Composer of the Month – Benjamin Britten – Factfile

Early Life:

Benjamin Britten is a British composer who is maybe best known for his opera and choral music.

He was born in 1913 in Lowestoft on the East Coast of England, the youngest of 4 siblings. His father, though he had wanted to be a farmer, was a dentist, and his mother was a very keen amateur musician who became Britten’s first teacher. When he was just 3 months old, Britten became seriously ill with pneumonia which he recovered from, but which left him with a damaged heart affecting his health throughout his life. Britten started playing the piano with his mother at the age of 2, and wrote his first compositions at the age of 5!

He was educated in Lowestoft, moving to a local fee paying school at the age of 7 where his piano lessons were taken over by one of the teachers there, Ethel Astle. When he was 10 years old, Britten starting taking viola lessons with one of his mother’s friends who had been a professional musician before she got married, and this new teacher encouraged him to start attending orchestral concerts in Norfolk. One of these concerts featured a work by composer Frank Bridge, The Sea, that Britten absolutely loved. His viola teacher was a friend of Frank Bridge’s, and she took a 13 year old Britten to meet the composer taking some of his compositions with them. Bridge was very impressed with Britten’s work and invited Britten to study composition with him. After school Britten went to the Royal College of Music in London to study with composers John Ireland and Ralph Vaughan Williams. During his time at the Royal College of Music, which Britten did not enjoy very much, he won several prizes for composition, and his work started to attract attention outside of the Royal College of Music and he even had some of his music broadcast on the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation).

After finishing his studies at the Royal College of Music, Britten became a member of the BBC’s film unit and he became a prolific composer of film, TV, theatre and radio music. In 1937 Britten met tenor Peter Pears, who became his partner both musically and in his personal life, until his death. Britten and Pears moved to the USA in 1939, and when World War II broke out Britten was persuaded to remain in America as an artistic ambassador, returning to England in 1942. He completed his choral works A Ceremony of Carols and Hymn to Saint Cecilia during the trip back home to England. A Ceremony of Carols involves the choir singing against a harp. Britten wrote some of the most significant pieces in the harp’s repertoire. Britten worked very closely with one of the most famous harpists of the 20th Century, Osian Ellis, so his writing for the harp feels very natural to harpists.

Britten was a pacifist, and he applied to be recognised as a conscientious objector to war but initially he had to serve in the military in a non-combatant role, before he was granted an unconditional exception to having to serve after an appeal. Britten set to work on his opera Peter Grimes, which was given its first performance in June 1945 by the Sadlers Wells Opera Company, a company that later became the English National Opera. After this first performance, Britten traveled with violinist Yehudi Menhuin to Germany to give performances to Concentration Camp Survivors. What Britten saw on this tour profoundly affected him and as he himself told Peter Pears, it coloured everything he wrote afterwards.

In the late 1940s Britten launched the Aldeburgh Festival of Music and the Arts together with Pears and librettist (someone who write the lyrics for opera and musicals) Eric Crozier. Britten wrote a new work which was performed at the Aldeburgh Festival almost every year. He wrote the opera Gloriana, a work that told the story of the decline of Queen Elizabeth I, to make the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. Given its subject matter and the occasion it was written for, it is perhaps not surprising that Gloriana was not very well received at the time.

In the 1950s the political situation in the UK again affected Britten’s life when the Home Secretary, David Maxwell Fyfe, got police to enforce anti-homosexuality laws. Britten and Pears were visited by the police, and Britten was so shaken by this experience that he considered a sham marriage to Imogen Holst (composer in her own right, and Gustav Holst’s daughter). They did not, in the end, marry.

In 1962, Britten’s War Requiem was premiered at the consecration of the new Cathedral in Coventry. Coventry is a city that had been heavily bombed during World War II, and the cathedral there had largely been destroyed. The new Cathedral is a modernist, rather beautiful building, and for its consecration Britten wrote this haunting, beautiful, brilliant and sometimes brutal work which commemorated those who died in both World Wars. Britten’s War Requiem included a traditional Requiem Mass and also settings of poems by War Poet Wilfred Owens.

Britten continued composing for as long as he could, but the pace at which he could write slowed considerably. He had an operation to repair a failing heart valve in 1973, and while the operation was a success, he did suffer a small stroke as a result of the operation which affected his right hand. He accepted a life peerage (an Honour and position in the English House of Lords) in June 1976 becoming Baron of Aldeburgh in the County of Suffolk, the first composer to have been offered a peerage. Britten died a few months later in December 1976 of congestive heart failure at the age of 63. He was buried in his hometown, with Pears being buried next to him when he died 10 years later. Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother attended a Memorial Service to Benjamin Britten which was held in Westminster Abbey on 10 March 1977.

I love Britten’s music and have played and sung many of his pieces. To my mind his work is absolutely beautiful. I look forward to sharing some of his music with you next week, please do come back for some suggestions of what to listen to to get to know this wonderful composer’s work.

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