BENJAMIN BRITTEN
BILLY BUDD
ANDREAS LÁNG
BENJAMIN BRITTEN’S LIFE It’s not surprising that the sea plays a central role in several of Benjamin Britten’s operas (including Billy Budd), given that Britten was born in the East Anglian port of Lowestoft in 1913. More precisely, on the southern edge of the town. From his parents’ house, he could see the sea directly, hear the storms and wind, and watch the boats and ships. The composer spent 21 years at his birthplace, and later he was unwilling and unable to stay away from the sea for long. He once looked back and commented: “I tried to live away from the sea, but I always felt something was wrong. I feel at home in this environment. The fishermen in their boats, all this is part of my life, I can’t live without it.” Besides the sea, the strongest influence on Benjamin Britten in his early years was his mother, Edith. She was intent right from the start on making her son (the fourth and youngest child) into a musical genius. In contrast to his father, a strict, ascetically included and industrious dentist, the mother had perfect pitch and was highly musical. A sickly child, Benjamin Britten had his first piano lessons from her before enrolling with the local piano teacher,
who also gave him singing and harmony lessons. He also had viola lessons with another teacher. It was not long before Benjamin Britten produced his first compositions, together with the first theatrical efforts. In 1920, for example, the seven-year-old wrote the drama The Royal Family, together with a short melody of his own. At the latest at the age of 13, when he passed a piano exam with distinction, it was clear to Benjamin Britten that he would be a composer. This was although he was also clearly mathematically gifted. His math teacher, a sadistic former officer who beat his pupils, was constantly trying to steer him away from music and towards mathematics. But this was in vain. The teacher did, however, serve as a model for various negative figures in Britten’s oeuvre, including John Claggart in Billy Budd. Significant influences on Britten’s further development as a musician and composer in the next few years were his composition teacher Frank Bridge and the works of Arnold Schönberg and Gustav Mahler. Britten tried to improve his craft wherever possible, in order to find the ideal expression for his own musical language.
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BENJAMIN BRITTEN’S LIFE
When his Sinfonietta op. 1 received its world première in January 1933 at the Ballet Club of the Mercury Theatre, he received his first bad review in the Daily Telegraph, which left the young composer feeling insecure. Even so, he created one new work after another, despite suffering personal calamities. His father died in 1934, followed three years later by his mother. However, the musical world gradually became aware of the aspiring composer, who seemed to be at home in the widest possible range of genres – all the way to film music. In the early 1930s Britten became increasingly concerned about the political situation. On a 1934 trip to experience the outstanding opera performances in Vienna and Munich, he recognised the dangers the National Socialist reign of terror posed to himself, his fellow composers and his country. A few months before the outbreak of the Second World War, the committed pacifist emigrated to the USA, together with his lifelong companion, the tenor Peter Pears. However, a combination of concern about his siblings and homesickness drove him to return to England in 1942, in the middle of the war. During his return journey, Benjamin Britten worked on his first
opera, Peter Grimes, which received its world première at the Sadler’s Wells Theatre on 7 June 1945, shortly after the end of the war in Europe. This work sparked a kind of renaissance in the English music theatre. In the next few years there was hardly any season without a world première of a Britten opera – The Rape of Lucretia (1946), Albert Herring (1947), The Little Sweep (1949), Billy Budd (1951), Gloriana (1953), The Turn of the Screw (1954). The centre of the composer’s life from this time to his death was the English coastal town of Aldeburgh, still home to this day of the annual Aldeburgh Festival, which Britten founded. From 1945, most of his compositions were written at this East Anglian port, although Britten made numerous world trips and concert tours with Peter Pears. Benjamin Britten’s health began to deteriorate around the 1960’s at the latest. There was a clear break with the diagnosis of endocarditis. Severely ill, Britten was confined to a wheelchair, where he wrote parts of his last opera, Death in Venice. On 12 June 1976 Queen Elizabeth II dubbed the mortally ill composer Baron Britten of Aldeburgh. Britten died just a few months later, in the night of 3-4 December 1976.
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