"Benjamin Britten at 100 - time for a new appraisal?"

[Beef Oven]

Britten is the reason I am a British music nut.
Aged around 17 the Sinfonia da Requiem and Sea Interludes blew me away.
Up to that point I thought classical music had only been written by Germans and Russians.
Britten is nothing but pinnacles IMO.

Well put.

[VodkaDilc]

Britten is the reason I am a British music nut.
Aged around 17 the Sinfonia da Requiem and Sea Interludes blew me away.
Up to that point I thought classical music had only been written by Germans and Russians.
Britten is nothing but pinnacles IMO.

I was lucky enough to have been in Noye's Fludde when I was 12. No better way to get hooked on Britten than being in the middle of that at such a young age.

[Ferretfancy]

I was lucky enough to have been in Noye's Fludde when I was 12. No better way to get hooked on Britten than being in the middle of that at such a young age.

I was lucky too, as we had a teacher at my boarding school who revered Britten, and that was back in the late forties and early fifties. I sang in the Five Flower Songs and we also had a performance of Rejoice in the Lamb in our school chapel.I can still transport myself back into the rather chilly library listening to the Pears / Brain discs of the Serenade.

It's worth remembering that Britten probably got more adverse criticism in his lifetime than he does now, especially in the period just after WWII. People sniped at the fact that he and Pears had gone to America, and on their return there were those who said that Grimes was just a lucky hit. It probably didn't help that a defensive clique grew up around him which tended to isolate him from balanced criticism.

I feel that his greatest works were written in his earlier career, perhaps culminating in A Midsummer Night's Dream and the War Requiem. Later it seemed as if he was setting himself challenges to overcome, rather than writing from the heart. To me, this applies to the Church Parables and the cello works. That said, if you start to listen to any of his music it's almost impossible to take the disc out of the player, and all his music has a sense of otherness which is unique. Les Illuminations is a wonderful example.

[amateur51]

I was lucky too, as we had a teacher at my boarding school who revered Britten, and that was back in the late forties and early fifties. I sang in the Five Flower Songs and we also had a performance of Rejoice in the Lamb in our school chapel.I can still transport myself back into the rather chilly library listening to the Pears / Brain discs of the Serenade.

It's worth remembering that Britten probably got more adverse criticism in his lifetime than he does now, especially in the period just after WWII. People sniped at the fact that he and Pears had gone to America, and on their return there were those who said that Grimes was just a lucky hit. It probably didn't help that a defensive clique grew up around him which tended to isolate him from balanced criticism.

I feel that his greatest works were written in his earlier career, perhaps culminating in A Midsummer Night's Dream and the War Requiem. Later it seemed as if he was setting himself challenges to overcome, rather than writing from the heart. To me, this applies to the Church Parables and the cello works. That said, if you start to listen to any of his music it's almost impossible to take the disc out of the player, and all his music has a sense of otherness which is unique. Les Illuminations is a wonderful example.

Agreed wholeheartedly Ferret, as is his Third String Quartet

[Mr Pee]

I've never really got Britten and for long held the opinion that his reputation has been exaggerated, partly because he's British.

Not sure whether you've read the linked article in the OP, Kernel, but this is a quote from it that rather undermines that view:-

Janis Susskind, the managing director of Britten's publisher, Boosey & Hawkes. "He is a British composer with a global reputation – and we haven't had many of those."

Far from being a parochial figure admired only in his own country, she says, he is consistently among the top-three royalty earners of any of the composers whose estates Boosey handles – including Stravinsky, Rachmaninov, Prokofiev and Richard Strauss.

His royalties, she says, are also growing – "they went up by about 30% between 2007 and 2011". Most of the revenue comes not from the UK but the US – and she cites South America as a growth area. "Chile, Argentina, Brazil – that's a whole new frontier."

[Serial_Apologist]

Britten is the reason I am a British music nut.
Aged around 17 the Sinfonia da Requiem and Sea Interludes blew me away.
Up to that point I thought classical music had only been written by Germans and Russians.
Britten is nothing but pinnacles IMO.

Can't say I've ever heard anything specifically "British" (or "English", for that matter), in Britten's music, aside from the occasional Holstian harmonic fingerprint. Tippett - despite later disclaimers of his youthful antagonism of the RVW generation - was much more indebted to the Tudor/folksong renaissance. One only has to listen to the broad theme in the finale of his Double Concerto to hear this - it is almost a copy of the similar theme from Bliss's Music for Strings of 4 years earlier, which in turn harked back to Elgar's Introduction & Allegro. I've always felt Britten to occupy a musical world of his own - one of stylists as distant from each other in time as in aesthetics: Purcell, Mozart, Schubert, Mahler, Holst, Debussy, Stravinsky, Berg, Bartok. With all its Christian guilt and obsession with childhood innocence, it's a musical world I've never warmed to: there are 20th century composers with whom one feels more rightly uncomfortable, weaving into the texture of their musical thought issues (be)set with/by the complexities of their and our time; outside the early socialist-inspired pieces, as a gay man forced to keep his counsel, Britten's contradictions were specific to himself and those condemned to remain un-outed, by the social mores of his time.

[Beef Oven]

Can't say I've ever heard anything specifically "British" (or "English", for that matter), in Britten's music, aside from the occasional Holstian harmonic fingerprint. Tippett - despite later disclaimers of his youthful antagonism of the RVW generation - was much more indebted to the Tudor/folksong renaissance. One only has to listen to the broad theme in the finale of his Double Concerto to hear this - it is almost a copy of the similar theme from Bliss's Music for Strings of 4 years earlier, which in turn harked back to Elgar's Introduction & Allegro. I've always felt Britten to occupy a musical world of his own - one of stylists as distant from each other in time as in aesthetics: Purcell, Mozart, Schubert, Mahler, Holst, Debussy, Stravinsky, Berg, Bartok. With all its Christian guilt and obsession with childhood innocence, it's a musical world I've never warmed to: there are 20th century composers with whom one feels more rightly uncomfortable, weaving into the texture of their musical thought issues (be)set with/by the complexities of their and our time; outside the early socialist-inspired pieces, as a gay man forced to keep his counsel, Britten's contradictions were specific to himself and those condemned to remain un-outed, by the social mores of his time.

I don't think that's what ER meant.

The fact that a British composer could write music too, not just Germans and Russians was an eye-opener (ear?) for me as a young person.

It caused me to become very interested in music written by British composers.

Much of this music I suppose is not specifically 'British' (whatever that is).

[ahinton]

I don't think that's what ER meant.

The fact that a British composer could write music too, not just Germans and Russians was an eye-opener (ear?) for me as a young person.

But Britten was surely recognised as only one of a number of those by the time he scaled the heights of international fame?

It caused me to become very interested in music written by British composers.

Much of this music I suppose is not specifically 'British' (whatever that is).

I have little idea what it is either! I've never even quite gotten to what it is about so much Elgar that so many people seem to regard as quintessentially English (and why in any case it is that Englishness should so often be qualified as "quintessential" I also have no idea). OK, one might reasonably make some kind of claims for Vaughan Williams and to a lesser extent Tippett and Bush for consciously writing music that has links to an English musical past but, that aside, I don't really get the concept; for me, being a Scottish composer is, for the most part, being two things simultaneously, rather as one of them once famously declared that she's a woman and a composer but rarely both at the same time...

[Beef Oven]

But Britten was surely recognised as only one of a number of those by the time he scaled the heights of international fame?


I have little idea what it is either! I've never even quite gotten to what it is about so much Elgar that so many people seem to regard as quintessentially English (and why in any case it is that Englishness should so often be qualified as "quintessential" I also have no idea). OK, one might reasonably make some kind of claims for Vaughan Williams and to a lesser extent Tippett and Bush for consciously writing music that has links to an English musical past but, that aside, I don't really get the concept; for me, being a Scottish composer is, for the most part, being two things simultaneously, rather as one of them once famously declared that she's a woman and a composer but rarely both at the same time...

Sure, Britten was one of a number of internationally recognised British composers, but not to me.

When I was 9 or 10 years old in the late 1960s, Britten was the only British composer I had ever heard of, even though I was already aware of music by Tchaikovsky, Prokofiev, Kodaly, Mozart, Beethoven, Bizet, Rossini, Verdi and Puccini (maybe because my mother is from central Europe).

Anyway, I was more interested in the Dave Clark 5, Amen Corner and The Archies!!!!

[Sir Velo]

"Time for a new appraisal of Britten". I have no idea what this means, other than it's representative of the typically empty and lazy journalism with which we have sadly become so familiar.

Do we need a new appraisal? No. Britten is one of our most respected and widely performed composers, and deservedly so. 'Nuff said.

By the way, risible comment by Ades.

[Mary Chambers]

By the way, risible comment by Ades.

I'm so glad someone feels the same as I do about that comment!

[Thropplenoggin]

I'm so glad someone feels the same as I do about that comment!

He has form in this regard. He dissed Wagner's operas last year, too. As someone with only one chamber opera under his belt, some humility might serve him well.

[Mary Chambers]

He has form in this regard. He dissed Wagner's operas last year, too. As someone with only one chamber opera under his belt, some humility might serve him well.

What about The Tempest? But you're right

[Thropplenoggin]

What about The Tempest? But you're right

I may have missed that one! It's not someone whose work I have any interest in getting to know.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

I was lucky too, as we had a teacher at my boarding school who revered Britten, and that was back in the late forties and early fifties. I sang in the Five Flower Songs and we also had a performance of Rejoice in the Lamb in our school chapel.

I don't know these!

It's worth remembering that Britten probably got more adverse criticism in his lifetime than he does now, especially in the period just after WWII. People sniped at the fact that he and Pears had gone to America, and on their return there were those who said that Grimes was just a lucky hit. It probably didn't help that a defensive clique grew up around him which tended to isolate him from balanced criticism.

The criticism of Britten because he was in America at the beginning of the War has always seemed odd to me. No such hostility is ever directed against Bliss (who was also in the States at this time) or Beecham (who moved to the States at the start of the War, stayed there until 1944, and returned to become a National Treasure). Britten and Pears returned, at not inconsiderable danger to themselves, during the height of the Battle of the Atlantic in 1942. Like Tippett, they were Conscientious Objectors, but Tippett's imprisonment for his beliefs seems to have won him more kudos than Britten & Pears' non-combative Arts activities. From the very start of his public activity, Britten attracted hostile comment which appear to me to be personal, rather than aesthetic, and selective examples of his Wartime stance merely provide a pseudo-moral excuse to continue such personal attacks.

I feel that his greatest works were written in his earlier career, perhaps culminating in A Midsummer Night's Dream and the War Requiem. Later it seemed as if he was setting himself challenges to overcome, rather than writing from the heart. To me, this applies to the Church Parables and the cello works.

There have been comments on other Threads ascribing a dilution of "heart" to those works of a composer that the poster found less attractive. I can only say that Phaedra, Venice and the Third Quartet sound to me as demonstrating as firm cardial activity as any by this composer, not to mention as keen a brain.

And can't it be argued that someone's "heart" can be totally involved in "setting himself challenges to overcome"? The Parables would be works I would cite as incontrovertably demonstrating such an argument: active engagement in new ideas to arrive at vital new means of aesthetic expression. The Madwoman's not-quite reconciliation with her son in Curlew River is an astonishing moment, simultaneously heart-breaking and heart-warming in ways he'd never done before.

That said, if you start to listen to any of his music it's almost impossible to take the disc out of the player, and all his music has a sense of otherness which is unique. Les Illuminations is a wonderful example.