Read on for our guide to the great 20th-century British composer Benjamin Britten.
Who was Benjamin Britten?
Benjamin Britten was one of the most significant composers of the 20th century, prolific across opera, song, chamber music, sacred music and much more.
What are Benjamin Britten’s best known works?
A list of Britten’s greatest and most famous works would include:
- The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra (1945)
- War Requiem (1962)
- Piano Concerto (1938, revised 1945)
- The Turn of the Screw (opera – 1954)
- Peter Grimes (opera – 1945). We named this dark and griping work one of the greatest operas of all time
- Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge (1937)
- String Quartet No. 2 (1945)
Who was Benjamin Britten’s partner?
Benjamin Britten had a long-term relationship with the great tenor Peter Pears. The latter was both Britten’s personal and professional partner. The composer wrote a series of major operatic roles for him, including most famously the gruff title character in Peter Grimes, which Pears first sang at London’s Sadler’s Wells in June 1945.
Other major roles written By Britten for Pears included the title role in Albert Herring (1947), Captain Vere in Billy Budd (1951), Peter Quint in The Turn of the Screw (1954), and Gustav von Aschenbach in Death in Venice (1973). The couple’s most important enterprise, however, was undounbtedly the foundation of the adventurous Aldeburgh Festival, on the picturesque Suffolk coast, in 1948.
Where did he live?
Britten and Pears lived in the idyllic Suffolk coastal town of Aldeburgh, where they founded their festival.
A fashionable composer?
Since his death in 1976, interest in Benjamin Britten’s music has grown greater, perhaps, than when he was alive. There have been excellent new recordings of his works to add to his own authoritative series for Decca; his operas have flourished in productions both traditional and avant-garde; and new biographies, scholarly assessments of the works and doctoral dissertations have appeared with regularity.
But if Britten’s stock is high now, it was not always so. In the US edition of Themes and Variations, the fifth of his books with Robert Craft, Stravinsky described the War Requiem (1962) as ‘a Honegger-type cinemascope epic in idiom derived in part from Boulanger-period Stravinsky’, and belittled the music for concerning itself with ‘patterns rather than inventions’.
Like much of Britten’s music of the Sixties, the War Requiem achieved great success with audiences, though fuelled condemnation from the musical movers and shakers. Britten, we now know, was aware of his unfashionable status, and was occasionally depressed by it.
Buried away in the Suffolk fishing town of Aldeburgh, he seemed to fight shy of the ‘fashionable’, preferring instead to write mainly for sympathetic colleagues for performances at the annual Aldeburgh Festival. ‘I believe in roots, in associations, in backgrounds, in personal relationships,’ he wrote, in what amounts to his artistic credo, On Receiving the First Aspen Award (1964), and he always trusted his innate musicality to a degree that made him confident of his creative path.
The Thirties: left-wing intellectual leanings
The extraordinary fluency of Britten’s compositional technique was evident early on, encouraged by his adoring yet dominating mother, and honed into shape with lessons from Frank Bridge, and from John Ireland at the Royal College of Music. However, it was somehow not quite decent to have such a precocious talent emerge from the provinces, and the consequent charges of cleverness from the critics haunted Britten throughout the politically charged Thirties.
During the war-torn Forties, Britten’s close contact with WH Auden, Christopher Isherwood and other left-wing intellectuals then working at the Group and Left Theatres, the GPO Film Unit and the BBC, was undoubtedly the cause of further critical antagonism. Even such loyal friends as the Bridges were not a little suspicious of the composer’s new associates and affiliations.
It seems that the parochialism of English musical criticism rubbed off on the composer himself, for, in later life, he came to believe that many of his major works from the ’30s were flawed, so little were they performed. Only in the years since the composer’s death has the stylistic significance of his 1930s works been fully recognised.
The sound-world of Our Hunting Fathers, of the Piano and Violin Concertos, and of the Sinfonia da Requiem fed into his technical armoury and moved him towards the goal of Peter Grimes (1945), as did the masses of incidental music for radio, film and theatre that he composed in the 1930s and ’40s.
Benjamin Britten in America
Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears lived in America from 1939 to 1942, following Auden and Isherwood over the Atlantic and settling in New York. While there, Britten met and befriended the great American composer Aaron Copland.
If the rehabilitation of the early works has made us reassess our understanding of Britten, the music of his North American years has also been recaptured. The composer started this off in his very last years, by undertaking a full-scale revision of his forgotten 1941 ‘choral operetta’ Paul Bunyan, to a libretto by WH Auden. Britten and Auden withdrew Bunyan after its New York premiere, but it demonstrates Britten’s knowledge of the American musical, country and blues idioms – a far cry from the overtly English Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings (1943) that launched his post-US career in England.
Disenchanted with the American dream, Britten returned home at the height of the war, yet his experience abroad proved to be a rite of passage that put him back on course. His stylistic ‘Europeanisation’ through works such as Les Illuminations, the Frank Bridge Variations and the Michelangelo Sonnets, and his ‘Americanisation’ in works such as Paul Bunyan, Canadian Carnival and American Overture, came to an abrupt end with his return in 1942.
Having made the decision to leave the US, he immediately embraced his Englishness and the English language, turning to Purcell and to folk music arrangements during his last months in New York. A Ceremony of Carols, which was written on the homeward voyage across the U-boat ridden North Atlantic, embodies the authentic English voice of Britten and anticipates the ritual element of his later works, notably the Canticles and the sequence of Church Parables of the Sixties.
Why did Britten go to the Far East?
Much has been written about Britten’s subsequent trip to the Far East in 1955/56. Donald Mitchell and Mervyn Cooke have examined the purely musical and musico-dramatic relationships between the Balinese gamelan, Japanese imperial court music and the restrained dramatic form of the Noh-play tradition. Britten successfully synthesized elements of each into works such as The Prince of the Pagodas and the Church Parables.
Philip Brett has also suggested links between Britten’s attraction to the exotic sonorities of the Orient and his sexual orientation. He was the first to openly discuss Britten’s homosexuality in relation to his output, attempting to decode the exact nature of the powerful moral and emotional dilemma encapsulated in many of Britten’s stage works, from Peter Grimes and The Turn of the Screw to A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Owen Wingrave.
It is clear from so many of Britten’s subsequent works that the tensions and frustrations within the composer were essential to his creative energy: when he flexed against this life of order, Britten’s achievements are of the very highest level. His rare balance of tradition and innovation has allowed him to emerge alongside Janáček and Shostakovich, if not as one of the iconoclasts, then as one of the central figures of 20th-century European music.
What did Britten compose for the Royal Family?
Benjamin Britten composed no fewer than four works for the Royal Family. These include, perhaps most famously, the National Anthem of Great Britain, a 1962 choral and orchestral arrangement of God Save the Queen composed by Britten. The arrangement was written for the Leeds Festival. Other works composed for royal occasions include Gloriana, an opera composed in 1953 to celebrate the coronation of Elizabeth II and following a period in the life of royal namesake Elizabeth I. There’s also Welcome Ode, Britten’s last ever completed work. Written for the Queen’s visit to Ipswich for the 1977 Silver Jubilee, Welcome Ode was performed by local schoolchildren.
When did Benjamin Britten die?
Britten died of heart failure in is beloved Aldeburgh, on 4 December 1976 at the age of 63.
Where is he buried?
A major figure in British cultural life, and an important contributor of music for royal occasions, Britten was allocated a burial place within Westminster Abbey. Britten, though, had been quite clear that he wanted to be buried side by side with his beloved Peter Pears in the graveyard at Aldeburgh parish church.
Philip Reed