Benjamin Britten

Considered to be the greatest English composer of the 20th century, Benjamin Britten's modernism was applied to a wide range of forms, including vocal music ( War Requiem), opera ( Peter Grimes ) and orchestral music ( The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra and Simple Symphony). The son of a dentist and a singer in an amateur choir, he was born in Lowestoft, Suffolk, on November 22, 1913, and contracted pneumonia in infancy. In poor health, Edward Benjamin Britten learned to play the piano with his mother and began to write short pieces, then the viola with a family friend, who introduced him to the composer Frank Bridge. Bridge, impressed by the teenager's talents, invited him to London to become a pupil and take piano lessons with Harold Samuel. A String Quartet and Four French Songs were produced in 1928, before he continued his schooling at Holt in Norfolk. Awarded a scholarship, he entered the Royal College of Music two years later, where his teachers were John Ireland (composition) and Arthur Benjamin (piano). Awarded four prizes, the young Britten was more stimulated by concerts, giving him the opportunity to listen to works by Mahler, Stravinsky and two composers he wanted to learn from in Vienna, Alban Berg and Arnold Schönberg, but his parents were opposed. His Opus 1, the Sinfonietta (1932), is strongly inspired by Berg, while his oboe quartet dedicated to Léon Goossens, Phantasy, was performed at the BBC in 1933, as was the choral piece A Boy Was Born the following year by the BBC Singers. He worked for a time in radio, then joined the GPO Film Unit, an offshoot of the Royal Post Office, for which he composed music for the films The King's Stamp and Night Mail (1935), and where he met the poet W.H. Auden, with whom he collaborated on the song cycles Our Hunting Fathers (1936), On This Island (1937), the operetta Paul Bunyan (premiered in 1941) and Hymn to St. Cecilia. His interest in vocal works is evident in the forty or so compositions he wrote for radio(King Arthur), film(Love from a Stranger) and theater(The Ascent of F6, On the Frontier, Johnson Over Jordan). In addition to the death of his mother, 1937 was marked by the meeting of Peter Pears, a neighbor and tenor who was to become his muse and companion. That same year, Britten paid tribute to his former teacher in Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge, a work for string orchestra that proved an international success after its premiere at the Salzburg Festival. When war broke out in 1939, Britten, a convinced pacifist, flew with Pears to America and settled in New York, where he composed the Violin Concerto (1939), the Sinfonia da Requiem and The Illuminations after Rimbaud (1940) and An American Overture (1941). He met Aaron Copland and Colin McPhee, who introduced him to Balinese gamelan. However, American critics did not spare the composer, who returned to England in 1942, where he wrote A Ceremony of Carols and applied for conscientious objector status, which he obtained. After writing a Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings in 1943, he drew inspiration from George Crabbe's collection of poems The Borough for the opera Peter Grimes, premiered for the reopening of Sadler's Wells Theatre on June 7, 1945. It was such a triumph that the theatre's director called it "the first success for an English opera since Purcell, Gilbert and Sullivan aside." A few months later, Britten, Pears and soprano Joan Cross formed their own company, the English Opera Group. Asked to write the music for the educational film Instruments of the Orchestra, Britten delivers his most popular work, The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra, performed by the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Malcolm Sargent. Opera took center stage with The Rape of Lucretia (1946) and Albert Herring (1947) for the Glyndebourne Festival, followed by Billy Budd (1951), based on Herman Melville, premiered at Covent Garden. In 1948, he founded the Aldeburgh Festival near his home, inaugurated with the cantata Saint Nicolas and featuring A Midsummer Night's Dream (1960) and Death in Venice (1973). In 1953, he surprised the audience at the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II with Gloriana, created for the celebration at the Royal Opera House. The following year, he composed The Turn of the Screw (1954), after Henry James, for the Venice Biennale, premiered at La Fenice. Britten's chamber operas, using small vocal and orchestral forces, are characterized by a mixture of tonality and dissonance, the use of leitmotivs and variations, and the treatment of recurring subjects such as alienation, innocence, morality, justice and power. A trip to Asia in 1956 inspired the ballet The Prince of the Pagodas. In the 1960s, he turned his attention to his festival, building a large concert hall in a former brewery, Snape Maltings, which opened in 1967. Destroyed by fire two years later, it reopened in 1970. Britten befriended Mstislav Rostropovich, for whom he composed a Cello Symphony (1963), a Sonata (1961) and three Cello Suites (1965, 1968 and 1974). For four years, he worked on one of his greatest achievements, the War Requiem, an imposing work premiered in 1962 in the rebuilt Coventry Cathedral. For television, he composed the opera Owen Wingrave, completed in 1970. With the same librettist, Myfanwy Piper, he threw his last energies into the opera Death in Venice, after Thomas Mann, premiered on June 16, 1973. After heart surgery, in 1975 he composed a third String Quartet and the cantata Phaedra. Ennobled by the Queen in 1973, he received the title of Baron Britten, Lord of Aldeburgh, then the Ernst-von-Siemens Prize (1974), before dying of heart failure on December 4, 1976, at the age of 63.

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