Benjamin Britten
(1913–1976)
Who Was
Benjamin Britten?
A Brief Introduction
By John Bridcut
Benjamin Britten was one of the greatest British composers of the 20th century, not least because of his wide international reach. When many other composers were discarding time-honored methods in favor of electronics and avant-garde techniques, Britten showed there were new and original ways to refresh tonality, without being hidebound by tradition. Half a century after his early death in 1976, his music has shown real staying power, whether his solo song cycles, his chamber music, or (most of all) his operas: Peter Grimes (1945) is now performed all over the world. But his large orchestral and choral pieces are also taken up internationally, such as his wickedly clever Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra (1945), or his War Requiem of 1962 which speaks to audiences now as profoundly as it did at the height of the Cold War.
Early Years: The Fourth B
Benjamin Britten’s birthday was November 22—the feast day of Saint Cecilia, patron saint of music. To his doting mother in the town of Lowestoft, it was a good omen: his composing prowess as a teenager led her to fantasize that he could be “the fourth B,” in the footsteps of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. (At that time neither Berlioz nor Bruckner stood a chance.) At 16, he wrote the simple but perfect choral anthem A Hymn to the Virgin (1930) in his school sick bay. He studied with two composers: Frank Bridge (happily) and John Ireland (unhappily). He adored the music of Beethoven, but his tastes ranged wider thanks to radio and 78 rpm records. His first commissions were for documentary film scores such as Night Mail (1936), on which he collaborated with the poet W. H. Auden and learned to work quickly on a shoe-string budget.
His composing prowess as a teenager led [his mother] to fantasize that he could be “the fourth B,” in the footsteps of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms.
In 1939 he moved to the United States, where two major orchestral pieces, his Violin Concerto (1939) and the Sinfonia da Requiem (1940), burnished his reputation. But Paul Bunyan (1941), his operetta for Columbia University, had less success. In the US, he and the British tenor Peter Pears began a lifelong partnership, both musical and personal. Homesick, they risked a perilous wartime voyage across the Atlantic in 1942, arriving in England with two new manuscripts in Britten’s baggage.
Middle Period: Returning to his Roots
The trigger for the return home had been a chance sighting of poetry by George Crabbe, an 18th-century poet from Suffolk, the English county where Britten had been raised. He was captivated by Crabbe’s account of a brutal fisherman, Peter Grimes, which “in a flash” he saw as ripe for an opera, and before leaving America, he won a $1,000 commission from the conductor Serge Koussevitsky (worth about $22,000 today). Britten set up home near Aldeburgh on the beautiful, often bleak, East Anglian coast, and spent the remaining war years working on Peter Grimes, which premiered in London to great acclaim a month after VE Day.
Britten set up home near Aldeburgh on the beautiful, often bleak, East Anglian coast, and spent the remaining war years working on Peter Grimes.
The two choral pieces he had written mid-Atlantic, A Ceremony of Carols and Hymn to Saint Cecilia (both 1942), quickly became staples in the Britten repertoire, as did the Serenade for Tenor, Horn, and Strings (1943), which showed his mastery in setting English poetry to music. He embarked on a series of chamber operas, such as his masterpiece The Turn of the Screw (1954), for only 13 instruments, which he miraculously contrived to resemble a full orchestra. Later the forces were further reduced for his three “church parables,” of which Curlew River (1964), a Japanese Noh-play set in East Anglia, is the most poignant.
In 1962, his fame reached its apogee with War Requiem, written for the rebuilding of the bombed Coventry Cathedral. He interwove the Latin requiem mass with war poems by Wilfred Owen—a powerful cocktail, and the recording sold 200,000 copies in a year.
He founded the Aldeburgh Festival of Music and the Arts, which still thrives today on a musical diet of Britten and contemporary music. One of the many friends invited to perform was the Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, who inspired Britten, in the footsteps of J. S. Bach, to write three matchless suites for unaccompanied cello (1964–1971).
Britten: Suite No. 3 for Cello, Op. 87
Late Period: Endgame
Britten often had ailments, but a prognosis in 1971 was more serious: he needed urgent heart surgery. He insisted, however, on completing his 16th opera, Death in Venice (1973), based on Thomas Mann’s novella about an aging writer’s infatuation with a beautiful young boy. It was a theme all too close to Britten’s own feelings throughout his life, in parallel with his love for Pears, who observed: “Ben is writing an evil opera, and it’s killing him”.
Britten missed the premiere, because he had been under the surgeon’s knife, and never properly recovered. For a while, he lost faith in his own creativity. But he proved himself with two remarkable works in 1975: Phaedra, a cantata for the mezzo-soprano Janet Baker, and his Third String Quartet, almost thirty years after his Second. He allowed his first operatic venture, Paul Bunyan, to be revived, and tearfully confessed he had not realized how strong it was. He himself was increasingly frail, and two weeks after a gentle celebration of his 63rd birthday (with champagne), he died on December 4, 1976, in Pears’s arms. His death led the news on the BBC and reverberated around the world. At the funeral, his music came full circle with the singing of his schoolboy anthem, A Hymn to the Virgin.
Britten: Quartet No. 3 for Strings, Op. 94
Legacy
Britten was not just a great composer, but also a top-rank pianist and conductor, so his prime legacy is Decca’s catalog of his performances of his own music, which remain the benchmark for more recent competitors. His teacher Frank Bridge encouraged him to be true to himself, and his music has an unmistakable character, not least in the skillful word-setting he had picked up from the 17th-century composer Henry Purcell, the orchestration he came to admire in Elgar, and the stagecraft and timing of Verdi. But his frequent use of boys’ voices was his own particular talent.
Most composers suffer years of neglect after their death. Not Britten. His place in the musical pantheon has grown ever more secure. The social issues he confronted (mental illness, abuse of children or women, pacifism, the power of the mob) keep his operas relevant today: the edgy treatment of Death in Venice is a core part of his legacy, admired for its originality, its beauty, and its courage. Scratch the surface of many modern operas, and you find Britten underneath.
Most composers suffer years of neglect after their death. Not Britten. His place in the musical pantheon has grown ever more secure.
Watching and Listening
As a teenager, Britten dabbled with chamber music, but his three mature string quartets are foremost in this area. All self-respecting quartet groups today include them in their repertoire: indeed, they feature regularly at the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center.
The First was commissioned by the American music patron Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge in 1941, and grabs attention at the start with a high-lying cluster of notes in the violins and viola, accompanied by plucked notes on the cello, adding up to a D major chord. No string quartet had sounded like that before. The Second followed four years later, with an equally original opening and an elaborate chaconne for the finale, written in tribute to Purcell and ending with no fewer than 23 chords of C major (one of Britten’s favorite keys). The Third was written for the Amadeus quartet in 1975: its scoring is pared down, but touching with its quotations from Death in Venice, amid a mood of resignation, interspersed with moments of fierce energy which show the frail composer was mentally as vigorous as ever. There are numerous commercial recordings of all three, with those by the Takács and Belcea quartets outstanding.
