Even as Benjamin Britten ascended to the leading position among British composers in the 1940s, he remained something of an enigma, traveling on his own path. Like most of his country’s composers he was a thoroughgoing eclectic in his work, but his influences played out in distinctive ways. In a time when the leading international composers were revolutionaries on the order of Schoenberg and Stravinsky, or trying to be, Britten remained a tonal composer, a melodist in the traditional sense.
A good deal of his work was highly Anglican sacred music. Yet he learned from everybody, including the above composers. His opera The Turn of the Screw is based on a twelve-tone theme, but sounds nothing like Schoenberg. He absorbed folk music while rarely sounding folksy. He wrote works inspired by Japanese theater and Balinese gamelan. All the while, in his person he maintained a cool distance from the public and a gruff professionalism, making few statements about his work or about music in general. His homosexuality, his obsessions, his insecurities remained more or less hidden in plain sight.
He was born Edward Benjamin Britten, Baron Britten of Aldeburgh. He composed from childhood and at twelve began studying with the well-known composer Frank Bridge. After a stint at the Royal College of Music, in the 1930s he did a good deal of work in theater, film and radio, and became close to poet W. H. Auden, who helped him come to terms with his sexuality. When the war broke out he sailed for the States, where he wrote his first opera, Paul Bunyan, to an Auden libretto. He was already living with his lifetime partner, tenor Peter Pears.
After much soul-searching, Britten sailed back to England in 1942, in the middle of the war. But he had already made a considerable impression in the United States, which led to a commission from the Koussevitzky Foundation for what became the opera Peter Grimes. Premiered in 1945, this bleak but electrifying story of a fisherman and his doomed boy apprentice was an international success and placed Britten in the first rank of opera composers and composers in general. In reputation it remains one of the towering operas of the twentieth century. Its leading role, like all Britten’s leading tenor roles, was written expressly and lovingly for Peter Pears.
For an introduction to Britten, I propose two pieces. The first is the 1937 work that more or less announced him to the world as a formidable new presence: Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge. Brash, witty, melodious, engaging from beginning to end, “conservative” (complete with a concluding fugue) yet fresh and distinctive in voice, it forms a fond memorial for his teacher. The other piece is his collection Four Sea Interludes from Peter Grimes. Here Britten shows off his strength and originality in orchestral color and tone painting: the luminous melancholy of “Dawn,” the pealing Sunday “Morning,” soulful “Moonlight,” raging “Storm.” All these are scenes any number of composers have painted, but nobody did them like Britten. (For more of his orchestral music, of course you can try his Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra based on an old Henry Purcell tune, a didactic piece introducing the instruments of the orchestra, that he made more delightful than it had reason to be. Britten loved children and wrote a good deal of music for them, usually with children as performers.)
On the boat as he returned to England in 1942 Britten produced one of his most beloved works, A Ceremony of Carols, eleven pieces for treble choir and harp based on Middle English poems (in their original spellings). It begins and ends evoking a church ceremony, in the form of a Gregorian Christmas chant. Between is some of the freshest and most appealing choral music of the century. He fashions a style with a certain archaic flavor to reflect the old poems. To quote one of the most enchanting of the pieces, “There is no rose of such vertu / as is the rose that bare Jesu… By that rose we may well see / There be one God in persons three.” These pieces have become one of the familiar ornaments of the holidays; may they always be.
Finally I’ll recommend what for me is his greatest opera, The Turn of the Screw, based on Henry James’s elusive and harrowing ghost story. Here Britten was working not only with a powerful story by a great writer, he was also working within the circle of his own obsessions. Britten was a gay man with a longtime companion and never talked about it. He had feelings for young boys with which he struggled, and kept it under wraps. He wrote several operas about suffering or death or sexual feelings involving children, and nobody in his time seriously examined that, either. James’s original Turn of the Screw had sexual threat in the center of the opera: a new governess of two children finds that they seem to be haunted and seduced by the ghosts of their dead servant and governess. In a good production Turn of the Screw is one of the most disquieting and riveting works the theater has to offer: the insinuating and unnerving melody with which Peter Quint calls to the children; the recurring refrain, taken from Yeats: “The ceremony of innocence is drowned.” In the opera seduction and revulsion are merged in a singular way. By all means first take this in with a video of a production (there is an excellent film of it). You won’t forget it. Here is as good a demonstration as any that music is not just an amusement, but a mirror of humanity in light and dark as profound as literature or drama or poetry.
Britten died in December 1976 in Aldeburgh, where he was born and where he founded an important music festival. He died shortly after completing his last opera, Death in Venice, from Thomas Mann’s story about an old artist’s fatal obsession with a young boy. Since then his life has been filled out in biographies and publications of his love letters to Pears, in stories of the personal and artistic insecurities he never escaped. I think that this stream of biography, which is ongoing, will only flesh out what was implicit in his music all along: anxiety, suffering, uncertainty, and immense human empathy.
More Britten: A Simple Symphony; War Requiem; The Burning Fiery Furnace; Serenade for Tenor, Horn, and Strings.