BENJAMIN BRITTEN 

 (1913 - 1976)

Benjamin Britten must be accepted as the most outstanding English composer working
in the mid-20th century. He won a significant international reputation while remaining
thoroughly English in inspiration, a feat that his immediate predecessors had been
unable fully to achieve.

Operas

Britten won a triumph in 1945 with his opera Peter Grimes, first staged when Sadler’s
Wells Theatre in London reopened after the Second World War. The aspirations of the
central character, the fisherman Peter Grimes, a man at odds with the community in
which he lives, are frustrated by a combination of social pressure and sheer chance,
leading to his suicide. The drama is set against the background of the sea, in various
moods, summarised in Four Sea Interludes, whichforms an evocative piece of concert
repertoire. Britten’s subsequent operas include works on a smaller scale for his English
Opera Group: The Rape of Lucretia, Albert Herring and The Turn of the Screw. Billy
Budd and the coronation opera Gloriana were followed by A Midsummer Night’s
Dream, the television opera Owen Wingrave, and the remarkable operatic version of
Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice. His three church parables draw inspiration from Japan
and from their medieval setting. All these works constitute a very significant element in
international dramatic and operatic repertoire. An early collaboration with the poet WH
Auden, Paul Bunyan, was staged in New York in 1941, to be revised in 1974 for
publication.

Orchestral Music

The best known of all Britten’s orchestral music must be Variations and Fugue on a
Theme of Purcell (more generally known under its popular title The Young Person’s
Guide to the Orchestra), a work that is both a tribute to the great 17th-century English
composer Henry Purcell and a useful teaching piece. Lachrymae, subtitled ‘Reflections
on a Theme of Dowland’, is a tribute to a still earlier predecessor, the lutenist John
Dowland; arranged by the composer shortly before his death from its original viola and
piano version, it is immensely moving. The early Matinées Musicales, based on the
music of Rossini, is an attractive piece, and the Simple Symphony for string orchestra,
based on tunes written by the composer in childhood, is a useful element in string
orchestra repertoire. Britten’s Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge, written in 1937,
serves as a brilliant tribute to his teacher, and his Piano Concerto and Violin Concerto
come from the same period. His Cello Symphony was written in 1963 for his friend, the
Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich.

Vocal and Choral Music

Britten was strongly influenced in his music and in his life by the tenor Peter Pears. For
him he wrote a quantity of songs, including the splendid Serenade for tenor, horn and
strings and the evocative Nocturne (both incomparable settings of the words of various
English poets), as well as several other settings of poets (from Michelangelo to Thomas
Hardy) for tenor and piano. His folksong arrangements have pleased a wide audience.
Major choral works include the War Requiem, which combines the text of the Latin
Requiem with the war poems of Wilfred Owen and forms an expression of Britten’s
own pacifism. His Ceremony of Carols, settings accompanied by solo harp and
designed, as were some other works, for boys’ voices, marked his return from America
to wartime England in 1942.

Chamber Music

Britten’s chamber music includes a cello sonata and three cello suites for his friend
Rostropovich, a fine suite for the Welsh harpist Osian Ellis, and Nocturnal after John
Dowland for the guitarist Julian Bream. Of his three numbered string quartets, Quartet
No 2 was written to mark the 250th anniversary of the death of Purcell, who provides
the quartet’s inspiration.