BRITTEN, EDWARD BENJAMIN (b. Lowestoft, England, November 22 1913; d. Aldeburgh December 4 1976)
Tenors may owe more to Britten than to any other composer of the twentieth century. In almost all his seventeen operas and most of his songs he wrote superb music for his life-long friend, tenor Peter Pears.
Britten seemed destined to write for the voice. His mother was a soprano for whom he played piano accompaniments in concert. Then, as a young student, he and the poet W.H. Auden became friends. Together they produced the cantata Ballad of Heroes, premièred in April 1935.
That year Britten, Pears and Auden left England for the United States. There, in 1941, Paul Bunyan, Britten's first opera, with a libretto by Auden, was premièred. It had such a bad reception that they wished it had never been produced.
Britten and Pears soon returned to England. In 1945 Peter Grimes was premièred. It was a triumph and for the next eighteen years Britten was almost a one-man opera factory. He also found time to compose songs in the English tradition and a body of church music. Between 1945 and 1973 he composed fifteen operas. The last was Death In Venice, based on the story by German author, Thomas Mann.
In 1947 he made his home in the English seaside village of Aldeburgh. There he instituted an annual music festival. It was for the 1949 festival that he created something new, an audience-participation work for children, Let's Make an Opera. Professional singers or gifted amateurs are needed for the grown-up parts. But Britten demanded that children sing the children's parts, unheard of at the time.
Britten rejected the Romantic impulse, believing that music had somehow gone soft with Beethoven. This led to a career of experimentation, resulting in work that is always lucid and usually powerfully memorable. In terms of popular acceptance, it's clear why he's England's most successful classical song and opera composer of the twentieth century.
