86 Facts About Britten

Edward Benjamin Britten, Baron Britten was an English composer, conductor, and pianist.

Britten was a central figure of 20th-century British music, with a range of works including opera, other vocal music, orchestral and chamber pieces.

Britten studied at the Royal College of Music in London and privately with the composer Frank Bridge.

Britten first came to public attention with the a cappella choral work A Boy was Born in 1934.

Britten 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.

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Britten was a celebrated pianist and conductor, performing many of his own works in concert and on record.

Britten performed and recorded works by others, such as Bach's Brandenburg Concertos, Mozart symphonies, and song cycles by Schubert and Schumann.

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.

Britten was born in the fishing port of Lowestoft in Suffolk, on the east coast of England on 22 November 1913, the feast day of Saint Cecilia.

Britten was the youngest of four children of Robert Victor Britten and his wife Edith Rhoda, nee Hockey.

Consensus among biographers of Britten is that his father was a loving but somewhat stern and remote parent.

Music was the principal means by which Edith Britten strove to maintain the family's social standing, inviting the pillars of the local community to musical soirees at the house.

When Britten was three months old he contracted pneumonia and nearly died.

Britten recovered more fully than expected, and as a boy was a keen tennis player and cricketer.

Britten made his first attempts at composition when he was five.

Britten started piano lessons when he was seven years old, and three years later began to play the viola.

Britten was one of the last composers brought up on exclusively live music: his father refused to have a gramophone or, later, a radio in the house.

The headmaster, Thomas Sewell, was an old-fashioned disciplinarian; the young Britten was outraged at the severe corporal punishments frequently handed out, and later he said that his lifelong pacifism probably had its roots in his reaction to the regime at the school.

Britten himself rarely fell foul of Sewell, a mathematician, in which subject Britten was a star pupil.

When his Simple Symphony, based on these juvenilia, was recorded in 1956, Britten wrote this pen-portrait of his young self for the sleeve note:.

Britten's friends bore with it, his enemies kicked a bit but not for long, the staff couldn't object if his work and games didn't suffer.

Robert Britten, supported by Thomas Sewell, doubted the wisdom of pursuing a composing career; a compromise was agreed by which Britten would, as planned, go on to his public school the following year but would make regular day-trips to London to study composition with Bridge and piano with his colleague Harold Samuel.

In September 1928 Britten went as a boarder to Gresham's School, in Holt, Norfolk.

Britten remained there for two years and in 1930, he won a composition scholarship at the Royal College of Music in London; his examiners were the composers John Ireland and Ralph Vaughan Williams and the college's harmony and counterpoint teacher, S P Waddington.

Britten was at the RCM from 1930 to 1933, studying composition with Ireland and piano with Arthur Benjamin.

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Britten won the Sullivan Prize for composition, the Cobbett Prize for chamber music, and was twice winner of the Ernest Farrar Prize for composition.

Britten used his time in London to attend concerts and become better acquainted with the music of Stravinsky, Shostakovich and, most particularly, Mahler.

Britten intended postgraduate study in Vienna with Alban Berg, Arnold Schoenberg's student, but was eventually dissuaded by his parents, on the advice of the RCM staff.

In February 1935, at Bridge's instigation, Britten was invited to a job interview by the BBC's director of music Adrian Boult and his assistant Edward Clark.

Britten was not enthusiastic about the prospect of working full-time in the BBC music department and was relieved when what came out of the interview was an invitation to write the score for a documentary film, The King's Stamp, directed by Alberto Cavalcanti for the GPO Film Unit.

Britten became a member of the film unit's small group of regular contributors, another of whom was W H Auden.

Auden was a considerable influence on Britten, encouraging him to widen his aesthetic, intellectual and political horizons, and to come to terms with his homosexuality.

Pears was inclined to disregard the advice and go back to England; Britten felt the urge to return, but accepted the embassy's counsel and persuaded Pears to do the same.

Already a friend of the composer Aaron Copland, Britten encountered his latest works Billy the Kid and An Outdoor Overture, both of which influenced his own music.

In 1940 Britten composed Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo, the first of many song cycles for Pears.

In 1941 Britten produced his first music drama, Paul Bunyan, an operetta, to a libretto by Auden.

In 1942 Britten read the work of the poet George Crabbe for the first time.

Britten knew that he must write an opera based on Crabbe's poem about the fisherman Peter Grimes.

Britten had grown away from him, and Auden became one of the composer's so-called "corpses" – former intimates from whom he completely cut off contact once they had outlived their usefulness to him or offended him in some way.

Britten spent much of his time there in 1944 working on the opera Peter Grimes.

Pears joined Sadler's Wells Opera Company, whose artistic director, the singer Joan Cross, announced her intention to re-open the company's home base in London with Britten's opera, casting herself and Pears in the leading roles.

Colin Matthews comments that the next two works Britten composed after his return, the song-cycle The Holy Sonnets of John Donne and the Second String Quartet, contrast strongly with earlier, lighter-hearted works such as Les Illuminations.

Britten recovered his joie de vivre for The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra, written for an educational film, Instruments of the Orchestra, directed by Muir Mathieson and featuring the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Malcolm Sargent.

Britten wrote the comic opera Albert Herring for the group in 1947; while on tour in the new work Pears came up with the idea of mounting a festival in the small Suffolk seaside town of Aldeburgh, where Britten had moved from Snape earlier in the year, and which became his principal place of residence for the rest of his life.

New works by Britten featured in almost every festival until his death in 1976, including the premieres of his operas A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Jubilee Hall in 1960 and Death in Venice at Snape Maltings Concert Hall in 1973.

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Unlike many leading English composers, Britten was not known as a teacher, but in 1949 he accepted his only private pupil, Arthur Oldham, who studied with him for three years.

When redundant Victorian maltings buildings in the village of Snape, six miles inland, became available for hire, Britten realised that the largest of them could be converted into a concert hall and opera house.

The hall was destroyed by fire in 1969, but Britten was determined that it would be rebuilt in time for the following year's festival, which it was.

Britten conducted the first performance outside Russia of Shostakovich's Fourteenth Symphony at Snape in 1970.

Britten composed his cello suites, Cello Symphony and Cello Sonata for Rostropovich, who premiered them at the Aldeburgh Festival.

Britten had been asked four years earlier to write a work for the consecration of the new Coventry Cathedral, a modernist building designed by Basil Spence.

Britten decided that his work would commemorate the dead of both World Wars in a large-scale score for soloists, chorus, chamber ensemble and orchestra.

Britten's text interspersed the traditional Requiem Mass with poems by Wilfred Owen.

In September 1970 Britten asked Myfanwy Piper, who had adapted the two Henry James stories for him, to turn another prose story into a libretto.

At an early stage in composition Britten was told by his doctors that a heart operation was essential if he was to live for more than two years.

Britten was determined to finish the opera and worked urgently to complete it before going into hospital for surgery.

In June 1976, the last year of his life, Britten accepted a life peerage – the first composer so honoured – becoming Baron Britten, of Aldeburgh in the County of Suffolk.

When Rostropovich made his farewell visit a few days later, Britten gave him what he had written of Praise We Great Men.

Britten died of congestive heart failure on 4 December 1976.

The authorities at Westminster Abbey had offered burial there, but Britten had made it clear that he wished his grave to be side by side with that, in due course, of Pears.

Britten told Pears that he always voted either Liberal or Labour and could not imagine ever voting Conservative, but he was never a member of any party, except the Peace Pledge Union.

Britten walked and swam regularly and kept himself as fit as he could, but Carpenter in his 1992 biography mentions 20 illnesses, a few of them minor but most fairly serious, suffered over the years by Britten before his final heart complaint developed.

Britten was not always confident that he was the genius others declared him to be, and though he was hypercritical of his own works, he was acutely, even aggressively sensitive to criticism from anybody else.

Britten was, as he acknowledged, notorious for dumping friends and colleagues who either offended him or ceased to be of use – his "corpses".

Britten did not want to hurt anyone, but the task in hand was more important than anything or anybody.

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Britten described as "complete rubbish" Kildea's allegation that the surgeon who operated on Britten in 1973 would or even could have covered up a syphilitic condition.

Britten discovered the music of Debussy and Ravel which, Matthews writes, "gave him a model for an orchestral sound".

Britten was impressed by Delius, and thought Brigg Fair "delicious" when he heard it in 1931.

Britten's music reflects the eroticism in Rimbaud's poems; Copland commented of the section "Antique" that he did not know how Britten dared to write the melody.

Britten's orchestration has an individuality, incisiveness and integration with the musical material only achieved by the greatest composers.

Britten's youthful jeux d'esprit the Simple Symphony is in conventional symphonic structure, observing sonata form and the traditional four-movement pattern, but of his mature works his Spring Symphony is more a song cycle than a true symphony, and the concertante Cello Symphony is an attempt to balance the traditional concerto and symphony.

In 1945 Britten revised it, replacing a skittish third movement with a more sombre passacaglia that, in Matthews's view, gives the work more depth, and makes the apparent triumph of the finale more ambivalent.

String quartets featured throughout Britten's composing career, from a student work in 1928 to his Third String Quartet.

For Osian Ellis, Britten wrote the Suite for Harp, which Joan Chissell in The Times described as "a little masterpiece of concentrated fancy".

Britten got into the valley of the shadow of death and couldn't get out.

Whittall believes that one reason for Britten's enduring popularity is the "progressive conservatism" of his music.

Britten generally avoided the avant-garde, and did not challenge the conventions in the way that contemporaries such as Tippett did.

Singers and players admired Britten's conducting, and David Webster rated it highly enough to offer him the musical directorship of the Covent Garden Opera in 1952.

Britten declined; he was not confident of his ability as a conductor and was reluctant to spend too much time performing rather than composing.

In May 1943 Britten made his debut in the Decca studios, accompanying Sophie Wyss in five of his arrangements of French folk songs.

Decca's first major commercial success with Britten came the following year, with Peter Grimes, which has, at 2013, never been out of the catalogues since its first release.

From 1958 Britten conducted Decca recordings of many of his operas and vocal and orchestral works, including the Nocturne, the Spring Symphony and the War Requiem.

State honours awarded to Britten included Companion of Honour in 1953; Commander of the Royal Order of the Polar Star in 1962; the Order of Merit in 1965; and a life peerage in July 1976, as Baron Britten, of Aldeburgh in the County of Suffolk.

Britten received honorary degrees and fellowships from 19 conservatories and universities in Europe and America.

Britten's awards included the Hanseatic Goethe Prize ; the Aspen Award, Colorado ; the Royal Philharmonic Society's Gold Medal ; the Wihuri Sibelius Prize ; the Mahler Medal ; the Leonie Sonning Music Prize ; the Ernst von Siemens Music Prize ; and the Ravel Prize.

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Britten was played in the premiere production by Alex Jennings.