Benjamin Britten was a child prodigy who went on to compose some of the 20th century’s greatest works. Peter Parker salutes a man whose genius was fuelled by personal passions.
Benjamin Britten: Changed
British music Photo: © Lebrecht Music and Arts Photo
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Benjamin Britten would have been very pleased to know that his centenary is
being celebrated with concerts and events all around the world, from Helsinki to
Kuala Lumpur, under the slogan “Britten 100: Music for Everyone”. His work may
be performed in the world’s grandest opera houses and concert halls, but Britten
genuinely believed that music should be available to all. His founding of the
Aldeburgh Festival in 1948 exemplified this: some of the 20th century’s greatest
musicians were persuaded to join him in concerts performed in halls and churches
in the small Suffolk town he had made his home. Many of his own works and those
of other composers received their premieres there. He also introduced
generations of children to music through such works as The Young Person’s
Guide to the Orchestra, Let’s Make an Opera and preeminently
Noye’s Fludde, where they get to sing and play an array of musical
instruments alongside professionals. It is characteristic of Britten’s influence
and reach that the director Wes Anderson, who at the age of 10 played an otter
in a school production of Noye’s Fludde in his native Texas, would go on
to use Britten as a “musical backbone” to his wonderful recent film about
American childhood, Moonrise Kingdom.
In Britten (Haus, t £9.99) David Matthews observes
that his reputation, unlike that of many composers, has suffered no decline
since his death in 1976. Indeed, those who dislike the composer talk about “the
Britten industry”. Even Paul Kildea, in Britten: a Life in the 20th
Century (Allen Lane, t £26) refers somewhat despairingly to “the
sheer scale of the documentation project in place” – notably at the
Britten-Pears Foundation, which boasts “the most complete composer archive in
the world”. For anyone who wants to know what the fuss is all about, Matthews’s
little book, first published in 2003 and now reissued in a “centenary edition”,
is a good place to start. It occasionally seems rather old fashioned (Britten’s
mother “very likely” made him homosexual) and it lacks the quirkiness of John
Bridcut’s entertaining but authoritative Pocket Guide to Britten (2010),
which not only gives a detailed outline of the composer’s life but also a full
descriptive catalogue of his works. It nevertheless provides a solid
introduction to the man and his music, written by a composer who worked with
him.
Neil Powell (Benjamin Britten: a Life for Music,
Hutchinson, t £23) and Kildea’s books will suit readers who want
rather more, but are daunted by the six meticulously annotated volumes of
Britten’s selected letters, which amount to a biography but run to more than
4,500 pages. Both writers make large claims for their subject, which their
respective biographies, in their very different ways, wholly justify. For
Powell, Britten “was the greatest of English composers – rivalled only by Henry
Purcell and Edward Elgar – and one of the most extraordinarily gifted musicians
ever to have been born in this country”. Kildea concludes that Britten “produced
a body of works and performances that was unrivalled in the 20th century and is
unlikely to be surpassed any time soon”.
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