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Read on for our guide to the great 20th-century British composer Benjamin Britten. <\/p>
Benjamin Britten was one of the most significant composers of the 20th century, prolific across opera, song, chamber music<\/a><\/strong>, sacred music and much more. <\/p> A list of Britten’s greatest and most famous works would include:<\/p> Benjamin Britten had a long-term relationship with the great tenor Peter Pears<\/a><\/strong>. 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<\/em><\/strong><\/a>, which Pears first sang at London’s Sadler\u2019s Wells in June 1945. <\/p> Other major roles written By Britten for Pears included the title role in\u00a0Albert<\/em><\/strong><\/a> Herring<\/em><\/strong><\/a>\u00a0(1947), Captain Vere in\u00a0Billy<\/em><\/strong><\/a> Budd<\/em><\/strong><\/a>\u00a0(1951), Peter Quint in\u00a0The<\/em><\/strong><\/a> Turn of the Screw<\/em><\/strong><\/a>\u00a0(1954), and Gustav von Aschenbach in\u00a0Death in Venice<\/em><\/strong><\/a>\u00a0(1973). The couple’s most important enterprise, however, was undounbtedly the foundation of the adventurous Aldeburgh Festival<\/a><\/strong>, on the picturesque Suffolk coast, in 1948.<\/p> Britten and Pears lived in the idyllic Suffolk coastal town of Aldeburgh, where they founded their festival.<\/p> Since his death in 1976, interest in Benjamin Britten\u2019s 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. <\/p> But if Britten\u2019s stock is high now, it was not always so. In the US edition of Themes and Variations<\/em>, the fifth of his books with Robert Craft, Stravinsky<\/strong><\/a> described the War Requiem<\/em> (1962) as \u2018a Honegger-type cinemascope epic in idiom derived in part from Boulanger-period Stravinsky\u2019, and belittled the music for concerning itself with \u2018patterns rather than inventions\u2019.<\/p> Like much of Britten\u2019s music of the Sixties, the War Requiem<\/em> 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. <\/p> Buried away in the Suffolk fishing town of Aldeburgh, he seemed to fight shy of the \u2018fashionable\u2019, preferring instead to write mainly for sympathetic colleagues for performances at the annual Aldeburgh Festival. \u2018I believe in roots, in associations, in backgrounds, in personal relationships,\u2019 he wrote, in what amounts to his artistic credo, On Receiving the First Aspen Award<\/em> (1964), and he always trusted his innate musicality to a degree that made him confident of his creative path.<\/p> The extraordinary fluency of Britten\u2019s compositional technique was evident early on, encouraged by his adoring yet dominating mother, and honed into shape with lessons from Frank Bridge<\/strong><\/a>, 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. <\/p> During the war-torn Forties, Britten\u2019s 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\u2019s new associates and affiliations.<\/p> 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 \u201930s were flawed, so little were they performed. Only in the years since the composer\u2019s death has the stylistic significance of his 1930s works been fully recognised. <\/p> The sound-world of Our Hunting Fathers<\/em>, of the Piano and Violin Concertos, and of the Sinfonia da Requiem <\/em>fed into his technical armoury and moved him towards the goal of Peter Grimes<\/em> (1945), as did the masses of incidental music for radio, film and theatre that he composed in the 1930s and \u201940s.<\/p> 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<\/a><\/strong>.<\/p> 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 \u2018choral operetta\u2019 Paul Bunyan<\/em>, to a libretto by WH Auden. Britten and Auden withdrew Bunyan after its New York premiere, but it demonstrates Britten\u2019s knowledge of the American musical, country and blues idioms \u2013 a far cry from the overtly English Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings <\/em>(1943) that launched his post-US career in England.<\/p> 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 \u2018Europeanisation\u2019 through works such as Les Illuminations<\/em>, the Frank Bridge Variations and the Michelangelo Sonnets<\/em>, and his \u2018Americanisation\u2019 in works such as Paul Bunyan, Canadian Carnival<\/em> and American Overture<\/em>, came to an abrupt end with his return in 1942. <\/p> Having made the decision to leave the US, he immediately embraced his Englishness and the English language, turning to Purcell<\/a><\/strong> and to folk music<\/a><\/strong> arrangements during his last months in New York. A Ceremony of Carols<\/a><\/strong><\/em>, 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<\/em> and the sequence of Church Parables of the Sixties.<\/p>What are Benjamin Britten’s best known works?<\/h2>
Who was Benjamin Britten’s partner?<\/h2>
Where did he live?<\/h2>
A fashionable composer?<\/h2>
The Thirties: left-wing intellectual leanings<\/h2>
Benjamin Britten in America<\/h2>