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109-543: The Little Sweep , Op. 45, is an opera for children in three scenes by the English composer Benjamin Britten , with a libretto by Eric Crozier . The Little Sweep is the second part of a stage production entitled Let's Make an Opera! . The first part takes the form of a play in which the cast portray contemporary amateur performers conceiving, creating and rehearsing the opera. Intended as an introduction to and demystification of

218-460: A Pacifist March to words by Ronald Duncan for the Peace Pledge Union , of which, as a pacifist, he had become an active member; the work was not a success and was soon withdrawn. The best known of his compositions from this period is probably Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge for string orchestra, described by Matthews as the first of Britten's works to become a popular classic. It

327-572: A dame school , run by the Misses Astle. The younger sister, Ethel, gave him piano lessons; in later life he said that he remained grateful for the excellence of her teaching. The following year he moved on to a prep school , South Lodge , Lowestoft, as a day boy . The headmaster, Thomas Sewell, was an old-fashioned disciplinarian; the young Britten was outraged at the severe corporal punishments frequently handed out, and later he said that his lifelong pacifism probably had its roots in his reaction to

436-525: A Theme by Frank Bridge for full orchestra for the Frederick Ashton ballet Le Rêve de Léonor (1949), but he later described the teacher–pupil relationship as "beneficial five per cent to [Britten] and ninety-five per cent to me!" Throughout the 1950s Britten continued to write operas. Billy Budd (1951) was well received at its Covent Garden premiere and was regarded by reviewers as an advance on Peter Grimes . Gloriana (1953), written to mark

545-501: A bit but not for long (he was quite tough), the staff couldn't object if his work and games didn't suffer. He wrote lots of it, reams and reams of it. Audrey Alston encouraged Britten to go to symphony concerts in Norwich . At one of these, during the triennial Norfolk and Norwich Festival in October 1924, he heard Frank Bridge 's orchestral poem The Sea , conducted by the composer. It was

654-408: A coach using a rocking-horse, a couple of chairs, and two parasols for the wheels, hailed as a triumph. While their mother is absent "seeing papa off to join his ship", the three Brook children of Iken Hall have been playing host to their three Crome cousins, together with their nursery-maid. The visit is due to end the following day. The first Audience Song is sung before the curtain rises to reveal

763-693: A composition scholarship at the Royal College of Music (RCM) in London; his examiners were the composers John Ireland and Ralph Vaughan Williams and the college's harmony and counterpoint teacher, S P Waddington. Britten was at the RCM from 1930 to 1933, studying composition with Ireland and piano with Arthur Benjamin . He won the Sullivan Prize for composition, the Cobbett Competition for chamber music, and

872-443: A damaged heart, and doctors warned his parents that he would probably never be able to lead a normal life. He recovered more fully than expected, and as a boy was a keen tennis player and cricketer. To his mother's great delight he was an outstandingly musical child, unlike his sisters, who inherited their father's indifference to music, while his brother, Robert, though musically talented, was interested only in ragtime . Edith gave

981-399: A dust-sheet. The children are playing hide-and-seek , apparently the version known as sardines . Jonny finds Juliet and joins her in her hiding-place, but their game is interrupted by a cry of distress from Sammy, who has become stuck in the chimney. The commotion attracts the other four children, and they succeed in extricating the sweep-boy from his predicament while singing the shanty Pull

1090-538: A farmer had been thwarted by lack of capital, and he had instead trained as a dentist, a profession he practised successfully but without pleasure. While studying at Charing Cross Hospital in London he met Edith Hockey, the daughter of a civil service clerk in the British Government's Home Office . They were married in September 1901 at St John's, Smith Square , London. The consensus among biographers of Britten

1199-455: A few days later, Britten gave him what he had written of Praise We Great Men . I heard of his death ... and took a long walk in total silence through gently falling snow across a frozen lake, which corresponded exactly to the inexpressible sense of numbness at such a loss. The world is colder and lonelier without the presence of our supreme creator of music. Britten died of congestive heart failure on 4 December 1976. His funeral service

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1308-408: A furious rage over her treatment by the sweeps, who have accused her of hiding their apprentice. There is a mad scramble to hide Sammy and look as innocent and natural as possible as Miss Baggott enters the room. At the spectacle of the grubby, sooty, untidy state of the nursery, the housekeeper's ire is redirected towards the children. Seeing toys lying around she approaches the toy-cupboard where Sammy

1417-516: A great interest in writing music for children and amateur performers, including the opera Noye's Fludde , a Missa Brevis , and the song collection Friday Afternoons . He often composed with particular performers in mind. His most frequent and important muse was his personal and professional partner, the tenor Peter Pears ; others included Kathleen Ferrier , Jennifer Vyvyan , Janet Baker , Dennis Brain , Julian Bream , Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau , Osian Ellis and Mstislav Rostropovich . Britten

1526-457: A large rambling farmhouse on the banks of the river Alde, the home of Margery Spring Rice . The child characters were transplanted from a nearby country house, Glemham House in Great Glemham , which in the late eighteenth century had been the home of George Crabbe , the author of the poem The Borough which had formed the basis of Britten's 1945 masterpiece Peter Grimes . Glemham House was

1635-476: A poem by Edith Sitwell . He returned to Aldeburgh in August, and wrote Welcome Ode for children's choir and orchestra. In November, Britten realised that he could no longer compose. On his 63rd birthday, 22 November, at his request Rita Thomson organised a champagne party and invited his friends and his sisters Barbara and Beth, to say their goodbyes to the dying composer. When Rostropovich made his farewell visit

1744-412: A problem when it proves to be too heavy for Tom the coachman and Alfred the gardener to lift. The children and Rowan break into the growing argument between Miss Baggot and the men, and offer to help lift the trunk. The extra manpower does the trick, and Juliet, Gay and Sophie watch from the window as it is loaded into the coach taking Jonny and the twins away. As soon as the coach has notionally departed,

1853-524: A setting of the Stabat Mater . Despite heavy subsidies, however, the costs of touring could not be recouped, so Britten and the group's other directors decided that it should be based at a home venue. This was the prime reason for the inauguration of the Aldeburgh Festival in 1948. The first opera commissioned by the group, Brian Easdale 's The Sleeping Children , was premièred in 1951. It gave

1962-466: A singing competition. The curtain rises to reveal Juliet sitting in her dressing-gown, as Rowan enters carrying a tray with her breakfast. They call Sammy out of the cupboard and feed him Juliet's breakfast, while Juliet sings a charming farewell aria. Sammy tries to refuse the money Juliet gives him, but she is insistent. The other children enter, the three Cromes ready to leave for home. They pack Sammy into Jonny's trunk, with yet more food, only to run into

2071-481: A version for two pianos and percussion, with additional notation in the piano parts for use if the percussion instruments are unavailable. The Little Sweep was the first of Britten's operas to be entirely conceived, composed and produced at Aldeburgh. Work continued throughout the spring and the first performance was given on 14 June 1949 in the Jubilee Hall. Imogen Holst describes "a hubbub of excited comment" from

2180-452: Is again sung to a closed curtain, vividly describing the splashing and scrubbing which is happening out of sight. The curtain rises to reveal Sam, "whiter than swans as they fly", and Juliet begins to question him about his background. He reveals that his father is a waggoner who broke his hip so that he couldn't work, and Sammy was sold into an apprenticeship with the sweeps because "there wasn't anything to eat". Sammy stoically declares that it

2289-458: Is hiding, reaching for the door-handle. In desperation Juliet fakes a fainting fit, which has the desired effect. Everyone fusses around Juliet, who is eventually carried to her bedroom, as Jonny reassures Sam and urges him to "sit tight, and tomorrow you're a free man." The third Audience Song evokes the passing of the night. For this, the audience is divided into four groups, taking the parts of owls, herons, turtle-doves and chaffinches engaging in

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2398-578: Is that his father was a loving but somewhat stern and remote parent. Britten, according to his sister Beth, "got on well with him and shared his wry sense of humour, dedication to work and capacity for taking pains." Edith Britten was a talented amateur musician and secretary of the Lowestoft Musical Society. In the English provinces of the early 20th century, distinctions of social class were taken very seriously. Britten described his family as "very ordinary middle class", but there were aspects of

2507-522: The BBC Singers , who first performed it the following year. In this same period he wrote Friday Afternoons , a collection of 12 songs for the pupils of Clive House School, Prestatyn , where his brother was headmaster. In February 1935, at Bridge's instigation, Britten was invited to a job interview by the BBC's director of music Adrian Boult and his assistant Edward Clark . Britten was not enthusiastic about

2616-545: The Gathorne-Hardy family of Great Glemham, Suffolk." Vocal The enthusiastic response of the audience to the congregational hymns incorporated in the cantata Saint Nicolas encouraged Britten and Crozier to build on this concept, and rely on the audience themselves to provide the chorus. The five adult parts (including that of Juliet, the eldest girl) were written for five members of the English Opera Group , and

2725-757: The Suite on English Folk Tunes "A Time There Was" (1974); the Third String Quartet (1975), which drew on material from Death in Venice ; and the dramatic cantata Phaedra (1975), written for Janet Baker . In June 1976, the last year of his life, Britten accepted a life peerage – the first composer so honoured – becoming Baron Britten, of Aldeburgh in the County of Suffolk. After the 1976 Aldeburgh Festival, Britten and Pears travelled to Norway, where Britten began writing Praise We Great Men , for voices and orchestra based on

2834-546: The coronation of Elizabeth II , had a cool reception at the gala premiere in the presence of the Queen and the British Establishment en masse . The downbeat story of Elizabeth I in her decline, and Britten's score – reportedly thought by members of the premiere's audience "too modern" for such a gala – did not overcome what Matthews calls the "ingrained philistinism" of the ruling classes. Although Gloriana did well at

2943-416: The "Little Sweep" narrative is related by Gladys (Mrs. Parworthy) as a true story which happened to her grandmother, Juliet Brook, when Juliet was a fourteen-year-old in 1809 or 1810. In this telling the long-term happy ending is revealed, that Juliet's uncle (the father of the visiting Crome children) took Sammy the rescued sweep-boy on as a gardener's boy. Gladys's mother remembered him as "old Samuel Sparrow,

3052-530: The 1950s. Hemmings later said, "In all of the time that I spent with him he never abused that trust", and Crawford wrote "I cannot say enough about the kindness of that great man ... he had a wonderful patience and affinity with young people. He loved music, and loved youngsters caring about music." It was long suspected by several of Britten's close associates that there was something exceptional about his attraction to teenage boys: Auden referred to Britten's "attraction to thin-as-a-board juveniles ... to

3161-517: The 1960s, the Aldeburgh Festival was outgrowing its customary venues, and plans to build a new concert hall in Aldeburgh were not progressing. When redundant Victorian maltings buildings in the village of Snape, six miles inland, became available for hire, Britten realised that the largest of them could be converted into a concert hall and opera house. The 830-seat Snape Maltings hall was opened by

3270-483: The Aldeburgh Festival. One of the best known of Britten's works, the War Requiem , was premiered in 1962. He had been asked four years earlier to write a work for the consecration of the new Coventry Cathedral , a modernist building designed by Basil Spence . The old cathedral had been left in ruins by an air-raid on the city in 1940 in which hundreds of people died. Britten decided that his work would commemorate

3379-510: The Brittens that were not ordinary: Edith's father was illegitimate, and her mother was an alcoholic; Robert Britten was an agnostic and refused to attend church on Sundays. Music was the principal means by which Edith Britten strove to maintain the family's social standing, inviting the pillars of the local community to musical soirées at the house. When Britten was three months old he contracted pneumonia and nearly died. The illness left him with

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3488-489: The English Opera Group. The new company's goal was to première Britten's operas, and to present other, mostly British, small-scale operas. The company's first project was to première Britten's chamber opera Albert Herring and give further performances of his opera The Rape of Lucretia during a tour of British and continental European venues. It also commissioned and premièred a new piece by Lennox Berkeley ,

3597-524: The Kid and An Outdoor Overture , both of which influenced his own music. In 1940 Britten composed Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo , the first of many song cycles for Pears. Britten's orchestral works from this period include the Violin Concerto , Sinfonia da Requiem , and An American Overture . In 1941 Britten produced his first music drama, Paul Bunyan , an operetta , to a libretto by Auden. While in

3706-745: The North American première of Britten's The Turn of the Screw at Canada's Stratford Festival in 1957. Aside from other new works by Britten, the group commissioned and produced eleven other new operas by British composers. It also gave the British première of Francis Poulenc 's opera Les mamelles de Tirésias in 1958. The group also performed older operas, such as Acis and Galatea , The Beggar's Opera , Idomeneo , Iolanta , La rondine and Trial by Jury , and works by Henry Purcell and Gustav Holst . The Royal Opera, London took over management of

3815-553: The Orchestra (1945), written for an educational film, Instruments of the Orchestra , directed by Muir Mathieson and featuring the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Malcolm Sargent . It became, and remained, his most often played and popular work. Britten's next opera, The Rape of Lucretia , was presented at the first post-war Glyndebourne Festival in 1946. It was then taken on tour to provincial cities under

3924-481: The Queen at the start of the twentieth Aldeburgh Festival on 2 June 1967; it was immediately hailed as one of the best concert halls in the country. The hall was destroyed by fire in 1969, but Britten was determined that it would be rebuilt in time for the following year's festival, which it was. The Queen again attended the opening performance in 1970. The Maltings gave the festival a venue that could comfortably house large orchestral works and operas. Britten conducted

4033-605: The Second World War began, Britten and Pears turned for advice to the British embassy in Washington and were told that they should remain in the US as artistic ambassadors. Pears was inclined to disregard the advice and go back to England; Britten also felt the urge to return, but accepted the embassy's counsel and persuaded Pears to do the same. Already a friend of the composer Aaron Copland , Britten encountered his latest works Billy

4142-457: The Stone (1939). In 1937 there were two events of huge importance in Britten's life: his mother died, and he met the tenor Peter Pears . Although Britten was extraordinarily devoted to his mother and was devastated at her death, it also seems to have been something of a liberation for him. Only after that did he begin to engage in emotional relationships with people his own age or younger. Later in

4251-577: The String Quartet in F, completed in April 1928, and the Quatre Chansons Françaises , a song-cycle for high voice and orchestra. Authorities differ on the extent of Bridge's influence on his pupil's technique. Humphrey Carpenter and Michael Oliver judge that Britten's abilities as an orchestrator were essentially self-taught; Donald Mitchell considers that Bridge had an important influence on

4360-511: The US, Britten had his first encounter with Balinese gamelan music, through transcriptions for piano duo made by the Canadian composer Colin McPhee . The two met in the summer of 1939 and subsequently performed a number of McPhee's transcriptions for a recording. This musical encounter bore fruit in several Balinese-inspired works later in Britten's career. Moving to the US did not relieve Britten of

4469-419: The US, Koussevitzky, always generous in encouraging new talent, offered him a $ 1,000 commission to write the opera. Britten and Pears returned to England in April 1942. During the long transatlantic sea crossing Britten completed the choral works A Ceremony of Carols and Hymn to St Cecilia . The latter was his last large-scale collaboration with Auden. Britten had grown away from him, and Auden became one of

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4578-448: The banner of the "Glyndebourne English Opera Company", an uneasy alliance of Britten and his associates with John Christie , the autocratic proprietor of Glyndebourne. The tour lost money heavily, and Christie announced that he would underwrite no more tours. Britten and his associates set up the English Opera Group; the librettist Eric Crozier and the designer John Piper joined Britten as artistic directors. The group's express purpose

4687-489: The box office, there were no further productions in Britain for another 13 years. It was later recognised as one of Britten's finer operas. The Turn of the Screw the following year was an unqualified success; together with Peter Grimes it became, and at 2013 remained, one of the two most frequently performed of Britten's operas. In the 1950s the "fervently anti-homosexual" Home Secretary , Sir David Maxwell Fyfe , urged

4796-511: The cane or the slipper were happily rare (although one nocturnal expedition to stalk ghosts left its marks behind); he worked his way up the school slowly and steadily, until at the age of thirteen he reached that pinnacle of importance and grandeur, never to be quite equalled in later days: the head of the Sixth, head-prefect, and Victor Ludorum . But – there was one curious thing about this boy: he wrote music. His friends bore with it, his enemies kicked

4905-470: The children's nursery at Iken Hall, which Rowan the nursery-maid is covering in dust-sheets in preparation for a visit from the chimney sweeps . Miss Baggot, the elderly sharp-tongued housekeeper, escorts in Black Bob, the master sweep, and his son Clem, "a sullen apprentice as black as his dad". Last of all Sam trails in, a small white figure struggling with an armful of buckets and rope. While Miss Baggot gives

5014-478: The composer sustained many deep friendships to the end of his life. Throughout his adult life, Britten had a particular rapport with children and enjoyed close friendships with several boys, particularly those in their early teens. The first such friendship was with Piers Dunkerley, who was 13 years old in 1934, when Britten was aged 20. Other boys Britten befriended were the young David Hemmings and Michael Crawford , both of whom sang treble roles in his works in

5123-401: The composer's so-called "corpses" – former intimates from whom he completely cut off contact once they had outlived their usefulness to him or offended him in some way. Having arrived in Britain, Britten and Pears applied for recognition as conscientious objectors ; Britten was initially allowed only non-combatant service in the military, but on appeal he gained unconditional exemption. After

5232-558: The creation of Snape Maltings concert hall in 1967. In 1976, he was the first composer to be given a life peerage . He died shortly afterwards, aged 63. Britten was born in the fishing port of Lowestoft in Suffolk , on the east coast of England on 22 November 1913, the feast day of Saint Cecilia , the patron saint of music. He was the youngest of four children of Robert Victor Britten (1877–1934) and his wife Edith Rhoda, née Hockey (1874–1937). Robert Britten's youthful ambition to become

5341-498: The cycle. In September 1928 Britten went as a boarder to Gresham's School , in Holt, Norfolk . At the time he felt unhappy there, even writing in his diary of contemplating suicide or running away: he hated being separated from his family, most particularly from his mother; he despised the music master; and he was shocked at the prevalence of bullying, though he was not the target of it. He remained there for two years and in 1930 he won

5450-465: The dead of both World Wars in a large-scale score for soloists, chorus, chamber ensemble and orchestra. His text interspersed the traditional Requiem Mass with poems by Wilfred Owen . Matthews writes, "With the War Requiem Britten reached the apex of his reputation: it was almost universally hailed as a masterpiece." Shostakovich told Rostropovich that he believed it to be "the greatest work of

5559-531: The death of his mother in 1937 he had used money she bequeathed him to buy the Old Mill in Snape , Suffolk which became his country home. He spent much of his time there in 1944 working on the opera Peter Grimes . Pears joined Sadler's Wells Opera Company , whose artistic director, the singer Joan Cross , announced her intention to re-open the company's home base in London with Britten's opera, casting herself and Pears in

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5668-609: The documentary films Coal Face and Night Mail in 1935. They also collaborated on the song cycle Our Hunting Fathers (1936), radical both in politics and musical treatment, and subsequently other works including Cabaret Songs , On This Island , Paul Bunyan and Hymn to St Cecilia . Auden was a considerable influence on Britten, encouraging him to widen his aesthetic, intellectual and political horizons, and also to come to terms with his homosexuality. Auden was, as David Matthews puts it, "cheerfully and guiltlessly promiscuous"; Britten, puritanical and conventional by nature,

5777-529: The end of his life, when he told Pears that it had coloured everything he had written since. Colin Matthews comments that the next two works Britten composed after his return, the song-cycle The Holy Sonnets of John Donne and the Second String Quartet, contrast strongly with earlier, lighter-hearted works such as Les Illuminations . Britten recovered his joie de vivre for The Young Person's Guide to

5886-567: The entire cast returns to the stage for the Coaching Song. They form a tableau with a rocking-horse and chairs arranged to form a coach, and sing together with the audience, describing Sammy's journey to safety and freedom. (Conductor/Juliet/Rowan/Sam/Baggott/Clem/Black Bob) Notes Cited sources Benjamin Britten Edward Benjamin Britten, Baron Britten OM CH (22 November 1913 – 4 December 1976)

5995-428: The first audience as even seasoned opera-goers raised their eyebrows at the standard expected of the audience/chorus ("What! In five-four? " " What? Diminished octaves?"), and the consternation of a "tall thin music critic" uncertain of the precise divisi required for the four birdsong choirs in the "Night Song". The performance was a huge success, with the final "Coaching Song" in which the children on stage improvised

6104-507: The first performance outside Russia of Shostakovich's Fourteenth Symphony at Snape in 1970. Shostakovich, a friend since 1960, dedicated the symphony to Britten; he was himself the dedicatee of The Prodigal Son . Two other Russian musicians who were close to Britten and regularly performed at the festival were the pianist Sviatoslav Richter and the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich . Britten composed his cello suites , Cello Symphony and Cello Sonata for Rostropovich, who premiered them at

6213-499: The first substantial piece of modern music he had ever encountered, and he was, in his own phrase, "knocked sideways" by it. Audrey Alston was a friend of Bridge; when he returned to Norwich for the next festival in 1927 she brought her not quite 14-year-old pupil to meet him. Bridge was impressed with the boy, and after they had gone through some of Britten's compositions together he invited him to come to London to take lessons from him. Robert Britten, supported by Thomas Sewell, doubted

6322-532: The group in 1961. In 1971 Steuart Bedford was appointed musical director, and Colin Graham became director of productions. In 1975 the group was enlarged to be able to produce works such as operettas and musicals in addition to opera. As well as appearing at festivals such as Aldeburgh, the company undertook regional tours and yearly performance seasons at the Sadler's Wells Theatre in London. The founder and leader of

6431-419: The head gardener", who used to give her apricots on her birthday. The group of six adults (including the conductor) and six children choose this as the subject of their home-made opera, libretto by Anne Dougall, a young Scottish bank clerk, and music by Norman Chaffinch, an enthusiastic amateur. The opera is written, composed, cast, produced and rehearsed in the space of less than an hour. The adult characters in

6540-432: The home of Fidelity and Jock, Countess and Lord Cranbrook , personal friends of the composer's. Fidelity was at that time Chairman of the Aldeburgh Festival. Britten and Crozier adopted the names and personas of her children and nephews for the opera (although the children themselves were not involved in the production), and the opera is "affectionately dedicated to the real Gay, Juliet, Sophie, Tina, Hughie, Jonny and Sammy –

6649-437: The hospital's similar cases, Britten was routinely screened for syphilis before the operation, with negative results. He described as "complete rubbish" Kildea's allegation that the surgeon who operated on Britten in 1973 would or even could have covered up a syphilitic condition. Kildea continued to maintain, "When all the composer's symptoms are considered there can be only one cause." In The Times , Richard Morrison praised

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6758-481: The in-fighting among the company, Cross, Britten and Pears severed their ties with Sadler's Wells in December 1945, going on to found what was to become the English Opera Group . A month after the opening of Peter Grimes , Britten and Yehudi Menuhin went to Germany to give recitals to concentration camp survivors. What they saw, at Belsen most of all, so shocked Britten that he refused to talk about it until towards

6867-455: The instructions, Rowan is shocked by the wretchedness of the little boy, and begs the sweeps not to send him up the chimney. The sweeps mock her and pallid white Sammy as they drive him up his first chimney, to be transformed into a black, "chimbley-stack" boy. Rowan runs from the room in distress, and the sweeps leave to prepare the next chimney. The door opens and Juliet enters furtively, before climbing into an armchair and covering herself with

6976-404: The job. Thinking herself alone, Rowan sings an aria ( Run, poor sweep-boy ) expressing her wish that she could help Sam escape. Overhearing this, the children gradually emerge from under the dust-sheets and set about persuading her to help them get Sam away from the sweeps. A decision is taken to feed him and bath him, and the curtain falls on the preparations for the bath. The second Audience Song

7085-537: The leading 20th-century composers in the genre. In addition to large-scale operas for Sadler's Wells and Covent Garden , he wrote chamber operas for small forces, suitable for performance in venues of modest size. Among the best known of these is The Turn of the Screw (1954). Recurring themes in his operas include the struggle of an outsider against a hostile society and the corruption of innocence. Britten's other works range from orchestral to choral, solo vocal, chamber and instrumental as well as film music. He took

7194-598: The leading roles. There were complaints from company members about supposed favouritism and the "cacophony" of Britten's score, as well as some ill-suppressed homophobic remarks. Peter Grimes opened in June 1945 and was hailed by public and critics; its box-office takings matched or exceeded those for La bohème and Madame Butterfly , which were staged during the same season. The opera administrator Lord Harewood called it "the first genuinely successful British opera, Gilbert and Sullivan apart, since Purcell ." Dismayed by

7303-465: The nuisance of hostile criticism: although Olin Downes , the doyen of New York music critics, and Irving Kolodin took to Britten's music, Virgil Thomson was, as the music scholar Suzanne Robinson puts it, consistently "severe and spiteful". Thomson described Les Illuminations (1940) as "little more than a series of bromidic and facile 'effects' ... pretentious, banal and utterly disappointing", and

7412-500: The operatic genre, the play also provides an opportunity to rehearse the audience in the four "Audience Songs" they will sing after the interval. The format of the play altered radically in the early months of its existence, passing through at least three versions (including one specially written for radio) utilising different approaches to the exposition. An initial version set "on the stage of any village hall" during an open dress-rehearsal for an already-written work morphs into one where

7521-407: The play the children also acquired the names of the respective cast members, and Elisabeth Parrish became Pamela, to reflect the part of Rowan having been taken over by Pamela Woolmore, who originally understudied the role. Britten and Crozier had been thinking about a children's opera for some years, but only began to put the concept into practice in the autumn of 1948 when planning the programme for

7630-466: The play were given the cast members' own first names and invented surnames, while the children originally had the first names of the children in the opera. For these, Britten used the names of the children and nephews of Fidelity Cranbrook, (wife of John Gathorne-Hardy, 4th Earl of Cranbrook ), a personal friend of the composer's, whose family seat Glemham House lies a few miles inland from Aldeburgh , in Great Glemham close to Snape . In later versions of

7739-454: The police to enforce the Victorian laws making homosexual acts illegal. Britten and Pears came under scrutiny; Britten was visited by police officers in 1953 and was so perturbed that he discussed with his assistant Imogen Holst the possibility that Pears might have to enter a sham marriage (with whom is unclear). In the end nothing was done. An increasingly important influence on Britten

7848-418: The premieres of his operas A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Jubilee Hall in 1960 and Death in Venice at Snape Maltings Concert Hall in 1973. Unlike many leading English composers, Britten was not known as a teacher, but in 1949 he accepted his only private pupil, Arthur Oldham , who studied with him for three years. Oldham made himself useful, acting as musical assistant and arranging Variations on

7957-614: The principal character. After the completion of the opera Britten went into the National Heart Hospital and was operated on in May 1973 to replace a failing heart valve. The replacement was successful, but he suffered a slight stroke, affecting his right hand. This brought his career as a performer to an end. While in hospital Britten became friendly with a senior nursing sister, Rita Thomson; she moved to Aldeburgh in 1974 and looked after him until his death. Britten's last works include

8066-499: The prospect of working full-time in the BBC music department and was relieved when what came out of the interview was an invitation to write the score for a documentary film, The King's Stamp , directed by Alberto Cavalcanti for the GPO Film Unit . Britten became a member of the film unit's small group of regular contributors, another of whom was W. H. Auden . Together they worked on

8175-447: The ranks of his 'corpses' and I have always recognized that any ordinary person must soon outlive his usefulness to such a great creative artist as Ben." Dame Janet Baker said in 1981, "I think he was quite entitled to take what he wanted from others ... He did not want to hurt anyone, but the task in hand was more important than anything or anybody." Matthews feels that this aspect of Britten has been exaggerated, and he observes that

8284-464: The regime at the school. He himself rarely fell foul of Sewell, a mathematician, in which subject Britten was a star pupil. The school had no musical tradition, and Britten continued to study the piano with Ethel Astle. From the age of ten he took viola lessons from a friend of his mother, Audrey Alston, who had been a professional player before her marriage. In his spare time he composed prolifically. When his Simple Symphony , based on these juvenilia,

8393-488: The relationships affectionate – including bed-sharing, kissing and nude bathing – but strictly platonic. A more recent controversy was the statement in a 2013 biography of Britten by Paul Kildea that the composer's heart failure was due to undetected syphilis , which Kildea speculates was a result of Pears's promiscuity while the two were living in New York. In response, Britten's consultant cardiologist said that, like all

8502-475: The remaining six children's parts were filled by boys and girls from the Ipswich Co-operative Society Choir. Orchestral Britten chose modest orchestral forces; string quartet (one instrument per part), piano duet (four hands on one piano), and percussion (cymbal, tenor drum and bass drum) requiring only one player. The vocal score, published by Boosey & Hawkes in 1950, incorporates

8611-424: The rest of Kildea's book, and hoped that its reputation would not be "tarnished by one sensational speculation ... some second-hand hearsay ... presenting unsubstantiated gossip as fact." English Opera Group Fleeing internal politics at Sadler's Wells Opera at the end of 1945, Britten and singers Joan Cross , Anne Wood , and Peter Pears joined with designer Piper and producer Crozier to found

8720-480: The rest of his life. The Aldeburgh Festival was launched in June 1948, with Britten, Pears, and Crozier directing. Albert Herring played at the Jubilee Hall, and Britten's new cantata for tenor, chorus, and orchestra, Saint Nicolas , was presented in the parish church. The festival was an immediate success and became an annual event that has continued into the 21st century. New works by Britten featured in almost every festival until his death in 1976, including

8829-404: The rope gently . Like Rowan, the children are horrified by Sammy's condition. They decide to hide him in the nursery while faking up a line of footprints to make it seem as if he has escaped through the window. Miss Baggott and Rowan return with the sweeps, and are thoroughly taken in by the ruse. Black Bob and Clem run off in search of Sammy, pursued by Miss Baggott insisting that they get on with

8938-517: The score of the new opera until August 1970. Owen Wingrave was first broadcast in Britain in May 1971, when it was also televised in Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, the US and Yugoslavia. In September 1970 Britten asked Myfanwy Piper , who had adapted the two Henry James stories for him, to turn another prose story into a libretto. This

9047-548: The second Aldeburgh Festival. One afternoon Britten suggested two Songs of Innocence and of Experience by William Blake , entitled " The Chimney Sweeper ", and as Crozier relates, "by that evening we had planned the structure, action and characters of a short opera in three scenes." As with Albert Herring , the opera which had opened the first Aldeburgh Festival, the action was to be set locally in Suffolk, this time in Iken Hall,

9156-716: The sexless and innocent", and Pears once wrote to Britten: "remember there are lovely things in the world still – children, boys, sunshine, the sea, Mozart, you and me." In public, the matter was little discussed during Britten's lifetime and much discussed after it. Carpenter 's 1992 biography closely examined the evidence, as do later studies of Britten, most particularly John Bridcut 's Britten's Children (2006), which concentrates on Britten's friendships and relationships with various children and adolescents. Some commentators have continued to question Britten's conduct, sometimes very sharply. Carpenter and Bridcut conclude that he held any sexual impulses under firm control and kept

9265-418: The son of a dentist. He showed talent from an early age. He studied at the Royal College of Music in London and privately with the composer Frank Bridge . Britten first came to public attention with the a cappella choral work A Boy Was Born in 1934. With the premiere of Peter Grimes in 1945, he leapt to international fame. Over the next 28 years, he wrote 14 more operas, establishing himself as one of

9374-441: The success that Frank Bridge had enjoyed in the US; the departure of Auden and his friend Christopher Isherwood to the US from England three months previously; hostile or belittling reviews of Britten's music in the English press; and under-rehearsed and inadequate performances. Britten and Pears consummated their relationship and from then until Britten's death they were partners in both their professional and personal lives. When

9483-541: The term was invented by Lord Harewood. Both Mackerras and Harewood joined the list of corpses, the former for joking that the number of boys in Noye's Fludde must have been a delight to the composer, and the latter for an extramarital affair and subsequent divorce from Lady Harewood , which shocked the puritanical Britten. Among other corpses were his librettists Montagu Slater and Eric Crozier . The latter said in 1949, "He has sometimes told me, jokingly, that one day I would join

9592-447: The twentieth century". In 1967 the BBC commissioned Britten to write an opera specially for television. Owen Wingrave was based, like The Turn of the Screw , on a ghost story by Henry James . By the 1960s Britten found composition much slower than in his prolific youth; he told the 28-year-old composer Nicholas Maw , "Get as much done now as you can, because it gets much, much more difficult as you grow older." He did not complete

9701-536: The wisdom of pursuing a composing career; a compromise was agreed by which Britten would, as planned, go on to his public school the following year but would make regular day-trips to London to study composition with Bridge and piano with his colleague Harold Samuel . Bridge impressed on Britten the importance of scrupulous attention to the technical craft of composing and the maxim that "you should find yourself and be true to what you found." The earliest substantial works Britten composed while studying with Bridge are

9810-418: The work was much enhanced when Koussevitzky took it up shortly afterwards. In 1942 Britten read the work of the poet George Crabbe for the first time. The Borough , set on the Suffolk coast close to Britten's homeland, awakened in him such longings for England that he knew he must return. He also knew that he must write an opera based on Crabbe's poem about the fisherman Peter Grimes. Before Britten left

9919-438: The year he got to know Pears while they were both helping to clear out the country cottage of a mutual friend who had died in an air crash. Pears quickly became Britten's musical inspiration and close (though for the moment platonic) friend. Britten's first work for him was composed within weeks of their meeting, a setting of Emily Brontë 's poem, "A thousand gleaming fires", for tenor and strings. During 1937 Britten composed

10028-630: The years by Britten before his final heart complaint developed. Emotionally, according to some commentators, Britten never completely grew up, retaining in his outlook something of a child's view of the world. He was not always confident that he was the genius others declared him to be, and though he was hypercritical of his own works, he was acutely, even aggressively sensitive to criticism from anybody else. Britten was, as he himself acknowledged, notorious for dumping friends and colleagues who either offended him or ceased to be of use to him – his "corpses". The conductor Sir Charles Mackerras believed that

10137-408: The young Britten his first lessons in piano and notation. He made his first attempts at composition when he was five. He started piano lessons when he was seven years old, and three years later began to play the viola . He was one of the last composers brought up on exclusively live music: his father refused to have a gramophone or, later, a radio in the house. When he was seven Britten was sent to

10246-728: Was Thomas Mann 's novella Death in Venice , a subject he had been considering for some time. At an early stage in composition Britten was told by his doctors that a heart operation was essential if he was to live for more than two years. He was determined to finish the opera and worked urgently to complete it before going into hospital for surgery. His long-term colleague Colin Graham wrote: Perhaps of all his works, this one went deepest into Britten's own soul: there are extraordinary cross-currents of affinity between himself, his own state of health and mind, Thomas Mann, Aschenbach (Mann's dying protagonist), and Peter Pears, who must have had to tear himself in three in order to reconstitute himself as

10355-411: Was a celebrated pianist and conductor, performing many of his own works in concert and on record. He also performed and recorded works by others, such as Bach 's Brandenburg Concertos , Mozart symphonies, and song cycles by Schubert and Schumann . Together with Pears and the librettist and producer Eric Crozier , Britten founded the annual Aldeburgh Festival in 1948, and he was responsible for

10464-516: Was a success in North America, with performances in Toronto, New York, Boston, Chicago and San Francisco, under conductors including John Barbirolli and Serge Koussevitzky . In April 1939 Britten and Pears sailed to North America, going first to Canada and then to New York. They had several reasons for leaving England, including the difficult position of pacifists in an increasingly bellicose Europe;

10573-463: Was an English composer, conductor, and pianist. He was a central figure of 20th-century British music, with a range of works including opera, other vocal music, orchestral and chamber pieces. His best-known works include the opera Peter Grimes (1945), the War Requiem (1962) and the orchestral showpiece The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra (1945). Britten was born in Lowestoft , Suffolk ,

10682-611: Was equally unflattering about Pears's voice. Robinson surmises that Thomson was motivated by "a mixture of spite, national pride, and professional jealousy." Paul Bunyan met with wholesale critical disapproval, and the Sinfonia da Requiem (already rejected by its Japanese sponsors because of its overtly Christian nature) received a mixed reception when Barbirolli and the New York Philharmonic premiered it in March 1941. The reputation of

10791-511: Was eventually dissuaded by his parents, on the advice of the RCM staff. The first of Britten's compositions to attract wide attention were composed while at the RCM: the Sinfonietta , Op. 1 (1932), the oboe quartet Phantasy , Op. 2, dedicated to Léon Goossens who played the first performance in a BBC broadcast on 6 August 1933, and a set of choral variations A Boy was Born , written in 1933 for

10900-562: Was headed by Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother . Despite his large number of works on Christian themes, Britten has sometimes been thought of as an agnostic. Pears said that when they met in 1937 he was not sure whether or not Britten would have described himself as a Christian. In the 1960s Britten called himself a dedicated Christian, though sympathetic to the radical views propounded by the Bishop of Woolwich in Honest to God . Politically, Britten

11009-449: Was held at Aldeburgh Parish Church three days later, and he was buried in its churchyard, with a gravestone carved by Reynolds Stone . The authorities at Westminster Abbey had offered burial there, but Britten had made it clear that he wished his grave to be side by side with that, in due course, of Pears. A memorial service was held at the Abbey on 10 March 1977, at which the congregation

11118-514: Was not, and learned little from him. He continued to study privately with Bridge, although he later praised Ireland for "nurs[ing] me very gently through a very, very difficult musical adolescence." Britten also used his time in London to attend concerts and become better acquainted with the music of Stravinsky , Shostakovich and, most particularly, Mahler . He intended postgraduate study in Vienna with Alban Berg , Arnold Schoenberg 's student, but

11227-488: Was on the left. He told Pears that he always voted either Liberal or Labour and could not imagine ever voting Conservative , but he was never a member of any party, except the Peace Pledge Union. Physically, Britten was never robust. He walked and swam regularly and kept himself as fit as he could, but in his 1992 biography, Carpenter mentions 20 illnesses, a few of them minor but most fairly serious, suffered over

11336-494: Was recorded in 1956, Britten wrote this pen-portrait of his young self for the sleeve note: Once upon a time there was a prep-school boy. ... He was quite an ordinary little boy ... he loved cricket, only quite liked football (although he kicked a pretty "corner"); he adored mathematics, got on all right with history, was scared by Latin Unseen; he behaved fairly well, only ragged the recognised amount, so that his contacts with

11445-497: Was sexually repressed. In the three years from 1935 to 1937 Britten wrote nearly 40 scores for the theatre, cinema and radio. Among the film music of the late 1930s Matthews singles out Night Mail and Love from a Stranger (1937); from the theatre music he selects for mention The Ascent of F6 (1936), On the Frontier (1938), and Johnson Over Jordan (1939); and of the music for radio, King Arthur (1937) and The Sword in

11554-706: Was the music of the East, an interest that was fostered by a tour there with Pears in 1956, when Britten once again encountered the music of the Balinese gamelan and saw for the first time Japanese Noh plays, which he called "some of the most wonderful drama I have ever seen." These eastern influences were seen and heard in the ballet The Prince of the Pagodas (1957) and later in two of the three semi-operatic "Parables for Church Performance": Curlew River (1964), The Burning Fiery Furnace (1966) and The Prodigal Son (1968). By

11663-480: Was time he began work, as "I shall be nine next birthday", and the wealthy children become even more dismayed. Sam reveals that his home is in the village of Little Glemham, which by coincidence is also Rowan's home. Jonny conceives the plan of smuggling Sam into his travelling-trunk so that he can be carried out of the house unseen when the Crome children leave the following day. Rowan agrees, just as Miss Baggott returns in

11772-419: Was to produce and commission new English operas and other works, presenting them throughout the country. Britten wrote the comic opera Albert Herring for the group in 1947; while on tour in the new work Pears came up with the idea of mounting a festival in the small Suffolk seaside town of Aldeburgh , where Britten had moved from Snape earlier in the year, and which became his principal place of residence for

11881-491: Was twice winner of the Ernest Farrar Prize for composition. Despite these honours, he was not greatly impressed by the establishment: he found his fellow-students "amateurish and folksy" and the staff "inclined to suspect technical brilliance of being superficial and insincere." Another Ireland pupil, the composer Humphrey Searle , said that Ireland could be "an inspiring teacher to those on his own wavelength"; Britten

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