Benjamin Britten

BRITTEN, (Edward) Benjamin. b. Lowestoft, Suffolk, 22 November 1913; d. Aldeburgh, Suffolk, 4 December 1976. Britten was educated at South Lodge Preparatory School, Lowestoft, and at Gresham’s School, Holt, Norfolk, before winning a scholarship to the Royal College of Music in 1930 where his composition tutor was John Ireland*. From 1927, however, he was taught privately by Frank Bridge and these lessons continued throughout his years at the College, where he was also taught the piano by Arthur Benjamin. His early professional and personal life was dominated by the overpowering influence of the poet W.H. Auden* and on 29 April 1939 (four months before the outbreak of World War II) Britten and Peter Pears followed Auden and Christopher Isherwood to America, where they stayed until March 1942. On returning to England, where they registered as conscientious objectors for the remainder of the war, Britten and Pears eventually settled in Aldeburgh, Suffolk, where they lived for the rest of their lives.

Britten established himself as the leading British composer of his generation with the premiere of his three-act opera Peter Grimes at Sadler’s Wells in 1945. This represented a dramatic new dimension to the 20th-century renewal of music in Britain and was also widely held to herald a post-war revival in the fortunes of British music on an international stage. He went on to dominate musical life in Britain not only as a composer but also as a peerless pianist (especially as accompanist to the tenor Peter Pears), an inspiring conductor (most notably with the English Chamber Orchestra) and an innovative director of the Aldeburgh Festival, which he founded (with Peter Pears and Eric Crozier) in 1948.

Britten was baptised at the family church, St John’s, London Road, Lowestoft (subsequently demolished) and attended regularly when he was at home from school or college. At public school too he imbibed the traditional Anglican liturgy of the time, and as his letters home indicate, he was already alert to, and often critical of, the music used for worship. After the death of his mother in 1937 Britten had no strong connection with any specific church as a regular worshipper, and although he remained a member of the Church of England until his death, his personal attitude to religion and faith was ambiguous at best. From the establishment of the Aldeburgh Festival, however, Britten maintained a politic link with Aldeburgh’s Parish Church and its various incumbents over the years. But from the 1952-54 diaries of Britten’s amanuensis and colleague Imogen Holst we glean in passing that the presence on the Festival Committee of Aldeburgh’s vicar could be a decidedly mixed blessing. Nevertheless, cordial relations were generally maintained: Britten’s funeral was held at Aldeburgh Parish Church in December 1976, and he was buried in the churchyard. A colourful memorial window to Britten was subsequently designed by John Piper and installed in the church.

Britten wrote no original hymn tunes of his own, but he did make significant and ground-breaking use of established Anglican hymns in two major works. The cantata Saint Nicolas was written to celebrate the centenary of Lancing College in Sussex, the school attended by Peter Pears, for whom the role of Nicolas was composed. The official première took place at Lancing on 24 July 1948, but the work had already received an ‘unofficial’ première at the opening concert of the first Aldeburgh Festival on 5 June in the Parish Church. It immediately came to symbolise the unique community-based spirit of this new venture. In Eric Crozier’s skilful libretto two congregational hymns are strategically placed — one at roughly the half-way point, ‘All people that on earth do dwell’* to the OLD HUNDREDTH* — and the other, ‘God moves in a mysterious way’* to LONDON NEW, as the conclusion of the score. The opportunity for the audience to join in the singing of the hymns is a typical example of Britten’s genius — at once a simple and even obvious move, yet at the same time a new-found gesture which can prove overwhelming in performance. The effect is analogous to Bach*’s use of established Lutheran chorales in his cantatas and the two Passions. It may well be that another trigger to Britten’s use of hymns in this way was the example of Michael Tippett*’s inclusion of five Negro spirituals at strategic points in his wartime oratorio A Child of Our Time (1939-41). Britten was one of the first people to be shown the score of this work in 1942, and he was instrumental in encouraging the first performance in 1944, in which Peter Pears notably took the solo tenor part.

A crucial trait that Britten picked up here from Tippett was the need to embed a given hymn in its new context so that the effect is both surprising yet somehow inevitable. This can depend partly on tonal architecture (in both long-term and local terms) and also on a network of motivic derivation running through the texture, so that the emergence of the familiar within the unfamiliar is in fact organic. When he came to make a dramatic setting of the medieval Chester Miracle Play Noye’s Fludde in 1957 (for the 1958 Aldeburgh Festival in Orford Church) Britten used the same technique again but on a broader and more integrated scale in which the three hymns are enfolded within the unbroken dramatic action. ‘Lord Jesus, think on me’* to the tune SOUTHWELL comes at the beginning of the work as an imploring invocation and colours much of the opening material. At the central stormy climax of the drama the heartfelt singing of ‘Eternal Father, strong to save’* (to John Bacchus Dykes*’s tune MELITA) represents a stunning stroke even for Britten — but one which he caps towards the end of the work with a thankful and cathartic setting of ‘The spacious firmament on high’* to the simple but moving glory of TALLIS’S CANON.

Though much emulated by later British composers, there is something about the singularity of Noye’s Fludde which is literally inimitable and it is telling that Britten himself never sought to repeat the work by creating a companion or sequel. In 1957 he visited the Far East as part of a world tour and became fascinated by the techniques and spirit of the Japanese Noh-play tradition. His next Aldeburgh Festival work for Orford Church was to be Curlew River in 1964 — the first of three ‘Parables for Church Performance’, the others being The Burning Fiery Furnace in 1966 and The Prodigal Son in 1968, all to libretti by William Plomer. Although there is no opportunity here for congregational participation, the ritualised presentation nevertheless involves the effect of a frame-within-a-frame in which a company of monks ‘presents’ and addresses the action to an enclosed community — so that we the audience are again ‘included’ within the action. Each parable is introduced and signed-off by the unaccompanied singing of a plainsong melody, respectively: Te lucis ante terminum*; Salus aeterna, and Iam lucis orto sidere*. To a far more intricate and sophisticated degree than in either Saint Nicolas or Noye’s Fludde the entire musical fabric of each score is derived from the plainsong, which acts as a thematic reservoir for the work. Enacted physically as both processional and recessional this dramatic deployment of the plainsong recalls Britten’s use of the antiphon Hodie Christus natus est as a frame for A Ceremony of Carols in 1942. In 1943 he also set sections from Christopher Smart*s Jubilate Agno (Rejoice in the Lamb).

One work by Britten which uses a hymn-tune rather less conventionally in being written expressly for the concert hall is the overture The Building of the House, which he composed for the opening concert of the Maltings Concert Hall at Snape on 2 June 2 1967 in the presence of the Queen. This is a short, bustling work for full orchestra in which a mixed chorus appositely sings a metrical version of Psalm 127 — ‘Except the Lord the house doth make’ — to the German chorale tune VATER UNSER. This occasion also included a memorable rendition of Britten’s remarkable arrangement of ‘God save our gracious Queen’ which he had composed for the Leeds Festival of 1962.

Britten wrote several notable works specifically for church performance in response to commissions, thus fulfilling the philosophy of his celebrated Aspern Lecture of 1964 that ‘a composer should be useful and to the living’. The Te Deum in C major was composed in 1934 for the Choir of St Mark’s, North Audley Street, London, and the Festival Te Deum in 1944 for the centenary of St Mark’s Church, Swindon. The Missa Brevis in D was written in 1959 for the boys of Westminster Cathedral and George Malcolm, and the Jubilate Deo in 1961 for St George’s Chapel, Windsor at the request of the Duke of Edinburgh. For the centenary of St Michael’s College, Tenbury in 1956, Britten composed a setting of George Herbert*’s words ‘Praised be the God of Love’ under the title Antiphon and in 1962 to mark the centenary of South Lodge Preparatory School, Lowestoft (which he had attended as a boy) he set Psalm 150 for children’s voices and instruments. Four choral works by Britten carry the title Hymn — A Hymn to the Virgin (1930, revised 1934); Hymn to St Cecilia (1942); Hymn to St Peter (1955) and A Hymn of St Columba (1962) — but the generic title in each case refers in general to the text being set as opposed to any conventional musical content or connection.

Geraint Lewis

Further Reading

1. Humphrey Carpenter, Benjamin Britten: a Biography (London; Faber and Faber, 1992).
2. Donald Mitchell, ‘Britten, (Edward) Benjamin (1913-1976)’, ODNB.
3. P. Brett, ‘Britten, (Edward) Benjamin’, NGII.