Benjamin Britten was an English composer, conductor and pianist. He was a central figure of 20th-century British classical music, with a range of works including opera, other vocal music, orchestral and chamber pieces.
Background
Britten was born in the fishing port of Lowestoft in Suffolk, on the east coast of England on 22 November 1913. He was the youngest of four children of Robert Victor Britten and his wife Edith Rhoda, nee Hockey. He showed talent from an early age.
Education
Born in Lowestoft, Suffolk, Benjamin Britten had a normal preparatory school education, at the same time studying with some of the best musicians in England. At the age of 16 he entered the Royal College of Music on a scholarship.
His teachers included Frank Bridge, John Ireland, and Arthur Benjamin; under the last two he studied at the Royal College of Music, London (1930 - 1933).
Career
Early in his career he wrote a moderate amount of solo and ensemble music for instruments, among which is The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra (1946), comprising variations and fugue on a theme by Henry Purcell, and later he composed several big works for the cello.
Britten's strengths are his masterful handling of choral sonorities, alone or in conjunction with instruments, his imaginative treatment of the word-music relationship, his sharp sense for the immediate theatrical effect, and his unusual interest and skill in writing music for children.
In September 1928 Britten went as a boarder to Gresham's School, in Holt, Norfolk. At the time he felt unhappy there, even writing in his diary of contemplating suicide or running away: he hated being separated from his family, most particularly from his mother; he despised the music master; and he was shocked at the prevalence of bullying, though he was not the target of it. He remained there for two years and in 1930, he won a composition scholarship at the Royal College of Music (RCM) in London; his examiners were the composers John Ireland and Ralph Vaughan Williams and the college's harmony and counterpoint teacher, S P Waddington.
In February 1935, at Bridge's instigation, Britten was invited to a job interview by the BBC's director of music Adrian Boult and his assistant Edward Clark. Britten was not enthusiastic about the prospect of working full-time in the BBC music department and was relieved when what came out of the interview was an invitation to write the score for a documentary film, The King's Stamp, directed by Alberto Cavalcanti for the GPO Film Unit.
Prior to World War II Britten furnished music for a number of plays and documentary films.
He also continued with other composing, the most prominent item being the Variations on a Theme by Frank Bridge (1937), his first major success.
He lived in the United States from 1939 to 1942.
Despite the turmoil of war, the period from 1939 to 1945 was a highly creative one for him, climaxed by the production of his opera Peter Grimes (1945).
Britten's performance skills were impressive, but even more so were the amount and variety of music he composed.
Quite in the British tradition, though, music employing voices far outweighs the purely instrumental in his output.
He wrote over 100 songs, mainly organized in the form of song cycles or solo cantatas, which he called "canticles, " and he made arrangements of several volumes of folk songs.
Britten had a special predilection for vocal music and was a master of the song-cycle.
Some of his best music is in works for voice and orchestra, such as Les Illuminations (1939), Serenade (1943), and Nocturne (1958), and works for voice and piano such as the Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo (1940), The Holy Sonnets of John Donne (1945), Winter Words of Thomas Hardy (1953), and the Six HölderlinHolderlin Fragments (1958).
Among numerous cantatas, A Boy Was Born (1933), Hymn to St. Cecilia (1942), A Ceremony of Carols (1942), Saint Nicholas (1948), and Cantata Misericordium (1963) are outstanding.
Peter Grimes, based on George Crabbe's The Borough, was commissioned by the Koussevitzky Foundation and scored an immediate success when produced in London in 1945.
His other full-scale operas, Billy Budd (1951), adapted from Melville's novelette, and Gloriana (1953), which was specially written for the coronation of Elizabeth II, did not prove so popular; but he displayed extraordinary mastery in the chamber operas he wrote for the English Opera Group.
(1949), and The Turn of the Screw (1954).
One should also mention his setting of Noye's Fludde (1958) from the Chester Miracle Play and the three-act ballet The Prince of the Pagodas (1957).
Representative examples are the excellent Serenade for tenor, horn, and strings (1943); Canticle No. 3, Still Falls the Rain (1954); and The Poet's Echo (1967), six songs to poems of Aleksandr Pushkin.
But it is his operas that carried Britten's name farthest.
Beginning rather poorly with Paul Bunyan (1941), he made a spectacular turnabout with Peter Grimes.
While by no means uniformly successful, they represent the most sustained and influential attempt by an Englishman to create an English repertory since the time of Purcell.
He is also one of the least problematical.
His roots are strongly in the English past, centering on Purcell and earlier composers of the Elizabethan and Tudor periods.
From Purcell, Britten said he learned how to set English words to music.
From this source he also may have derived his attachment to vocal music, including opera, as well as his preference for baroque forms, such as the suite and the theme and variations.
Britten's example stimulated English composition, particularly in the operatic field, as it had not been stirred for ages.
In 1960 he made a successful operatic adaptation of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream for medium-sized orchestra.
In 1976 he was declared a life peer (the granting of a non-hereditary title of nobility in Great Britain).
He died later that year.