Benjamin Britten
A Life for Music
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
This spellbinding centenary biography by Neil Powell looks at the music, the life, and the legacy of the greatest British composer of the twentieth century
Benjamin Britten was born on November 22, 1913, in the East Suffolk town of Lowestoft. Displaying a passion and proficiency for music at an early age, to the delight of his mother, Edith, a talented amateur musician herself, he began composing music when he was only five years old. After studying at the Royal College of Music, Britten went on to write documentary scores for the General Post Office Film Unit, where he met and collaborated with the poet W. H. Auden.
Of more lasting importance was Britten's introduction in 1937 to the tenor Peter Pears, who was to become the inspirational center of his emotional and musical life. Their partnership lasted nearly four decades, during a dangerous time when homosexuality was illegal in England. Conscientious objectors, Britten and Pears followed Auden to America before the war began in 1939. While there, they joined the extraordinary Brooklyn ménage of George Davis, Louis MacNeice, and Paul Bowles.
Eventually intense homesickness, provoked in part by George Crabbe's poem "Peter Grimes," drove the pair home to East Anglia in 1942 and gave Britten the inspiration for his finest opera. Throughout his career, Britten did not want modern music to be just for "the cultured few" and instead always composed his music to be "listenable-to." The shared quotidian lives of Britten and Pears unfold in this intimate biography and the story of two men who created a truly remarkable legacy.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Born in 1913 to a music-loving mother who wanted her son to become a musician, Benjamin Britten, the celebrated British composer, wrote no fewer than 534 works by the time he was 14. In this crisply narrated biography, Powell (George Crabbe) elegantly traces the development of Britten's musical gifts from his childhood and youth in England to his travels to America, his meetings and lifelong friendship with W.H. Auden, and his crucial role in helping to establish the Alderburgh Festival. While Britten admired Brahms early in life, by the end of his college days, much of that composer's music repulsed him; he then turned to Mahler, Stravinsky, and Elgar. Powell's book is more than a staid, detailed, year-by-year chronicle of the composer's life; the author's incisive explorations of Britten's operas and other musical compositions sing with life. He probes the genius of Britten's compositions from Sinfonietta, which premiered in 1933, to the triptych of Peter Grimes (based on the epic poem of fellow Suffolk resident George Crabbe), Billy Budd, and Death in Venice. Peter Grimes, for example, is at once "old-fashioned in its construction of linked set pieces and radical in its borrowing of montage techniques from the composer's experience in film and radio." In this powerful biography, Powell pays eloquent tribute to Britten's musical genius.
