Set design by David Myerscough-Jones for Owen Wingrave, 1969
Benjamin Britten: biography
1970-1976
Never afraid of a new challenge, Britten accepted a commission from the BBC to compose his first opera to be written specifically for television. Working again with Myfanwy Piper, he adapted another Henry James story Owen Wingrave, op.85 (1970). This is the tale of a young man who renounces his military training to embrace pacifism, much to the horror of his family and his fiancée. Owen frees himself from his ancestors’ military tradition but accepts the challenge to spend the night in the haunted room at his family seat of Paramore. In the morning he is found there, dead.
Peter Pears as Gustav von Aschenbach and John Shirley-Quirk as The Elderly Fop in Death in Venice, 1973
Next to Suffolk it may be said that Britten loved and felt most at home in Venice. For many years Thomas Mann’s novella Death in Venice had intrigued him as a possible opera plot and in 1971 he set to work on this with Myfanwy Piper for a third and final time as his librettist.
There are only three principal solo voices in the opera: that of the novelist Aschenbach (tenor), the Traveller (baritone), who also sings the multiple roles of Elderly Fop, Hotel Manager, Barber, Gondolier, Leader of the Players and the Voice of Dionysius, and a counter-tenor who provides the Voice of Apollo. There are a chorus, mimes and dancers, the chief solo dancers being Tadzio, the boy whom Aschenbach sees as incarnate perfection, and his mother, ‘the lady of the pearls’. In the music for these the gamelan influence is again clearly heard. The opera was premiered at Snape Maltings on the 16th of June during the 1973 Aldeburgh Festival. Pears, the opera’s dedicatee, sang the demanding role of Aschenbach but the composer was too frail to be present.
Britten, December 1974
By 1973 Britten’s health had deteriorated considerably. In the spring of that year he underwent an operation to replace a heart valve, but this was not completely successful. His career as accompanist and conductor ceased, but with constant medical supervision and the help of a devoted staff he was still able to compose. Final works include the Suite on English Folk Tunes op.90 A time there was… of 1974, an orchestral suite that takes its name from the final song of Winter Words, and the dramatic cantata Phaedra, written for Janet Baker. These received their first performances at the 1975 and 1976 Aldeburgh Festivals.
Britten had long been the recipient of numerous awards and honorary degrees. In 1976, after years of refusing a personal accolade he now at last accepted ‘for music’ an honour from the Queen, who on 12 June of that year created him a Life Peer, ‘Baron Britten of Aldeburgh in the County of Suffolk’.
Party in the garden of The Red House to celebrate Britten’s peerage, 12 June 1976. Britten talks to Lady Cranbrook, Chairman of the Aldeburgh Festival.
In September 1976 his String Quartet No.3, op.94, written in the autumn of 1975, was played to him privately by the Amadeus Quartet in the library at The Red House. Its first public performance was given in the Maltings at Snape a fortnight after Britten's death on 4 December, 1976.
Britten’s funeral service was held at the Aldeburgh Parish Church on 7 December 1976. The service was led by the Lord Bishop of St Edmundsbury and Ipswich, the Right Reverend Dr. Leslie Brown who had visited the composer shortly before his death. Dr. Brown caught the essence both of Britten’s modesty and the general impact of his music on the world when he proclaimed in his address: ‘Ben will like the sound of trumpets, though he will find it difficult to believe they are sounding for him’. The composer's friends Bob and Doris Ling, caretakers of the Maltings, paid their own tribute to the composer by lining his grave in the churchyard with rushes gathered from the riverbank at Snape.
The Benjamin Britten Memorial Window, in Aldeburgh Parish Church, designed by John Piper
Britten’s music is undoubtedly his greatest lasting memorial, and his legacy continues also in the Aldeburgh Festival and the Britten-Pears Young Artist Programme which he founded. A poignant visual memorial to the composer is to be found in the church at Aldeburgh. It is a stained glass window representing scenes from the three Church Parables which was designed by his friend John Piper and interpreted in glass by Patrick Reyntiens in 1979. The window’s three images, the Father welcoming back his prodigal son, a curlew descending toward the river, and the salvation of the three Israelites from the Burning Fiery Furnace reflect not only Britten’s triumph as a musician but also his belief in the power of peace.
Explore an animated timeline of Britten's life