Benjamin Britten

Benjamin Britten in 1968

Benjamin Britten (Edward Benjamin Britten, Baron Britten, 1913–1976) was an English composer, perhaps best known for his operas including Peter Grimes, Albert Herring, and Billy Budd, as well as The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra and his War Requiem.

Early life

Britten was born in Lowestoft, Suffolk, on 22 November 1913, the feast day of Cecilia, patron saint of music. His childhood bedroom window looked out over the sea, which from childhood became a constant source of inspiration. As an adult he commented that he needed to live near water, a desire that comes from his youthful enjoyment of living so near the coast. "As a family," he was later to say, "we were enormously interested in the fishing. We had our favourite boats and knew all their names."

His mother Edith was an enthusiastic amateur pianist and singer and although she encouraged all of her children (Britten had three siblings) to play the piano it was Benjamin whom she regarded as specially gifted. He was educated in Lowestoft and at Gresham's School at Holt, Norfolk. Formal music lesson began with the piano at five and the viola at the age of 10. His viola teacher Audrey Alston arranged for him to meet the composer Frank Bridge whose orchestral suite The Sea had by Britten’s own admission "knocked [him] sideways". Bridge agreed to given tuition to Britten who had by this time already written a large volume of music. These important lessons, however, influenced the way he was to view his output and trained him to become more critical of his work. Between the ages of five and 18 he composed well over 750 individual pieces, including songs, chamber music and full scale orchestral works. He kept everything and on occasion revised it. The earliest of these pieces is his Simple Symphony of 1934, which is based on piano music composed between the ages of nine and 12. He returned to his juvenilia throughout his life, re-examining it, sometimes with a view toward publication. The String Quartet in D major of 1931 is the last of these revised scores, and Britten worked on it only two years before his death.

Britten entered the Royal College of Music, having won an open scholarship in 1930, where his teachers included John Ireland and Arthur Benjamin and it was here that he produced his Opus 1, the Sinfonietta for small orchestra. This was dedicated to Bridge but a more stated acknowledgement of his gratitude appeared later with his work for string orchestra, the Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge (op. 10), premiered by the Boyd Neel Orchestra in the Netherlands in 1937. On graduation Britten supported himself by writing music for theatre, radio and film, working with people such as poet W H Auden who produced the texts for GPO (General Post Office) film documentaries such as Coal Face (1935) and Night Mail (1936).

Britten and Pears

Britten met the tenor Peter Pears (b. 1910) during the mid-1930s (neither one could recall exactly when) and this was the beginning of a lifelong personal and professional partnership. They travelled together to the United States in 1939 to explore new opportunities in their careers. During their three years there Britten composed significant new scores such as the technically challenging but dazzling Violin Concerto (op. 15, 1939), the Sinfonia da Requiem (op. 20, 1940) which he dedicated eventually to the memory of his parents, and the American folktale-based operetta Paul Bunyan (op. 17, 1941) to a libretto by Auden. It was in the USA that Britten and Pears established their life partnership and although they were prevented from legally living openly together they travelled and lived as a couple settling for a time in the family home of William and Elizabeth Mayer, German emigres who lived in Amity, Long Island.

Eventually, homesick, concerned about family and friends, and with a desire to begin work in Suffolk on a new opera commissioned by the Russian-born American conductor Serge Koussevitzky, Britten returned to England at the height of the Second World War. Both he and Pears were ardent pacifists and believed that they could best serve their fellow human being at this troubled time through their music. They registered as Conscientious Objectors, taking work for CEMA (Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts) which involved much touring, bringing music to various parts of the war-torn country. Pears also became Britten’s principal source of inspiration: song cycles including the Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo (op. 22, 1940), the Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings (op. 31, 1943) and the Holy Sonnets of John Donne (op. 35, 1945), the Thomas Hardy settings Winter Words (op. 52, 1953) and Nocturne (op. 60, 1958) were all composed very much with Pears's voice in mind: he premiered the Michelangelo and Donne sonnets and Hardy poems with Britten accompanying him at the piano, and these works received multiple performances during their many recitals together. Pears also introduced audiences to many of Britten's major operatic roles, beginning in 1945 with Peter Grimes (op.33), the opera Koussevitzky had commissioned, and the first work staged at Sadler’s Wells theatre following the end of the War. Grimes ushered a resurgence in interest and enthusiasm for opera in English and proved to be a great success. It was based on part of a poem by the Aldeburgh-born poet George Crabbe and focused on a community whose lives and attitudes were shaped by the sometimes brutal east coast.

English Opera Group

In 1947 Britten and Pears helped form a new opera company, originally based at Glyndebourne. His first two works for the company were the chamber operas The Rape of Lucretia (op. 37, 1946) which retold the classical story of Lucretia and Tarquinius and featured Kathleen Ferrier in the title role, and Albert Herring (op. 39, 1947) a humorous retelling of a short story by Guy de Maupassant, reset in Suffolk. Although both operas were first staged at Glyndebourne, the company, now known as The English Opera Group, worked independently and it was for them that Britten wrote almost all remaining operatic works.

Although most of his film work was confined to productions for the GPO and Crown Film Units, Britten wrote the score for a film for the Ministry of Education entitled Instruments of the Orchestra. A set of variations and fugue based on music from Henry Purcell’s incidental music for Aphra Behn’s play Abdelazar, or the Moor’s Revenge, it became a concert piece in its own right, The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra (op. 34), possibly his most well-known and widely performed work. Britten’s prolific operatic output included the children’s opera The Little Sweep (op. 45, 1949) which is coupled with a play about putting a stage work together called Let’s Make an Opera. In 1951 he composed Billy Budd, after the story by Herman Melville, for the Festival of Britain. Gloriana (op. 53) was written in honour of Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation in 1953 and did not prove to be a critical success, although subsequent revivals of the work have revised opinion. In 1954 he returned to the chamber opera format and composed The Turn of the Screw (op. 54), after the ghost story by Henry James, which was premiered at the Festival of Contemporary Music in Venice in 1954. With its small cast of characters and orchestra of 13 players the opera recreates the mounting tension and suspense that is integral to James’s story, with Britten suggesting settings as diverse as a peaceful summer’s evening and a disturbing, haunted house.

Britten at Aldeburgh

** Editing in Progress**

According to Operabase, Britten has more operas played worldwide than any other composer born in the 20th century, and only Puccini and Richard Strauss come ahead of him if the list is extended to all operas composed after 1900.

He shared a house for a while with the composer Lennox Berkeley. In 1936 he met the tenor Peter Pears who became his life partner. In 1939 they moved to America. They returned in 1942, registering as conscientious objectors, and moved to The Red House in Aldeburgh, Suffolk. In 1948 they founded the Aldeburgh Festival.

Britten declined a knighthood, but accepted a life peerage a few months before his death.