One hundred years of Britten

The British rightly consider Benjamin Britten a national musical genius.

Britten was born on November 22, 1913 in the coastal town of Lowestoft in Suffolk, the son of a dentist. Most of all, Britten loved the East Coast of Britain - the silence and the sea. In the vicinity of the small town of Aldborough, in the typically English “Red House”, together with his beloved friend, singer Peter Pearce, the composer lived most of his life.

Britten began composing music - and one whose level of skill excludes the usual condescension towards juvenilia - very early, in fact, as a child: he was five years old.

Britten's mother sang as an amateur and organized musical evenings in their home. It was she who taught little Benjamin how to read music. Later, his mother’s friend studied with young Britten, and he found a real teacher in the person of composer Frank Bridge - Britten was eleven at the time.

Until he entered the Royal College of Music (1930-1933), young Britten lived like many of his peers from middle-income families - with the difference that he purposefully studied with Bridge, coming to London weekly for this, and continued to compose music - already during these years he musical creativity was remarkably rich in content.

Frank Bridge highly appreciated the most modern music, and Britten himself was guided by Stravinsky, Shostakovich and Mahler and wanted to go to Vienna to study with Alban Berg. However, parents were against it, and college teachers even more so. As Britten wrote many years later, the Royal College of Music gave him little, so Bridge remained his main mentor.

Britten dedicated one of his most popular compositions, Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge, to Bridge. First presented to the public at the Salzburg Festival in 1937, it subsequently became widely performed. And although Britten made his mark as an established composer while still a student at the Royal College of Music (the BBC Singers choir learned his variations of “A Child Is Born” in 1933), it was “Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge” that immediately made Britten’s name widely known, including including overseas.

Subsequently, Britten began to receive regular orders for music for documentaries, initially for those that were produced in the relevant department of the British Post Office. Thanks to this, Britten met the poet Wystan Auden, with whom he later worked closely and became friends.

One of the results of this collaboration, the documentary film Night Mail (1936), is considered a classic of the genre: Auden wrote poetry for this film, and Britten wrote music. In subsequent years, until his departure for America in the spring of 1939, Britten wrote extensively for radio, film and theatre.

In 1937, Britten's mother died - biographers believe that this was a severe shock for him, since it was with his mother that he had the deepest relationship. That same year, Britten met the singer Peter Pears, who was to become the main person in his life - lover, friend, moral support, performer of his compositions.

Modern technology has preserved for us numerous audio and video recordings of Britten and Pierce playing music together - in particular, Britten loved to accompany Pierce when he performed Schubert and Schumann’s Lieder at concerts (Britten was an excellent pianist).

As a convinced pacifist, the composer took part in a variety of pacifist actions. In the spring of 1939, Britten and Pierce went overseas - to Canada and then to the USA. Their friends - Wystan Auden and novelist and playwright Christopher Isherwood - left for the States a little earlier.

When the war began, Britten and Piers contacted the British embassy in the United States, but they were strongly advised not to return home yet. In America, Britten’s work was not accepted by everyone, but the composer was openly supported by Sergei Koussevitzky, at that time one of the largest conductors in the world.

Britten and Piers returned to England in the spring of 1942.

While still in the States, Britten read the poems of the 18th century English poet Crabbe, “The Town,” and experienced a strong feeling, which he later described as a “sense of homeland” and the need to express it in music (Crabbe, like Britten, was from Suffolk).

Returning to England, Britten bought an old house (former mill) in the town of Snape in Suffolk. It was there that during 1944 he wrote the opera Peter Grimes.

The opera's premiere in 1945 at Sadler's Wells Theatre, starring Peter Pears, became a national event. The public preferred “Peter Grimes” to “Cio-Cio-san” and other popular productions. How perspicacious was the great Koussevitzky, who, before Britten left the USA, offered him $1,000 as an advance for staging an opera that had not yet been written!..

Also in 1945, Britten created his most popular work, a guide to the orchestra for young people, intended for a popular science film about a symphony orchestra. The main theme in this work is taken from Purcell; I note that it is rare for an orchestral work to have such grace in full sound (see, for example, performed by the BBC orchestra www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfFFqxnQBuI ).

Britten finally settled in Suffolk, buying a building in the town of Aldborough, which is now, after restoration, called the “Red House” and is part of a complex of buildings associated with the annual festival in Aldborough, the idea of ​​​​which was originally expressed by Pearce in 1948.

The history of this festival is described in detail; A documentary film is also available where the still very young Queen Elizabeth II opens a modern concert hall in Snape, converted at the initiative of Britten and Pearce from an old malthouse.

Britten's subsequent life was primarily about composing and performing music. He wrote 14 operas, among which Peter Grimes and The Turn of the Wheel (based on the famous story by Henry James) remain the most performed English operas to this day. I would like to note one more of his works, which had a symbolic meaning not only for Britten the pacifist, but also for many of his compatriots: this is “War Requiem” (based on the poems of the poet Wilfred Owen, who died in the First World War). The Requiem was written to commemorate the total destruction of Coventry and its famous cathedral, which was rebuilt next to the preserved ruins and opened in 1962.

The Requiem is dedicated to the friends of Britten and Pearce who fought and died in recent wars. The solo parts in “War Requiem” were intended for Galina Vishnevskaya, Fischer-Dieskau and Pierce. Shortly before the premiere, Vishnevskaya was refused permission to leave the USSR, so the singer who replaced her, Heather Harper, began rehearsing only ten days before the performance. Those present at the first performance of the Requiem in Coventry in May 1962 noted that after the last sounds of the orchestra there was complete silence in the hall for some time...

In 1963, Vishnevskaya was finally released, and she recorded “War Requiem” with Pierce, Fischer-Dieskau and the orchestra conducted by the author. 200 thousand The copies of the record with this recording sold out in five months - an unheard-of circulation for a modern classic. Since then, the tradition according to which the soprano part in this work is performed by a Russian singer has been invariably preserved. As far as I could find out, in the USSR “War Requiem” was first performed by the student orchestra of the Leningrad Conservatory, led by the wonderful conductor and teacher Nikolai Rabinovich.

Britten visited Russia three times and was friends with Rostropovich, Vishnevskaya, Shostakovich and Richter. As you know, Shostakovich dedicated Symphony No. 14 to Britten; Britten wrote the Symphony Concertante for cello for Rostropovich.

Britten, of course, was a great worker. A modest man, prone to punctuality, he was cordial and sociable, willingly playing music with children and youth, although he had no students. He loved solitude and walks along the seashore, while his and Peter’s house was always open to close friends.

Judging by letters, biographical details known to us and video recordings, Britten was extremely demanding of performers - but also of himself. In the video footage, we see a thin man wearing a V-neck sweater, with reserved gestures and a soft voice; at the same time, as contemporaries testify, as an author and conductor, Britten was absolutely uncompromising. He left a colossal archive, about which archivists wrote that Britten, most likely, did not throw anything away at all. Peter Pearce collected paintings; Britten was given a lot of things, he bought some himself, but he was not a real collector.

From early childhood, the composer had heart problems, but this did not seriously manifest itself until the late 60s, perhaps due to the rather spartan lifestyle that Britten led. However, in the late 60s he suffered endocarditis, from which he essentially never recovered. He put off his prescribed heart surgery for a long time in order to finish his last opera, Death in Venice. In 1973, Britten underwent surgery and was brought to the performance in a wheelchair.

And yet Britten continued to write music. He died in December 1976 from heart failure, having said goodbye to friends and family a week before.