Benjamin Britten

1913–1976, BRITISH

An internationally respected English composer, Britten is best known for his operas and his War Requiem. He developed his own musical language that was distinctively modern without abandoning melody or tonality.

BENJAMIN BRITTEN
Britten is seen here conducting in Berlin’s State Opera House (Staatsoper Unter den Linden) in 1968. He was a renowned conductor and pianist and performed many of his own works.

Edward Benjamin Britten was born in 1913 in Lowestoft, on the east coast of England. His father, a dentist, was indifferent to music, but his mother was an amateur musician, delighted to find in Benjamin a son who shared her tastes. He was sent to private schools that did nothing to encourage music, but at home he learned to play the piano and the viola. At the age of 12, he expressed enthusiasm for an orchestral piece by British composer Frank Bridge, heard at a concert. Through personal contacts his mother arranged for him to have composition lessons with Bridge, who became his musical mentor.

POSTER FOR PEACE, 1930s
An ardent pacifist and member of the Peace Pledge Union, Britten was awarded the status of conscientious objector in Britain in 1942 and unconditionally exempted from all military service.

Early compositions

In 1930, Britten won a scholarship to the Royal College of Music in London. While there, he produced his first compositions of note, including the choral work A Boy Was Born, which premiered on BBC radio in 1934. After college, he found employment writing music for the GPO Film Unit, which was then at the cutting edge of documentary filmmaking. This brought him into contact with the poet W.H. Auden, a leading left-wing intellectual, who was writing verse voice-overs for the films. In 1936, poet and composer collaborated on the celebrated documentary Night Mail, as well as on Britten’s first song cycle, Our Hunting Fathers. Both men were gay at a time when homosexual acts were illegal. Auden’s influence helped Britten come to terms with his sexuality. In 1937, the composer met the tenor Peter Pears, who was to be his lifelong companion. They would often give recitals together, as Britten was a first-rate piano accompanist.

FIRST IMPRESSIONS
The first draft of the opera Billy Budd is played to writer Ronald Duncan (center) and musician Arthur Oldham. At the piano, Britten accompanies Peter Pears singing one of the arias.

War and pacifism

The last years of the 1930s were dominated by the approach of World War II. Britten was an adherent of the pacifist Peace Pledge Union. In early 1939, he traveled with Pears to North America and, after the outbreak of war in September, stayed there, eventually joining Auden in New York. Self-exiles such as Britten and Auden were harshly criticized in Britain for failing to support the war effort against Nazi Germany. But the British authorities had no desire to stir up controversy by persecuting prominent conscientious objectors, and after Britten returned home in 1942—whiling away the journey by writing his choral work A Ceremony of Carols—he was left free to continue work as a musician.

The war years were a fertile time for Britten. His output included three notable song cycles—Les Illuminations (1940), Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo (1942), and the Serenade for Tenor, Horn, and Strings (1943)—as well as the Sinfonia da Requiem (1940), one of his most successful purely orchestral works. Above all, he produced the score for the opera Peter Grimes.

This powerful work brought together two of Britten’s deepest sources of inspiration—his love of the coast in the county of Suffolk, where the opera is set, and his sense of isolation as a homosexual, which he expressed through the character of Grimes, who is marginalized and finally driven to his death by a repressive society.

From its first performance in London in 1945, Peter Grimes was hailed as a masterpiece. In a series of operas over the following decade, from The Rape of Lucretia (1946) and Albert Herring (1967) to Billy Budd (1951) and The Turn of the Screw (1954), Britten in effect reestablished an English operatic tradition that had lapsed since the 17th century. In 1947, he set up the English Opera Group as a touring company performing chamber operas, and the following year founded the Aldeburgh Festival (see box). His status in British music was reflected by the Royal Opera House’s staging his Gloriana to mark the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953, although the opera proved too dark and challenging to satisfy celebratory expectations.

RUSSIAN FRIENDSHIP
The Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich (left) grasps Britten’s hand, after playing the composer’s Cello Sonata in his Aldeburgh music room. Russian soprano Galina Vishnevskaya and Swiss conductor Paul Sacher applaud in the background.

Popularity and innovation

Despite his growing fame, Britten’s sexuality kept him nervous of the police, who were conducting a virulent campaign against high-placed homosexuals in the early 1950s. He was rendered vulnerable not only by his relationship with Pears but by the attraction he felt for adolescent boys. These personal tensions informed some of his best-known works, notably Billy Budd and The Turn of the Screw, which depict children and adolescents as symbols of purity and innocence menaced by evil and corrupt forces. Britten also enjoyed writing music for children, including the much-played Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra (1945) and the one-act opera Noye’s Fludde (1958).

Cold War composition

In the context of the Cold War and the nuclear arms race of the 1950s and 1960s, Britten’s pacifism took on a fresh urgency and relevance. Premiered in 1962, his emotional and dramatic War Requiem intermingled the Latin Mass with settings of anti-war poems by Wilfred Owen. It was commissioned for performance in Coventry Cathedral, rebuilt after its destruction by aerial bombing during World War II. Appearing at a time of international crisis, when nuclear war between the Western powers and the Soviet Union seemed possible or even imminent, the work had an astonishing public impact for a piece of classical music, the first recording selling more than 200,000 copies in six months.

It was partly in protest at the Cold War division of the world that Britten pursued publicized friendships with the Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich and Soviet cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, for whom he wrote his Cello Symphony in 1963.

In the 1960s, Britten was frequently denounced as a musical reactionary by avant-garde critics and composers committed to the idea that 12-tone serialism was the only valid form of contemporary music. But his work continued to be innovative in its own distinctive way, in particular integrating influences from non- European musical traditions. His exquisite sequence of small-scale music dramas written between 1964 and 1969 (Curlew River, The Burning Fiery Furnace, and The Prodigal Son) drew inspiration from Japanese Noh theater and Balinese gamelan, among other sources. His opera Owen Wingrave, commissioned for television and broadcast in 1971, was far less successful, failing perhaps because of his lack of sympathy for the medium (he never owned a television set).

OPERA BY THE SEA
Cast members take to the stage during the first performance of “Grimes on the Beach,” a production of Britten’s opera Peter Grimes at the Aldeburgh Festival on June 17, 2013.

Final years

From 1957 to the end of his life, Britten lived with Pears at the Red House in Aldeburgh, on the same bleak Suffolk coast where he had been born. In declining health by the 1970s, he struggled through illness to finish his last major work, the opera Death in Venice. Thomas Mann’s story of a dying artist’s obsession with an idealized boy was of obvious personal significance to Britten. First performed in 1973, the work is generally judged one his finest achievements. Britten died of heart failure in 1976. He was buried in a simple churchyard in Aldeburgh, where Pears would later lie alongside him.