Benjamin Britten

Benjamin Britten was born on 22 November 1913 in Lowestoft, a fishing port on the Suffolk coast in eastern England, on St Cecilia’s Day, the feast of the patron saint of musicians. His father was a dentist; his mother, Edith, an amateur singer, held concerts at home and dreamed of her son becoming a great composer. Benjamin composed from the age of five, and by fourteen had already written hundreds of pieces: sonatas, songs, quartets. He learned piano and viola. All his life he remained attached to the North Sea and the landscapes of his childhood.

In 1927, aged thirteen, he began studying composition with Frank Bridge, a demanding composer who taught him rigour and openness to modern European music, from Ravel to Berg. In 1930 he entered the Royal College of Music in London, where he was somewhat bored. In 1934 he composed the Simple Symphony for string orchestra, based on tunes he had written as a child. That same year he wanted to study with Alban Berg in Vienna, but his teachers dissuaded him.

To earn his living he composed in 1935–36 for the GPO Film Unit, the film unit of the British Post Office. There he worked with the poet W. H. Auden on the documentary Night Mail (1936), which follows the night mail train from London to Scotland, its rhythm imitating the train’s wheels. In 1937 he composed the Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge, which made him known internationally. That same year he met the tenor Peter Pears, who became his lifelong partner and the performer of almost all his vocal works.

A committed pacifist, Britten left with Pears for North America in 1939, at the start of the Second World War. There he composed his Violin Concerto and Les Illuminations, on poems by Rimbaud. But he was homesick: reading in California a poem by George Crabbe about a Suffolk fisherman, he decided to return. In 1942, crossing the Atlantic, he composed A Ceremony of Carols for children’s choir and harp. Back in England he obtained conscientious-objector status and gave concerts to support the population.

On 7 June 1945 his opera Peter Grimes, inspired by Crabbe’s poem, was premiered in London: the story of a solitary fisherman rejected by the people of his village. It was a triumph, marking the rebirth of English opera, absent since Purcell. Its “Sea Interludes” evoke the North Sea in all its moods. In 1946 he composed for an educational film The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra, variations on a theme by Purcell that introduce each instrument of the orchestra in turn before a great final fugue.

In 1948, with Pears and the librettist Eric Crozier, he founded the Aldeburgh Festival in the small Suffolk coastal town where he had settled. There he presented his own works and those of other composers. He wrote many operas, such as Albert Herring, Billy Budd, The Turn of the Screw and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, as well as works for children, whom he loved to involve in music: Let’s Make an Opera (1949) and Noye’s Fludde (1958), an opera about Noah’s Ark for children and amateurs in which dozens of children play the animals.

In 1962 he composed the War Requiem for the consecration of the new Coventry Cathedral, rebuilt after its destruction by German bombing. The work combines the Latin Mass for the Dead with poems by Wilfred Owen, a young soldier killed in 1918. For the premiere Britten wanted three soloists from formerly enemy countries: an Englishman, a German and a Russian woman. In 1976 he became the first composer to be made a life peer, as Lord Britten of Aldeburgh. Suffering from heart disease, he died at Aldeburgh on 4 December 1976. He is regarded as the greatest English composer of the twentieth century.