Edward Benjamin Britten, Baron Britten OM CH was an English composer, conductor, and pianist. He was a central figure of 20th-century British music. His best-known works include the opera Peter Grimes, the War Requiem and the orchestrals The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra. Britten was the first composer to be given a life peerage.
About Benjamin Britten in brief
Edward Benjamin Britten, Baron Britten OM CH was an English composer, conductor, and pianist. He was a central figure of 20th-century British music, with a range of works including opera, other vocal music, orchestral and chamber pieces. His best-known works include the opera Peter Grimes, the War Requiem and the orchestrals The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra. Britten was born in Lowestoft, Suffolk, the son of a dentist, and showed talent from an early age. He studied at the Royal College of Music in London and privately with the composer Frank Bridge. He took a great interest in writing music for children and amateur performers, including the opera Noye’s Fludde, a Missa Brevis, and the song collection Friday Afternoons. His most frequent and important muse was his personal and professional partner, the tenor Peter Pears; others included Kathleen Ferrier, Jennifer Vyvyan, Janet Baker, Julian Bream, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Mstislav Rostropovich. Together with Pears and the librettist and producer Eric Crozier, Britten founded the annual Aldeburgh Festival in 1948, and he was responsible for the creation of Snape Maltings concert hall in 1967. In his last year, he was the first composer to be given a life peerage. Britten described his family as very ordinary middle class, but there were aspects of the Brittens that were not ordinary: Edith’s father was illegitimate, and her mother was an alcoholic.
Robert Britten refused to attend church on Sundays and was an agnostic. Edith strove to maintain the family’s social standing, inviting the pillars of the local community to musical soirées so that Britten could lead a normal life. When he was three months old he contracted pneumonia and nearly died. The illness left him with a damaged heart, and doctors warned his parents that he would probably never be able to lead anormal life. He recovered more fully than expected, and as a boy was a keen tennis player and cricketer. To his mother’s great delight he was an outstandingly musical child, unlike his sisters, who inherited their father’s indifference to music, while his brother was a musically talented tennis player, though he was only interested in ragtime and tennis. He also performed and recorded works by others, such as Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos, Mozart symphonies, and song cycles by Schubert and Schumann. He was the youngest of four children of Robert Victor Britten and his wife Edith Rhoda, née Hockey. Robert’s youthful ambition to become a farmer had been thwarted by lack of capital, and he had instead trained as a dentist. While studying at Charing Cross Hospital in London he met Edith Hockey, the daughter of a civil service clerk in the British Government’s Home Office.
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