Benjamin Britten is regularly described in superlatives. 'The man who put British opera on an international stage' says the Guardian. adding, 'and changed the UK’s musical map for ever.' 'Without a doubt the 20th-century’s greatest opera composer', writes ClassicFM (according to Operabase, his operas are performed worldwide more than those of any other composer born in the 20th century). The first composer ever to be honoured with a life peerage, he died, at 63, Baron Britten of Aldeburgh.
But Britten, unlike all those distant great composers of the past, is accessible: we have recorded images and interviews, his brilliant piano playing and conducting recorded in action. And when he talks of his work, it's in terms of its relevance. "What matters to us now is that people want to use our music," he told the BBC. "For that, as I see it, is our job: To be useful, and to the living."
And then there's the dark side, to the man and his music. Also accessible to us are the voices of critics and of those (many) contemporaries he offended or angered. Throughout his adult life, he was always subject to public hostile gossip for his homosexuality, his manipulative friendships with young boys, his pacifism and his approaches to music and texts. His personal sensitivity to criticism and tendency to cut off those who displeased him meant that he was famous for what he termed his 'corpses' - 'ruthlessly and peremptorily dropped friends and colleagues'; a personal account here.
And his music, too, is light and dark. Opera audiences see it as mainly dark: the best known Britten operas searing accounts of loneliness, danger and isolation. But then there is the charming children's opera Noyes Flude, and his brilliant evocative version of Midsummer Night's Dream. And his recasting of The Beggar's Opera.
Britten’s body of work is demure but terrifying, technically bulletproof but emotionally jarring, childlike but erotic... sets the twee against the profoundly dark, the easy and entertaining against the too horrible to contemplate.
Where to start to understand Britten? His life and views are entangled in his music, so one approach is via the many online documentaries offering the voices of those he worked with and also his own.
Do you want a quick meeting? The 1968 CBC interview that gave us that simple statement about being useful is here.
Or you can start with an entirely uncritical, sanitized, - even sycophantic - account, of which there are plenty. From Aldeburgh, where he founded the festival for his work in the countryside he loved, we get careful accounts of his genius and some wonderful recordings of his conducting.
From his centenary celebrations, we get awed interviews with those who worked with him. This longer documentary, 'Benjamin Britten On Camera', takes you to the music- particularly the operas - via productions in his time, and the memories of many who worked with Britten.
Britten and Pears
You find fast that to get to know Britten, you have to get to know his partner, tenor Peter Pears. All the documentaries about their lives together are also about Britten's music and Pears' celebration of it. The 2001 film titled 'The Hidden Heart (Life of B. Britten & P. Pears) is full of music and stories about the productions. Tony Palmer's second Britten film, "Benjamin Britten – A Time There Was", includes long extracts from the landmark opera, Peter Grimes, Pears perfectly singing the demanding part. In a disarming interview an ageing Pears comments, "After all, he did already know my voice very well and he wouldn't have written music I couldn't sing."
For a small insight into the relationship, for most of its time illegal, go to the The Great British Art Tour: Britten, Pears and a missing arm.
Or browse the YouTube offerings of the two performing together. Here's a performance of some of the volumes of Britten's settings of English folksongs.
All three of Palmer's films are on YouTube - extraordinary if largely uncritical records. Here are the links.
Benjamin Britten – A Time There Was
Britten - Nocturne
War and humanity
Wikipedia comments: 'Music critics have frequently commented on the recurring theme in Britten's operas from Peter Grimes onward of the isolated individual at odds with a hostile society. The extent to which this reflected Britten's perception of himself, pacifist and homosexual, in the England of the 1930s, 40s and 50s is debated. Another recurrent theme is the corruption of innocence, most sharply seen in The Turn of the Screw.'
The children
Whatever his personal relationships with the much-discussed boys in his life, Britten clearly loved writing for and working with children, introducing them to the orchestra, conducting their singing.
More, much more, to come - as, in the next weeks, we visit six of Britten's operas.
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