Benjamin Britten was born into a middle-class family living in the small port of Lowestoft in East Anglia, a region of England to which Britten remained attached throughout his life. His father was a dentist but his mother was a keen amateur singer who encouraged him to learn both the viola and the piano with local teachers and to compose. By the age of fourteen he had written over one hundred youthful pieces of music: some of these were to form the basis of his early Simple Symphony. He met the composer Frank Bridge in 1927 at a concert that Bridge was conducting, and showed him some of his compositions; as a result Bridge agreed to take him on as a private pupil. Bridge gave Britten a firm technical foundation and introduced him to the music of many contemporary foreign composers.
After two years at Gresham’s School in Holt, Norfolk, Britten entered the Royal College of Music in London in 1930. Here he studied composition with John Ireland and piano with Arthur Benjamin, winning several prizes for his compositions. He completed his studies at the Royal College in 1933. During the following year his father died, and, at a rehearsal for his choral work A Boy was Born, he met briefly for the first time the tenor Peter Pears, who was later to become his life-long partner. He also planned to study with Berg in Vienna; however, opposition at home put paid to this plan.
From 1935 until the beginning of World War II, Britten wrote much occasional music for the Post Office Film Unit, BBC Radio, and for small theatre groups active in London. This work brought him into contact with, amongst others, the poet W. H. Auden, who wrote many of the scripts for which Britten provided music, as well texts for several of his song settings. In 1937 Britten’s mother died and his close friendship with Pears now began to develop. Britten’s compositions from this period, such as Our Hunting Fathers (1936), the Frank Bridge Variations (1937), Piano Concerto (1938), Violin Concerto (1937), and Les Illuminations (1939) display an effortless virtuoso technique and a brilliant musical language that rivalled anything being composed in the United Kingdom at this time.
Auden’s emigration to the USA influenced Britten and Pears to do likewise and they sailed to America in 1939. They settled in Long Island, where Britten and Auden collaborated on his first opera Paul Bunyon (1940). The conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Serge Koussevitzky, became interested in Britten’s music: he performed the Sinfonia da Requiem and commissioned Britten to compose an opera. This was to be Peter Grimes, inspired by George Crabbe’s poem The Borough, which Britten came across in California. On their return voyage to England in 1942 Pears and Britten worked on the libretto for the opera, which was first performed by the Sadler’s Wells Opera Company in 1945, and a year later in Boston, conducted by the young Leonard Bernstein.
Peter Grimes quickly established Britten as an operatic composer of the first rank: its searing portrayals of a social outsider and of the violation of innocence were subjects that recurred in many of his other dramatic works. Britten soon followed it up with further works for the stage: The Rape of Lucretia (1946), Albert Herring (1947), a version of The Beggar’s Opera (1948), and The Little Sweep (1949). These were all written for the English Opera Group, a small opera company founded and effectively controlled by Britten. The desire to take charge of his creative career, in opposition to the established arts organisations of the time, was also seen in his foundation of the Aldeburgh Festival in 1948: this was to become a major musical focus for him. The future pattern of his life now became set: alongside his continual flow of operas he composed large-scale orchestral and choral works, as well as chamber and vocal pieces. Performance was generally focused upon Aldeburgh, where he conducted and accompanied, and upon tours undertaken by the English Opera Group.
Two major operas for Covent Garden appeared at the beginning of the 1950s: Billy Budd (1951) and Gloriana (1953). These were followed by the smaller-scale but even more subtle The Turn of the Screw (1954), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1960), and the three ‘church parables’ of 1964 –1968. Britten’s final operas were Owen Wingrave (1971), composed originally for television, and Death in Venice (1973). His outstanding non-operatic work was the War Requiem of 1961, a deeply-felt meditation upon the effects of war that ignited international interest. His final masterpiece was the String Quartet No. 3 of 1975. In 1973 he underwent heart surgery from which he never fully recovered and he died in December 1976 at Aldeburgh.
Britten was fortunate in that his composing career ran in parallel to the growth of the recording industry after World War II. After several early recordings with EMI, he became contracted to Decca with whom he remained for the rest of his life. Decca provided him with a first-class recording environment, and in the form of the producer John Culshaw a sympathetic link within the company. Culshaw recognised the universal appeal of the War Requiem, which was quickly recorded after its premiere, with Britten conducting and utilising creatively the then relatively new techniques of stereophonic sound. So successful was this recording that Decca was subsequently happy to publish recordings of Britten’s new works as they appeared. In addition, during his last years Britten conducted for the company a considerable amount of music by composers such as Bach, Mozart, Schubert, Schumann and Grainger.’’ Britten was a conductor of exceptional character. His performance style tended to be muscular and straightforward, and was always informed by a deep sense of natural musical instinct. He quickly gained the complete respect of orchestral musicians and singers, and rarely encountered any difficulties in making his wishes understood, although he remained chronically, and unnecessarily, unsure of himself as a conductor.
Britten was deeply aware of the dilemmas to the creative and recreative artist posed by recording, and expounded his thoughts on these in the lecture he gave as the first recipient of the Aspen Award for Services to the Humanities in 1963. He saw the electronic reproduction of music as a surrogate for the true musical experience. ‘If I say the loudspeaker is the principal enemy of music, I don’t mean that I am not grateful to it as a means of education and study, or as an evoker of memories. But it is not a part of a true musical experience.’ In this respect he foreshadowed the beliefs of later eminent musicians such as Sir Simon Rattle, himself at one time closely associated with the Aldeburgh Festival. At the same time it was ironic that he should hold these ideas when his own works and performances were being internationally disseminated by Decca, which under Culshaw was one of the few recording companies in the world to develop the idea, even if only temporarily, of recording as a genuine art form in its own right, similar to another twentieth century technology, film, in its ability to create through artificial means legitimate works of art.
© Naxos Rights International Ltd. — David Patmore (A–Z of Conductors, Naxos 8.558087–90).