrote his Canticle I: My Beloved Is Mine (text by Francis Quarles), the song cycle A Charm of Lullabies, and his “realization” of John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera. His next major work was the Spring Symphony of 1949 for soloists, chorus, boys’ choir, and large orchestra, set to texts by English poets including John Milton, Robert Herrick, William Blake, and Auden. His next opera, Billy Budd (libretto by Forster and Crozier, based on Herman Melville’s tale), was commissioned by the Arts Council for the 1951 Festival of Britain. A big opera in every sense, from the size of the orchestra to its form in four acts (later reduced to two), it was an immediate critical success, although it did not win general public favor until nearly twenty years later. Britten’s other works from 1951 were his Canticle II: Abraham and Isaac for alto and tenor voices and piano, Six Metamorphoses After Ovid for unaccompanied oboe, and his “realization” of Henry Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, prepared in collaboration with Imogen Holst.

Gloriana (libretto by William Plomer after Lytton Strachey), an opera commissioned to mark the June, 1953, coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, is a character study of the aging queen as seen against the events of her reign. The opening night was a disaster and the opera was panned by most critics, although it was well received when staged again twelve years later. He next composed the song cycle Winter Words (text by Thomas Hardy) and began the opera The Turn of the Screw (libretto by Myfanwy Piper, based on a Henry James tale). The latter was premiered by the English Opera Group in Venice on September 15, 1954, and was a success. His other new work of 1954 was the Canticle III: Still Falls the Rain (text by Edith Sitwell) for tenor, horn, and piano.

In late 1955, Britten heard and was deeply impressed by Balinese gamelan music. This prompted his full-length ballet The Prince of the Pagodas, which was premiered at Covent Garden in 1957 and which initially failed. For the 1958 Aldeburgh Festival, he composed the six-part Songs from the Chinese for high voice and guitar and the children’s opera Noye’s Fludde. In 1958, he wrote only the Nocturne (texts by eight English poets) for tenor, seven obbligato instruments, and string orchestra, and the Six Hölderlin Fragments for voice and piano. In 1959, Britten composed the Cantata Academica, Carmen Basiliense, in honor of the five hundredth anniversary of the founding of Basel University, and the Missa Brevis in D for treble voices and organ. He also began his next opera, A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1960, libretto by Britten and Pears, adapted from William Shakespeare’s play). It was particularly successful in its music for the fairies (boys’ voices and countertenor) but betrays a certain lack of emotional involvement.

In 1960, Britten began his warm friendship with the Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, for whom he later wrote the Sonata in C in 1961, the Symphony for Cello and Orchestra in 1963, and the three suites for solo cello in 1964, 1967, and 1971. For Rostropovich’s wife, the soprano Galina Vishnevskaya, Britten also wrote The Poet’s Echo (text by Alexander Pushkin) in 1965 and the soprano solos in the War Requiem (1962, text from the Roman Catholic Mass for the Dead and poems by Wilfred Owen), a major work for soloists, chorus, boys’ choir, orchestra, chamber orchestra, and organ, written to celebrate the dedication of the rebuilt Coventry Cathedral. Written in memory of friends killed in World War II, it was Britten’s strongest musical statement as a pacifist and his most universally acclaimed work. Britten’s subsequent style became more severe and much less accessible, and none of his later works was as immediately well received by either the public or the critics.

In 1963, Britten and Pears visited the Soviet Union for a series of concerts, and Britten completed his Cantata Misericordium, written for the centennial of the Red Cross. This was followed in 1964 by the first of his Church Parables, Curlew River (libretto by Plomer), adapted from a fifteenth century Nō play that Britten and Pears had seen in Tokyo in 1956. The music, too, reflects a Japanese influence in its reliance on percussion and stylized gesture.

In 1965, Britten composed the cycle Songs and Proverbs of William Blake for the German baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, and the next year he completed his second Church Parable, The Burning Fiery Furnace (libretto by Plomer), and the “vaudeville” for boys’ voices and piano, The Golden Vanity (1967). For the 1967 Aldeburgh Festival, Britten, again in collaboration with Holst, produced another “realization” of a Purcell work, this time of The Fairy Queen. For the 1968 festival he wrote The Prodigal Son, his last Church Parable, and the “Ballad for Children’s Voices and Orchestra,” Children’s Crusade. He also rewrote and published several youthful works, a process he continued sporadically until his death.

In early 1969, Britten completed a Suite for Harp for the Welsh harpist Ossian Ellis, for whom, with Pears, he wrote his Canticle V: The Death of Saint Narcissus (text by T. S. Eliot) in 1974, A Birthday Hansel in 1975, and his last set of English folk-song arrangements in 1976. In the same year, Britten wrote the song cycle Who Are These Children? His next opera, Owen Wingrave (libretto by Piper, based on Henry James) was written especially for television. It was broadcast in May, 1971, but was not well received. For the Aldeburgh Festival of that year, he wrote his Canticle IV: The Journey of the Magi (text by Eliot).

In October, 1971, Britten began work on his last opera, Death in Venice (1973, libretto by Piper, based on Thomas Mann’s novella). It included a stunning and extremely demanding role for Pears, then in his early sixties, as the dying composer Aschenbach. Premiered in June, 1973, Death in Venice continued Britten’s exploration of themes exposed in his earlier operas and marked a partial return to a more lyrical style of writing. It was generally well received.

Before the premiere of Death in Venice, Britten had already suffered a debilitating stroke while undergoing a much-delayed heart operation. He could no longer conduct or play the piano and at first thought he would also be unable to compose. Beginning in early 1974, however, Britten began to revise some of his early unpublished works, including Paul Bunyan, and in July, he composed his Canticle V: The Death of Saint Narcissus. The other major works of his last years were Suite on English Folk Tunes for chamber orchestra, subtitled “A Time There Was . . . ,” of 1974; the settings of eight medieval lyrics for unaccompanied chorus, Sacred and Profane, of 1975; the dramatic cantata Phaedra (text by Racine in Robert Lowell’s translation), for mezzo-soprano, small orchestra, and harpsichord; and the moving and enigmatic String Quartet no. 3, also of 1975.

Britten’s last completed composition, perhaps fittingly, was the brief Welcome Ode, written in late 1976 for children’s chorus and orchestra, designed to welcome Queen Elizabeth II to Suffolk on her Silver Jubilee visit of 1977. When he died at Aldeburgh on December 4, 1976, he was at work on a setting of Edith Sitwell’s poem “Praise We Great Men” intended for his friend Rostropovich’s first concert as conductor of the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington, D.C., in 1977.

Significance

Britten established English opera, which had been dormant since the death of Purcell, as a viable art form. He also founded the English Opera Group to perform English operas and the Aldeburgh Festival to provide them with a venue, even though most of his own operas were, almost from their inception, performed throughout the Western world. He composed a distinguished body of vocal and instrumental works, which, despite the fact that they were written for the talents of specific performers, also joined the standard repertoire. In general, his earliest works, written before his return from the United States, and the latest, beginning with the three Church Parables, were the slowest to gain general acceptance.

Britten drastically altered the status of the English composer and musician in his own country and gained for him new respect in the wider world. If his music is primarily appreciated in his native England, he is hardly so insular a figure as were virtually all of his predecessors and most of his contemporaries. He was also the first major composer to benefit fully from the technology of sound recordings and to have supervised and participated actively in the recording of virtually every one of his own compositions and a large number of works by composers whom he loved and admired.

His musical style is basically conservative and essentially tonal, although it can include a high level of dissonance. He did not employ serial techniques, although he admired the music of Berg, and was therefore accused in his own lifetime of being a reactionary. He believed in the importance of textural clarity and was especially inspired by Gustav Mahler’s use of instruments; as a result, he was often criticized for excessive simplicity. His use of traditional formal devices such as the passacaglia, recitative, and various dance forms in his compositions was meant as a sincere gesture of homage to the music of his predecessors, most especially Purcell, but in his earlier works often provoked accusations of technical brilliance without original content.

The pervading themes in Britten’s works were drawn from his own experience, but his works are not autobiographical. The story of the misunderstood outsider, Peter Grimes, ultimately destroyed by the attitudes of society, may have represented Britten’s own worst fears about his return to Great Britain, but the subject itself was a common one in the first half of the twentieth century, and had been treated by, among others, Berg in Wozzeck (1925) an opera that Britten knew. The theme of the corruption of innocence, so central to Britten’s output, is dealt with by Igor Stravinsky (hardly a kindred spirit) in The Rake’s Progress (1951), while the question of the role of the artist in society is the prevailing theme of Paul Hindemith’s operas Cardillac (1926) and Mathis der Maler (1938). Britten’s works stand on their own intrinsic merit, surviving because they are idiomatic yet challenging for the performer and rewarding if also challenging for the listener.

Britten was the most honored English composer of his time as well as the most gifted. He was made Companion of Honour in 1952, given the Order of Merit in 1965, and finally created a life peer, Lord Britten of Aldeburgh, in 1976. He was surrounded to the end by friends with whom he worked and relaxed and for whom he wrote much of his music, and the majority of his works were public and critical successes. Yet Britten still felt himself a somewhat misunderstood outsider, and this theme in itself a metaphor for much of twentieth century art runs like a thread through his life and music.

Bibliography

Brett, Philip, ed. Benjamin Britten: “Peter Grimes.” New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983. A collection of essays on the composition, analysis, and criticism of the opera Peter Grimes, including reprints of several articles and much new material.

Evans, Peter. The Music of Benjamin Britten. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1979. A detailed discussion of Britten’s music and his compositional style.

Felsenfeld, David. Britten and Barber: Their Lives and Their Music. Pompton Plains, N.J.: Amadeus Press, 2005. Includes a brief biography, essays about Britten and composer Samuel Barber and analyses of four of Britten’s compositions recorded on an accompanying compact disc.

Holst, Imogen. Britten. 1966. 3d ed. London: Faber & Faber, 1980. A charming and perceptive biography written by Britten’s musical assistant from 1952 to 1964, who was also artistic director of the Aldeburgh Festival from 1956 to 1977. Aimed primarily at children, the book contains numerous illustrations and musical examples that can be played or sung.

Kennedy, Michael. Britten. Rev. ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. This biography places Britten’s life within the context of historical and social events. The revised edition features updated material, including a chapter on Britten’s posthumously published compositions.

Kildea, Paul Francis. Selling Britten: Music and the Marketplace. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Describes how Britten’s relations with record companies, the English Opera Group, music festivals, and other commercial and national institutions influenced his compositions.

Mitchell, Donald. Britten and Auden in the Thirties: The Year 1936. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1981. Covers a crucial period in Britten’s personal and artistic development. Contains extensive quotations from Britten’s diaries.

Palmer, Christopher, ed. The Britten Companion. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984. Contains short essays on Britten the composer, the Church Parables, and the vocal and instrumental works by categories, as well as individual essays on each opera, several of which are reprinted from other sources.

White, Eric Walter. Benjamin Britten: His Life and Operas. Rev. ed. Edited by John Evans. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983. A pioneering study, substantially rewritten in 1970 and updated again in 1983, by a longtime friend of the composer. White includes a biographical sketch and perceptive discussions of each of the operas.