Britten, Benjamin Books

Benjamin Britten: His life and operas

Eric Walter White

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Britten: War Requiem (Cambridge Music Handbooks)

Mervyn Cooke

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Another excellent addition to the Cambridge Series 5 out of 5 stars.
7 of 7 people found this review helpful.

I have read several of the books in the Cambridge Music Handbooks Series. The purpose of the books in this series is to aid the listener in understanding the theoretical/analytical aspects of the music (such as form, recurring thematic material, growth process, etc.) as well as the historical background of the piece, including critical reaction to the premiere of the work.

The book is divided logically into four chapters. The first chapter deals with Britten's pacifist beliefs and how they led to his encounter with the poetry of Wilfred Owen, a soldier who had been killed in World War I. Owen turned out a small body of poetry during the last two years of the war, nine of which Britten chose to use in his Requiem, along with the text for the Latin Mass of the Dead.

The second chapter gives the historical background of the piece: commission, composition, and the premiere performance.

The third chapter is subtitled "The musical language: idiom and structure." This chapter details the musical content of the piece and how it conforms or deviates from the traditional Requiem formula set up by Mozart and Verdi. This chapter is the "meat" of the book as far as this critic is concerned. In understanding the musical content, one is better equipped to listen with an ear of understanding instead of ignorance.

The final chapter reveals the critical reception of the piece, which was extremely positive. Most critics immediately hailed this work as Britten's masterpiece. As the author states, "it is difficult to call to mind any other major twentieth-century work which met with such instantaneous and unanimously high praise from almost all sectors of the media."

In conclusion, I can highly recommend this book without hesitation if you are at all interested in the music of the twentieth century. Britten was clearly a brilliant composer; the War Requiem is, arguably, his masterpiece; and this book is a fine tribute to a wonderful piece of music.

Editorial Review:

The book examines from various viewpoints Britten's War Requiem, written in 1962 to celebrate the consecration of the new Coventry Cathedral and uniting the famous anti-war poetry of Wilfred Owen with the Latin Requiem Mass. Britten's and Owen's pacifist beliefs are compared, and the chronology of the compositional process unraveled from documentary and manuscript sources. The musical language is analyzed in detail, and the fluctuating critical responses to the score are assessed.

Letters From a Life: The Selected Letters of Benjamin Britten, Volume Three, 1946-1951

Benjamin Britten

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

This long-awaited third volume of composer Benjamin Britten's remarkable letters covers the years 1946-51. Fresh from the astonishing success of his great first opera, Peter Grimes, Britten was vital to the post-war rebuilding of the arts in Great Britain with his visionary work as a composer, conductor, and performer. With his partner, the celebrated tenor Peter Pears, he founded the Aldeburgh Festival, which eventually grew into the international festival that it is today, and the English Opera Group. He also toured widely in Europe and the United States as a pianist and conductor. During this time he wrote many of his best-known works, including the operas Billy Budd, Albert Herring, and The Rape of Lucretia. Britten's correspondents include literary figures such as Christopher Isherwood, Edith Sitwell, E. M. Forster (the librettist for Billy Budd), and Edward Sackville-West, as well as musical colleagues from around the world including Ernest Ansermet, Francis Poulenc, Aaron Copland,and Igor Stravinsky. This volume of selected letters represents one of the richest and most innovative periods of the composer's creative life. His daily concerns and the unique era in which he lived are vividly evoked by the comprehensive and scholarly annotations, which offer a wide range of detailed and fascinating information. Donald Mitchell contributes a superb introduction. Illustrations: 16 pages of b/w photographs

Benjamin Britten: A Biography

Humphrey Carpenter

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 4 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Good Narrative; Weaker Analysis 4 out of 5 stars.
6 of 6 people found this review helpful.

This is a good but not outstanding biography of the great Benjamin Britten. Carpenter was well equipped to tackle Britten's life. An experienced biographer, some of his prior work, like his very good biography of Auden, covers the same period and some of the same aspects of British artistic life as this book. Carpenter had the cooperation of the Britten estate and a wide variety of Britten's friends and associates. It is based on a wide variety of documentary material and interviews. This book is thorough, well written, and organized well. As a narrative of Britten's personal and professional lives, it is very strong and unlikely to be surpassed. The book shows very well Britten's remarkable creativity. A disciplined worker, Britten produced a large volume of outstanding music while also performing and working as a major force in the development of British musical life. Carpenter also shows, though implicitly, that Britten was a charismatic figure. He had a remarkable ability to attract the services of other talented individuals, allowing him to realize very ambitious projects such as his operas and the development of the Aldeburgh festival. Carpenter is fair in this treatment of Britten, showing both the attractive and unfortunate aspects of his personality, such as his tendency to callously discard co-workers when he felt he could work more productively with others.
Carpenter is less good in dealing with Britten's music. This is true both for Britten's output in general and specific works. Nowhere in this book do we get any sense of why Britten chose to focus on vocal music. Britten did produce important orchestral and chamber work, but his most important output was opera, less conventional music theater like his church parables, choral music, and songs. Britten's ability to set text to music was truly remarkable. Did Britten see this as his great strength as a composer or were there other reasons for the focus of his career? Carpenter tends also to interpret individual works, particularly the operas, in light of very specific aspects of Britten's life, especially his sexuality. In many cases, such as the operas Peter Grimes and Death in Venice, this makes good sense. With these interpretations, Carpenter seems also to be following the lead of some other scholars who have studied Britten. This approach, however, seems not so much wrong as excessively reductive. For example, Carpenter's discussion of Britten's underappreciated opera Gloriana, composed for the coronation of Elizabeth II, focuses on the character of the Earl of Essex, who Carpenter sees as embodying some of Britten's preoccupations about his life as public artist. The main figure of the opera, however, is Elizabeth I, and an important theme of the work is the collision of private needs and public responsibilities in the exercise of power. Surely, this was not lost on the premiere audience, which included the young Elizabeth II, who later became something of a patron of Britten. Carpenter gives no real sense of the position that Britten occupies in the history of 20th century music, probably because he doesn't have the musicological knowledge necessary to establish this kind of context. Less understandably, Carpenter misses an opportunity to discuss Britten's important role in the professionalization and expansion of post-war British musical and artistic life. Carpenter's own narrative shows the somewhat amateurish quality of pre-war British musical life and its remarkable evolution in the post-war period, a process in which Britten was a important creative figure.
This book is a useful source for those interested in Britten specifically, 20th century music, opera, and the history of British intellectual life. There is still an opportunity to write a first rate biography of Britten.

Editorial Review:

A biography of Benjamin Britten which presents a panorama of British musical life since the 1920s.

The Cambridge Companion to Benjamin Britten (Cambridge Companions to Music)

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Editorial Review:

This is a comprehensive guide to Britten's work, aimed both at the nonspecialist and the music student. It sheds light on both the composer's stylistic and personal development, offering new interpretations of his operatic works and discussing his characteristic working methods. A distinguished team of contributors include some who worked with the composer during his lifetime, as well as leading representatives of the younger generation of Britten scholars on both sides of the Atlantic.

Britten and Auden in the Thirties: The Year 1936 (Aldeburgh Studies in Music)

Donald Mitchell, Alan Hollinghurst (Foreword by)

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Editorial Review:

Benjamin Britten and W.H. Auden were key figures of the 1930s, and here Donald Mitchell traces their lives during one crucial year, 1936. They worked hard to establish themselves, first through the GPO film unit, in a collaboration which flowered and spilled over into the theatre, and then radio - a new medium that the liveliest creative minds of the time were exploring and exploiting. Britten and Auden also joined forces in works destined for the recital room and concert hall, among them Our Hunting Fathers, the political symbolism of which Donald Mitchell examines in depth, and On the Island, settings of early Auden that comprised Britten's first important set of songs to English texts. Much use is made of Britten's private diaries, which he kept on a daily basis, and a revealing portrait emerges of the two men's relationship, of their work together in many different fields, and of the reflection within that work of political ideas current at the time.DONALD MITCHELL was Britten's close friend and publisher from 1964 until the end of the composer's life, and his authorised biographer. The T S Eliot Memorial Lectures delivered in 1979

Benjamin Britten: Peter Grimes (Cambridge Opera Handbooks)

Philip Brett

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Editorial Review:

Benjamin Britten's Peter Grimes is one of the few operas of the last half-century to have gained a secure place in the repertory. Its appearance in 1945 shortly after the end of the war in Europe was a milestone in operatic history as well as in British music. But the origins of the work lie in the United States, where Britten and his friend Peter Pears (the first Grimes) spent the years 1939-42. In 1941 they read an evocative essay by the novelist E. M. Forster on the Suffolk poet George Crabbe (1754-1832); this precipitated Britten's decision to return to his native country, and sent them both to Crabbe's poem, The Borough, which gave them the idea for the plot they drafted together. This book opens with Forster's original essay and his later one on Crabbe and Peter Grimes. From there the reader can trace the history of the opera: in Donald Mitchell's annotated interview with the wife of the librettist, Montagu Slater; in Philip Brett's detailed study of the fascinating documents preserved in the Britten-Pears Library at Aldeburgh; and in his history of the work's stage presentation and critical reception. Hans Keller's remarkable synopsis, first printed in 1952, is complemented by a fine new analytical study by David Matthews of Act II scene 1, the crux of the opera.

Benjamin Britten: Death in Venice (Cambridge Opera Handbooks)

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Editorial Review:

This book is exceptional amongst those that have appeared so far in this well-established series, in that it is largely written by those who worked with the composer and assisted him during the period in which the opera was composed and first put on the stage. It will thus remain a source of first-hand information on Britten's final operatic achievement. Donald Mitchell was Britten's publisher at the time of Death in Venice and his Introduction includes many personal observations on the genesis of the work. The latter part of the book contains essays by T. J. Reed and Patrick Carnegy on the libretto's source in Thomas Mann's novella and Philip Reed compares briefly Visconti's cinematic interpretation of the novella. The volume is richly illustrated with music examples, sketches and extracts from the autograph score, and pictures from the first production. It will make an essential reference work and indispensable companion for opera-goers, students and scholars alike.

Britten's Musical Language (Music in the Twentieth Century)

Philip Rupprecht

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Editorial Review:

Blending insights from linguistic and social theories of speech, ritual and narrative with music-analytic and historical criticism,Britten's Musical Language offers fresh perspectives on the composer's fusion of verbal and musical utterance in opera and song. It provides close interpretative studies of the major scores (including Peter Grimes, Billy Budd, The Turn of the Screw, War Requiem, Curlew River and Death in Venice) and explores Britten's ability to fashion complex and mysterious symbolic dramas from the interplay of texted song and wordless discourse of motives and themes.

Television Opera: The Fall of Opera Commissioned for Television

Jennifer Barnes

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Editorial Review:

Television opera - that is, opera commissioned for television - was one of the earliest attempts by television to bridge the distinction between high culture and popular culture: between 1951 and 2002, in Britain and the United States, over fifty operas were commissioned for television. This book discusses three case studies, the first a live broadcast, the second a video recording, and the third a filmed opera made for television: Gian Carlo Menotti's 'Amahl and the Night Visitors' (NBC, 1951; Benjamin Britten's 'Owen Wingrave' (BBC, 1971), taking into account Britten's earlier television experiences with 'The Turn of the Screw' (Associated Rediffusion, 1959) and 'Billy Budd' (NBC, 1952 and BBC 1966); and Gerald Barry's 'The Triumph of Beauty and Deceit' (1995), part of Channel 4's decision in 1989 to embark upon a series of six hour-long television operas. In each case, the composer's response to the demands of television, and his place within the production's hierarchy, are examined; and the effect of the formats and techniques peculiar to television on the process of composing are discussed. JENNIFER BARNES is Assistant Principal and Dean of Studies at Trinity College of Music, London.From its beginnings, television has relied on music to signal its message to the broadest market, and opera was a significant part of that plan. But whereas in opera the role of the composer is paramount and his vision provides the driving force, in opera commissioned for television there are other priorities, both practical and artistic. Over the decades, conflict of expectations, methods and authority have influenced the production of many television operas. To chart these changes, this work examines three, commissioned at twenty-year intervals - Menotti's 'Amahl and the Night Visitors', Britten's 'Owen Wingrave' and Barry's 'Triumph of Beauty and Deceit.Over fifty operas have been commissioned for television since the early 1950s. Examining changes in television techniques, Jennifer Barnes considers their impact on the role of the composer and questions whether television, in its rapid evolution, has abandoned early indigenous production methods, and with that its secrets of writing and producing opera for television.