The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. In the 29-volume second edition. Grove Music Online /General Editor – Stanley Sadie. Oxford University Press. 2001.

Britten, (Edward) Benjamin

(b Lowestoft, 22 Nov 1913; d Aldeburgh, 4 Dec 1976). English composer, conductor and pianist. He and his contemporary Michael Tippett are among several pairs of composers who dominated English art music in the 20th century. Of their music, Britten’s early on achieved, and has maintained, wider international circulation. An exceedingly practical and resourceful musician, Britten worked with increasing determination to recreate the role of leading national composer held during much of his own life by Vaughan Williams, from whom he consciously distanced himself. Notable among his musical and professional achievements are the revival of English opera, initiated by the success of Peter Grimes in 1945; the building of institutions to ensure the continuing viability of musical drama; and outreach to a wider audience, particularly children, in an effort to increase national musical literacy and awareness. Equally important in this was his remaining accessible as a composer, rejecting the modernist ideology of evolution towards a ‘necessary’ obscurity and developing a distinctive tonal language that allowed amateurs and professionals alike to love his work and to enjoy performing and listening to it. Above all, he imbued his works with his own personal concerns, some of them hidden, principally those having to do with his love of men and boys, some more public, like his fiercely held pacifist beliefs, in ways that allowed people to sense the passion and conviction behind them even if unaware of their full implication. He also performed a fascinating, as well as problematic, assimilation of (or rapprochement with) the artistic spoils of the East, attempting an unusual integration of various non-Western musical traditions with his own increasingly linear style.

1. Childhood, adolescence, 1913–30.

2. College and the profession, 1930–39.

3. North America, 1939–42.

4. Return to England, 1942–50.

5. Success and authority, 1951–5.

6. Transition and triumph, 1955–62.

7. Further travels, 1963–9.

8. Final testaments, 1970–76.

9. Reception, influence, significance.

WORKS

ARRANGEMENTS BY BRITTEN

ARRANGEMENTS BY OTHERS OF BRITTEN WORKS

WRITINGS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

PHILIP BRETT (text), JENNIFER DOCTOR, JUDITH LeGROVE, PAUL BANKS (works), JUDITH LeGROVE (bibliography)

Britten, Benjamin

1. Childhood, adolescence, 1913–30.

Britten was the youngest of four children born into a middle-class family in Lowestoft, on the Suffolk coast. The family house was a substantial villa overlooking the sea. His father, a dentist, appears to have been a bit severe, even ‘hard’, and not a contributor to the family's extensive musical life, though charming and supportive in letters to his son. Benjamin received encouragement from his mother Edith, herself a singer and pianist. She was determined that he should succeed and controlled his life rigorously until his death in 1937. She was clearly the centre of his emotional world. The coincidence of his birthday with St Cecilia's day must have seemed a good omen for her ambitious dream of his becoming ‘the fourth B’: like many aspects of the composer's childhood, it has been celebrated in Britten lore and literature. An early attempt at play writing and fervent exploration of the piano as well as a substantial number of compositions written before he was ten have been taken to suggest an almost Mozartian precocity in his otherwise standard progress to preparatory school, a small local day school which he entered at eight.

At school, he appears to have diverted any adult disapproval and schoolboy bullying occasioned by his music and sensitive nature by proficiency at sports (he was a keen cricketer) and a certain toughness. He had piano lessons with Edith Astle, passing the Associated Board Grade 8 at 13, and began viola lessons at ten with Audrey Alston, who encouraged him to attend concerts in Norwich. It was through her he met the composer Frank Bridge. Mrs Britten had failed in attempts to draw wider attention to the prolific output of her son, who at 14 had 100 opus numbers to his credit (several have been published, mostly since his death; see Mark in Cooke, D1999). But Bridge was impressed, and persuaded Britten's parents to allow him to travel to London for composition lessons. These may have injured his ego, but they also helped Britten to introduce a certain rigour into his composition. The cardinal principles of Bridge’s teaching were ‘that you should find yourself and be true to what you found. The other … was his scrupulous attention to good technique’ (Britten, Sunday Telegraph, 17 Nov 1963). The String Quartet in F, completed in April 1928, is among the first substantial works written under Bridge, whose influence is also evident in a song cycle with orchestra, Quatre chansons françaises, composed that summer for the older Brittens’ 27th wedding anniversary. These settings of Hugo and Verlaine allude to Wagner filtered through Gallic gestures, but the diatonic nursery-like tune for the sad boy with the consumptive mother in L'enfance is entirely characteristic.

In September 1928 Britten entered Gresham's, a public school at Holt in north Norfolk. This was a difficult and belittling experience, for the music master disparaged his composition, and the bullying (of other boys, not himself) outraged his always incendiary sense of justice. He felt keenly his first separation from home. One outlet was intensely passionate letters to his mother, another talk of suicide in his diary, yet another lapsing into psychosomatic illness, an involuntary defence that continued as a safety valve throughout his life. The music master eventually came round, at least to the extent of performing his Bagatelle for violin, viola and piano in a school concert in March 1930. But the family allowed him to leave after two years when he unexpectedly passed his School Certificate in 1930.

The lessons with Bridge continued to stimulate and direct his need to compose. The single-movement Rhapsody for string quartet of March 1929 looks forward to the two Phantasy compositions of the early 1930s. The following year came the Quartettino, with its conscientious if garrulous motivic working out of a five-note motto; and there were several works featuring the viola, including a solo piece (published posthumously as Elegy), written just after Britten left Gresham's and perhaps hinting at his unhappiness there. It was followed by two sketches (published posthumously as Two Portraits), the first a vigorous movement for strings depicting his school friend David Layton (whom Britten described in his diary as ‘clean, healthy thinking & balanced’, Carpenter, C1992, p.75) and the second entitled ‘E.B.B.’, with solo viola playing a melancholic folklike tune, evidently a self-portrait. The well-known Hymn to the Virgin, composed during his last term at Gresham's, was long one of the two earliest compositions in his published catalogue of works, together with the setting of Hilaire Belloc's The Birds composed a year earlier.

Britten, Benjamin