Benjamin Britten
“I believe in roots, in associations, in backgrounds, in personal relationships.” — from his 1964 Aspen Award acceptance speech
At a glance 🔭💭
Some coordinates adapted from GeoNames (CC BY 4.0) · Pleiades (CC BY 3.0)
People close to him ⏳🌊
- FamilyEdith Britten
His mother, an amateur singer, who recognized her youngest child's gift early and placed great hopes in it.
- TeacherFrank Bridge
The lifelong teacher who passed on to him as a teenager both rigorous compositional craft and pacifism.
- FriendshipW. H. Auden
The poet who, working with him on “Night Mail” and other projects, opened up for him the worlds of literature and politics.
- FamilyPeter Pears
The tenor and life partner who was with him from 1937 until the composer's death; most of the major tenor roles were written for him.
- PatronageSerge Koussevitzky
Conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, who commissioned 「Peter Grimes」 through his foundation.
- FriendshipDmitri Shostakovich
A Soviet composer with whom he exchanged dedications of works, sharing a deep respect across the wall of the Cold War.
I. The boy from Lowestoft · 1913–1930 (age 0–17)
(The sea) He was born in November 1913 in Lowestoft, a seaside town in Suffolk on the east coast of England. His birthday, the 22nd, was the feast of St. Cecilia, patron saint of music. The family home stood on a street facing the North Sea, and the rough sea and the lives of its fishermen would later come back to life in his operas. (Family) His father, Robert Victor Britten, was a dentist, and his mother, Edith, was an amateur singer in a local choral society. He was the youngest, after his sisters Barbara and Beth and his brother Robert. His mother pinned great hopes on her youngest child's gift and is said to have often declared that he would become the 'fourth B,' after Bach·Beethoven·Brahms. (Precocity) He began composing at around five, and at about ten he took viola lessons from Audrey Alston. By his mid-teens he had written hundreds of works, among them piano pieces·songs·string quartets, and some of the melodies from this time were used again, around the age of twenty, in the 「Simple Symphony」. (Mentor) At ten, at the Norwich Festival, he heard Frank Bridge's orchestral suite 「The Sea」 and was deeply struck; in 1927, through Alston's introduction, he met Bridge in person and began private lessons with him. Bridge made him scrutinize the purpose of every single note. A pacifist who had witnessed the horrors of the First World War, he also instilled in the boy his thinking about war. (Boarding school) In 1928 he entered Gresham's School in Norfolk, but found little there to give his heart to musically. He enjoyed cricket and tennis and kept a diary faithfully, and that diary preserves how heavily communal life weighed on him. In 1930 he won a scholarship to the Royal College of Music and left for London.
In this work, melodies from piano pieces and songs written before the age of twelve were rewoven, around the age of twenty, for string ensemble. It is as if the boy from Lowestoft had gathered up his own childhood and presented it to the world.
- The second movement, 'Playful Pizzicato,' is played from beginning to end without the bow, the strings plucked with the fingers (pizzicato). At a fast tempo the many string instruments must lock together in crisp, bouncing rhythms, so the ensemble's coordination is laid bare.
- The first movement, 'Boisterous Bourrée,' borrows the lively rhythm of the bourrée, an old French dance. It is worth following the give-and-take as the lower strings bat back the short motifs tossed out by the upper strings.
- The third movement, 'Sentimental Sarabande,' is the longest and most serious. Listen to the gait of this slow old dance in triple time (sarabande), its weight falling on the second beat, and you will hear the deep lyricism behind the title 'Simple.'
- The movement titles are wordplay matching the first sound of an adjective to that of a dance name, as in Boisterous, Playful, Sentimental and Frolicsome. The published score identifies which childhood piece each theme came from.
II. London, and Auden · 1930–1939 (age 17–26)
(Conservatory) From 1930, for three years, he studied composition with John Ireland and piano with Arthur Benjamin at the Royal College of Music. The atmosphere at the school was conservative, and he felt he learned more from his meetings with Bridge than from his classes. He gave opus number 1 to the 「Sinfonietta」 he wrote as a student, and his choral variations 「A Boy Was Born」 began to make his name known. (Vienna) In 1934 he hoped to go to Vienna to study with Alban Berg, having been deeply drawn to Berg's opera 「Wozzeck」 when he heard it on the radio. But word reached his parents from the college that Berg would 'not be a good influence,' and in the end the plan was shelved. In April of that year his father died. (Film) In 1935 he joined the film unit of the General Post Office (GPO), writing documentary scores for a meager weekly wage. In 「Night Mail」 (1936), made with the poet W. H. Auden, he meshed the rhythm of the verse with the sound of the train's wheels. Auden opened the worlds of politics and literature to him and encouraged him to accept his homosexuality. Together they also created the song cycle 「Our Hunting Fathers」. (Meeting) In January 1937 his mother died. That year he grew close to the tenor Peter Pears, and the two went on to share life and music for nearly 40 years. With his inheritance from his mother he bought a dilapidated old windmill at Snape in Suffolk. That summer, for the Salzburg Festival, he wrote 「Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge」, a tribute to his teacher, in little more than a month. The following year the American composer Aaron Copland stayed at the mill, and the two played each other their music. (Departure) As the shadow of war darkened over Europe, in May 1939 he crossed the Atlantic with Pears. Like Auden, who had gone to America before him, he believed he could start anew in a new land.
Around the time he lost his parents one after the other, he expressed his gratitude by setting the character of his teacher, his spiritual father, into each variation.
- The theme comes from the second of Bridge's 「Three Idylls for String Quartet」. Keep in mind the calm theme that first appears after the introduction, and you can follow how the variations that come after twist it.
- His manuscript named a trait of his teacher's character for each variation — 'Adagio' his integrity, 'March' his energy, 'Romance' his charm, 'Aria Italiana' his humor, 'Funeral March' his sympathy. Picture what kind of man he must have been as you listen to each variation, and the work becomes a portrait.
- In the 'Aria Italiana,' over an accompaniment in which the strings pluck like guitars (pizzicato), a high violin mimics the dazzling virtuosity of an opera singer. The 'Wiener Walzer' that follows is a parody that twists the Viennese waltz with deliberately exaggerated sentiment.
- In the closing 'Fugue and Finale,' when the fugue, with voice after voice chasing in, reaches its peak, the theme returns broad and warm. The words written on the manuscript of this finale were 'our perfect understanding.'
III. Across the Atlantic · 1939–1945 (age 26–32)
(Long Island) In America he stayed with the Mayer family in Amityville, Long Island, New York. Elizabeth Mayer, the wife of a psychiatrist, looked after the two young men as if they were her own family. From this period came 「Les Illuminations」, set to Rimbaud's poetry, the 「Violin Concerto」, the 「Sinfonia da Requiem」 in memory of his parents, and the 「Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo」 for Pears. (Brooklyn) From the autumn of 1940 he lived in the Brooklyn house Auden shared, among writers·artists. It was free but noisy, and hard to concentrate on work there. The operetta 「Paul Bunyan」 (1941), with a libretto by Auden, was savaged by critics, and around this time their collaboration effectively came to an end. His income was erratic and he was often ill. (Crabbe) In the summer of 1941, in California, he read an article by E. M. Forster about George Crabbe, the Suffolk poet. Seized by unbearable homesickness at this tale of his native coast, he resolved to make an opera of Peter Grimes, the fisherman in Crabbe's poem 「The Borough」. The conductor Serge Koussevitzky commissioned the work, offering 1000 dollars through his foundation. (Conscience) In the spring of 1942, on the voyage home aboard a Swedish cargo ship, he wrote 「Hymn to St Cecilia」 and 「A Ceremony of Carols」. Back in England, before the tribunal for conscientious objectors, he testified that the spirit of God is in every person and so he could not destroy it. On appeal he won unconditional exemption, and with Pears he toured the country giving wartime recitals. In 1943, after a bout of measles, he wrote the 「Serenade」 for Pears and the horn player Dennis Brain. (Grimes) On June 7, 1945, 「Peter Grimes」 premiered at Sadler's Wells Theatre in London. It was the story of a fisherman shunned by the villagers who goes out to sea and dies. Layered within it were the feelings of two men who, as pacifists and homosexuals, had always stood on the outside, and Pears called it the story of an individual against the crowd. The premiere was a great success, hailed as the rebirth of English opera.
Written as he recovered from measles after returning home, it weaves together English poems of evening and night, sleep and death, tailored to Pears and Dennis Brain.
- The horn solos of the opening 'Prologue' and closing 'Epilogue' are played without valves, using only the notes the length of the tube alone can produce (natural harmonics). That some notes sound higher or lower than the piano's is not a mistake but a deliberate evocation of the old bugle's color, and the Epilogue is played offstage so that it sounds from afar.
- In Tennyson's 'Nocturne' ('Blow, bugle, blow'), the horn answers the end of each of the tenor's phrases like an echo in the hills.
- In Blake's 'Elegy' ('O Rose, thou art sick'), the horn paints the sick rose with a moaning line that slides by semitones (chromatic).
- The anonymous 'Lyke-Wake Dirge' is a song of a dead soul crossing the road to the afterlife. While the tenor repeats the same tune, the strings pile up one after another like a fugue, and at the climax the horn bursts out piercingly.
- Ben Jonson's 'Hymn' is a fast song to the goddess of the hunt, a notorious passage that tests the horn player's fingers and tongue.
These are interludes from the opera he began in California, homesick for the sea of his home. The light and weather of the North Sea are painted by the orchestra.
- 'Dawn' is divided into three layers — a thin melody sung in a single line very high up by violins and flutes, the wavelike broken chords (arpeggios) of clarinets·harp·violas, and heavy chords in the low brass. They are often heard as the cry of gulls, glittering waves and the weighty sea.
- In 'Sunday Morning,' the horns repeat short notes in overlapping patterns, imitating the bells of the village church. Don't miss the moment they merge with the real bells ringing behind them.
- 'Moonlight' is slow and still. As broad chords in the low strings surge in and ebb away, flutes and harp slip in between, glinting.
- 'Storm' is a violent passage driven by brass and percussion. In its midst, at a moment when the wind briefly drops, the melody Grimes sings in the opera as he dreams of rest drifts past.
IV. Aldeburgh · 1945–1955 (age 32–42)
(Belsen) In July 1945 he toured the liberated camps of Germany with the violinist Yehudi Menuhin, playing for the survivors. For the rest of his life he scarcely ever spoke of what he saw at Bergen-Belsen. Yet The Holy Sonnets of John Donne, written on his return, lie heavy with the shadow of death and judgment, and Pears recalled him saying that the experience colored everything he wrote afterward. (Opera company) To stage his work without depending on the big houses, in 1947 he founded the English Opera Group with the writer Eric Crozier and the painter John Piper. Chamber opera, which could tour with a handful of singers and a dozen or so players, was also a practical way to keep costs down. The tragedy The Rape of Lucretia (1946) was followed by Albert Herring (1947), a comedy satirizing the Suffolk countryside. (Festival) In 1947 he and Pears moved to Crag House on the seafront at Aldeburgh, and the following year the two of them and Crozier launched the Aldeburgh Festival. Begun in small churches and village halls, the festival became a stage for his new works and for the Purcell·Schubert he loved. From 1952 Imogen Holst, daughter of Gustav Holst, was at his side as his assistant. (Innocence) Billy Budd (1951), with a libretto by Forster and Crozier, told of a pure young sailor destroyed by malice. The destruction of innocence was a theme his work returned to again and again. Gloriana, written in 1953 to celebrate the coronation of Elizabeth II, met a frosty reception at its gala premiere and wounded him deeply. (Sensitivity) He was exacting in his work and acutely sensitive to criticism. Even close collaborators were cast off once they lost his trust. David Hemmings, who sang the boy Miles in The Turn of the Screw, premiered in Venice in 1954, later testified that the composer was at ease with children but never once crossed the line.
Written just after the war for an educational film for children. Using a melody by Purcell, whom he revered all his life, it introduces every corner of the orchestra.
- It opens with a theme taken from Purcell's incidental music for Abdelazer, played by the full orchestra, then the woodwinds, brass, strings and percussion in turn. Compare how differently the same melody is colored by each family of instruments.
- In the variations that follow, each instrument takes the spotlight — the sparkle of piccolo and flute, the song of the oboe, the drollery of the bassoon, the weight of trombones and tuba emerge one after another.
- In the percussion variation, over the steady support of the timpani, bass drum and cymbals, tambourine and triangle, snare drum and wood block, xylophone, castanets and tam-tam, and whip appear in pairs, one after another.
- The final fugue grows ever thicker as the instruments come chasing in one by one, starting with the piccolo. At the climax the brass proclaim Purcell's original theme, slow and majestic, so that the fast fugue and the slow theme sound together at once.
V. From the East to Coventry · 1955–1965 (age 42–52)
(The East) From late 1955 he and Pears spent five months on a world concert tour that took them to Bali in Indonesia and to Japan. In Bali he fell under the spell of the gamelan, an ensemble of bronze percussion, and wrote its melodies down in notation; that sound found its way into the ballet The Prince of the Pagodas (1957). In Tokyo in February 1956 he went twice to see the Noh (能) play Sumidagawa, the story of a mother driven mad by the loss of her child. (Retreat) In 1957 he swapped houses with the painter Mary Potter and moved to the Red House on the outskirts of Aldeburgh. He needed somewhere quiet to work, away from the onlookers who strolled along the seafront promenade. There he turned Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream (1960) into an opera. (Requiem) On May 30, 1962, War Requiem was premiered at the consecration of the new Coventry Cathedral, built after the old one was destroyed by Luftwaffe bombing. He wove the poems of Wilfred Owen, killed in the First World War, into the Latin Mass for the Dead. In the score he wrote the names of four friends who had fought in the Second World War, three of whom had been killed. He meant to embody reconciliation by casting as soloists the Soviet Galina Vishnevskaya, the Englishman Pears and the German Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, but the Soviet authorities kept Vishnevskaya from appearing at the premiere. The recording released the following year sold 200,000 copies in five months. (Friendship) In 1960, at the British premiere of Shostakovich's Cello Concerto No. 1 in London, he met and befriended the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich. For him he wrote the Cello Sonata, the Cello Symphony and three suites for solo cello. Through Rostropovich he also grew close to Shostakovich, and across the wall of the Cold War the two men held each other's music in deep esteem. (Parable) In 1964 he wrote the church parable Curlew River, transplanting his memory of Sumidagawa to a medieval English church. That same year, accepting the Aspen Award in America, he said that a composer should write for his own community, and in 1965 he received the Order of Merit.
The work in which his lifelong pacifism rang out most powerfully. For the consecration of a cathedral destroyed by bombing, he sought to bring together the voices of nations that had been enemies.
- Listen to the three groups separately. The soprano·chorus·full orchestra sing the Latin Mass, the tenor·baritone and chamber orchestra sing Owen's poems, and a distant boys' choir with organ sounds like voices from another world.
- From the very start, bells alternate between two notes, C and F-sharp (a tritone). Called 'the devil in music' in the Middle Ages, this unsettling interval runs through the whole work, resolving into a calm chord each time a major section ends.
- In the 'Offertorium', the tenor and baritone sing Owen's twisted retelling of Abraham and Isaac. After the lines in which, despite the angel's plea, the old man slew 'his son, and half the seed of Europe, one by one', the boys' repetition of 'We offer sacrifices of praise (Hostias)' makes a chilling contrast.
- In the closing 'Libera me', Owen's Strange Meeting unfolds. A dead soldier says 'I am the enemy you killed, my friend', and as the tenor and baritone trade 'Let us sleep now', all the forces come together as one. At the premiere an English tenor and a German baritone sang this passage together.
VI. A final Venice · 1966–1976 (age 53–63)
(The Maltings) In June 1967 the Maltings, a concert hall converted from an old malt house at Snape, opened its doors. On the opening night of the 1969 festival a fire gutted the hall, but it was rebuilt in time for the next year's festival. He poured what strength he had left into raising it again. (Dedication) In 1968 he dedicated the church parable The Prodigal Son to Shostakovich, and the following year Shostakovich dedicated to him his Symphony No. 14, a work that sings of death. In 1970 he conducted the symphony's British premiere at Aldeburgh. (Heart) In the early 1970s a heart valve began to fail and he was urged to have surgery, but he put it off in order to finish his last opera, Death in Venice, based on Thomas Mann's novella. The aging writer Aschenbach, undone by his enthrallment to beauty, was a role written for Pears. In May 1973 he suffered a mild stroke during valve-replacement surgery that left his right hand weakened, and he never again played the piano in public. He was unable to attend the premiere that June. (Last years) Even so, he went on writing as far as his body allowed. The cantata Phaedra (1975) for the mezzo-soprano Janet Baker and String Quartet No. 3, completed in Venice, belong to his final period. In July 1976 he became the first composer to be made a life peer. (Death) On December 4, 1976, he died of heart failure at the Red House, in Pears's arms. He was 63. He was buried in the churchyard of Aldeburgh's parish church, and in 1986 Pears was laid beside him. Queen Elizabeth II sent her condolences to Pears, a gesture taken as public recognition of their relationship. The estate he left became the Britten-Pears Foundation, which still supports music in Aldeburgh.
Finished in Venice, the setting of his last opera, when his body was weakened after surgery. It was premiered two weeks after his death.
- Of the five movements, the first, 'Duets', has the four instruments converse while switching partners in pairs. Try to tell by ear which two instruments are paired at any moment, and the structure becomes clear.
- In the third movement, 'Solo', the first violin sings long and alone in a very high register while the others support it with bated breath. It sounds like a bird calling high in the sky.
- The final movement, 'Recitative and Passacaglia', bears the subtitle 'La Serenissima', the old byname of Venice, and quotes melodies from Death in Venice. After a passage in which the instruments bring out short fragments as if speaking (the recitative), there follows a passacaglia in which a low voice repeats the same figure over and over.
- The piece ends on a chord that never fully resolves. Don't hurry this last sonority, which sounds more like a question mark than a full stop; listen to it right to the end.
Lesser-known stories
Sinfonia da Requiem is usually introduced simply as a memorial to his parents, but it was originally commissioned in 1940 by the Japanese government, through the British Council, for the celebrations of the 2600th year of the imperial era. When the Japanese side received movement titles such as 'Lacrymosa', 'Dies irae' and 'Requiem aeternam', taken from the Latin Mass for the Dead, they refused to perform it, declaring Christian funeral music unsuitable for a festive occasion. Britten did not return the fee he had already been paid, and the work was premiered the following year in New York under John Barbirolli. The diaries he kept from about the age of fourteen until 1938 lay for years in the foundation's archive, appearing in book form only in 2009. Many of the hundreds of juvenilia he wrote before his Opus 1 were likewise catalogued only after his death. Thanks to this, it became concretely clear that works such as the Simple Symphony were in fact built from melodies written by a boy of about ten. The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra was written in 1946 for Instruments of the Orchestra, an educational film made by the British Ministry of Education. In the film Malcolm Sargent conducted the London Symphony Orchestra and provided the narration himself. As the piece later spread widely as a concert work, its origins in film came to be seldom mentioned. Behind the success of Peter Grimes lay strife within the company. Some members of the Sadler's Wells company protested that the new work's unfamiliar music and the preparations for its premiere were destabilizing the company, while the soprano Joan Cross, who was running it, pushed the work through. After the premiere Cross, Pears and Crozier left the company, and the experience planted the seed of the English Opera Group.
Glossary notes 📚🔎
Variations
(Meaning) Byeonjugok (變奏曲) means 'a piece played (奏) with changes (變)'. (In music) A form in which a single theme is heard first and then repeated several times with its rhythm·harmony·tempo·mood altered. Britten's Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge dresses the same theme in turn as a march, a waltz and a funeral march. It is like friends each taking 'Happy Birthday' and turning it into a rap, a trot song or a very slow ballad — the song is the same, but each time it wears a different face.
Pizzicato
(Meaning) From the Italian pizzicare ('to pinch'), it means 'plucked, as if pinched'. (In music) A technique of sounding a string instrument such as the violin or cello by plucking the string with the finger instead of drawing the bow. The sound is short, bouncy and quickly gone. Stretch a rubber band tight and flick it with your finger and it gives a short twang; that is the very same principle.
Natural harmonics
(Meaning) Baeeum (倍音) means 'multiplied (倍) tones'. When a note sounds, tones at two and three times its frequency faintly mix in with it; these are called baeeum, or harmonics. (In music) The notes a tube can produce by its length alone, without valves or finger holes, are called natural harmonics. Change the pitch with lip pressure alone, as on an old hunting horn, and only these notes come out, some of them sounding slightly sharper or flatter than the keys of a piano. The horn in the Serenade deliberately plays using nothing but these notes. If you have ever blown too hard into a recorder in music class and, with your fingers unmoved, heard a much higher note squeak out, that was the moment of leaping from one harmonic to the next.
Interlude
(Meaning) Ganjugok (間奏曲) means 'a piece played (奏) in between (間)'. (In music) Music played by the orchestra alone, without singing, between the acts or scenes of an opera. It fills the time taken to change the set while sketching in advance the mood of the scene to come. The interludes from Peter Grimes paint dawn and storm at sea, and are often lifted out and played on their own in concert. Think of the moment in a school play when the lights dim during a scene change and only music is heard.
Fugue
(Meaning) The Latin fuga means 'flight, escape'. The name comes from the way a later voice chases the voice ahead of it. (In music) A form in which one voice first plays a short subject, and the other voices enter one after another with the same subject at shifted pitches, weaving around one another. The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra ends with a fugue in which the instruments enter in turn, from piccolo to percussion. It resembles a round, where the next singer comes in late with the same tune, except that in a fugue the entering voice takes up the tune at a different pitch. (Elsewhere) In psychiatry, 'fugue' denotes a state in which a person forgets who they are and leaves home to wander.
Tritone
(Literal meaning) Samjeoneum (三全音) means 'three whole tones (全音, 三)': the distance between two notes that lie three whole steps apart. In English it is called the tritone. (In music) The interval between C and F♯ (F sharp) is one example. Sounded together, the two notes give off something uneasy and unresolved, and in the Middle Ages the interval was shunned as 'the devil in music.' In "War Requiem" its tolling bells run through the entire work. Press C and F♯ together on a piano and you feel a nagging urge to move on to some other note — rather like going to bed with your homework only half done.
Gamelan
(Literal meaning) The word is said to come from the Javanese gamel, meaning 'to strike' or 'hammer.' (In music) The traditional ensemble of Java and Bali in Indonesia, in which dozens of struck instruments play together: bronze gongs, metal keyed instruments shaped like xylophones, and drums. Many instruments layer the same melody at different speeds, building up shimmering strata of sound. Britten heard it in Bali and carried its resonance into works such as "The Prince of the Pagodas." Picture classmates in the music room dividing up the beats on xylophones, metallophones and triangles, all striking at once to shape a single tune, and you come close.
Passacaglia
(Literal meaning) A widely held explanation traces it to the Spanish pasacalle (pasar, 'to pass,' + calle, 'street'). It was originally a short piece played while passing along the street. (In music) A form in which a short melody in the low register repeats in the same shape again and again, while the other voices above it unfold variations without pause. Britten cherished the form and used it in his operas and in the final movement of his "String Quartet No. 3." It resembles a long jump rope turning at a steady beat on the playground while the friends who jump in each leap with a different move.