Benjamin Britten
English Modern opera composer and pacifist, voice of 20th-century Britain
1913
1976
English
Modern
Peter Grimes, War Requiem, The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra
Early life
Benjamin Britten was born on 22 November 1913 in Lowestoft, Suffolk, on the feast day of Saint Cecilia, the patron saint of music. He began composing at the age of five, and by fourteen had amassed a substantial portfolio of juvenile works. He studied with Frank Bridge, who introduced him to the continental European modernism of Berg and Bartók, and later attended the Royal College of Music in London, though he found its conservatism stifling. In the mid-1930s he composed prolifically for the GPO Film Unit, honing a gift for vivid, economical orchestration.
Career and major works
Britten spent the early years of the Second World War in North America, but returned to England in 1942, his artistic identity clarified. The premiere of his opera Peter Grimes at Sadler's Wells on 7 June 1945 was a landmark event that re-established English opera as a vital art form after two centuries of relative dormancy. A succession of operatic masterpieces followed: The Rape of Lucretia (1946), Albert Herring (1947), Billy Budd (1951), The Turn of the Screw (1954), A Midsummer Night's Dream (1960), and Death in Venice (1973). Beyond opera, Britten composed the War Requiem (1962) for the consecration of the new Coventry Cathedral, the orchestral showpiece The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra (1946), and a wealth of song cycles written for the tenor voice of his lifelong partner Peter Pears.
Musical style and legacy
In 1948 Britten co-founded the Aldeburgh Festival in Suffolk, which became one of Europe's leading music festivals. His musical language is tonal but freely chromatic, marked by an unerring ear for instrumental colour, a dramatic instinct sharpened by his operatic experience, and a particular sensitivity to the setting of English words. He was created a life peer in 1976, the first composer so honoured, and died in Aldeburgh on 4 December that year.