Book description
Benjamin Britten was the greatest English composer of the twentieth
century and one of the outstanding musicians of his age.
Born in Lowestoft, Suffolk, in 1913, Britten was the youngest child
of a dentist father and amateur musician mother. After studying at the
Royal College of Music, he became a vital part of London's creative
and intellectual life during the 1930s, collaborating with W. H. Auden
and meeting his lifelong partner, the tenor Peter Pears. At the
outbreak of the Second World War, Britten and Pears were already in
America, earning a precarious living as freelance musicians before
re-crossing the Atlantic by ship in the perilous days of 1942.
But the east coast of England was where Britten, as he himself said,
belonged: this was where he returned to write his most famous opera,
Peter Grimes, and - with Pears and Eric Crozier - to found the
Aldeburgh Festival in 1948. In the years that followed, his worldwide
reputation grew steadily, helped by a busy schedule of international
tours and, for many, crowned by the extraordinary success of his War
Requiem. Meanwhile, his festival went from strength to strength, its
progress symbolised by the opening of Snape Maltings Concert Hall in 1967.
Britten was a mass of paradoxes: a solitary, introspective thinker
who came to ebullient life in the company of young people, for whom he
composed some of his most memorable works; a man of the political left
who was on the friendliest terms with members of the royal family; a
composer inspired by some of the twentieth century's deepest
preoccupations who combined innovation with a profound understanding
of musical tradition. Devoted to his friends, protégés and fellow
musicians, he was, above all, someone who lived for music.
Neil Powell's book is the landmark biography for Britten's centenary
year: a subtle and moving portrait of a brilliant, complex and
ultimately loveable man.
Neil Powell is a poet and biographer who has written extensively on
literature and music. His previous books include
Roy Fuller: Writer
and Society
(1995),
The Language of Jazz
(1997),
George Crabbe: An English Life
(2004) and
Amis & Son: Two Literary Generations
(2008), as well as seven collections of poetry, the most recent of which
is
Proof of Identity
(2012). He lives in Suffolk.
