Benjamin Britten: biography

1934-1936

A Boy was Born was broadcast by the BBC in February 1934, gaining Britten recognition in musical circles as a composer of so much promise that his Phantasy op. 2 was chosen by the International Society for Contemporary Music for performance at their Festival in Florence that year. Although he was terminally ill, Britten's father urged his son to attend this festival, but died before Britten, summoned by telegram, could get back home. In October 1934 Britten and his mother travelled to Vienna. There he met the music editor Erwin Stein, who later came to England as a refugee and took a position in the music publishing house Boosey and Hawkes, where the director Ralph Hawkes had already signed Britten up as a composer.

The following spring Britten found employment with the General Post Office Film Unit. The Unit’s series of documentary films, made by John Grierson, showed aspects of English life, particularly examining the world of industry and the people who worked within it, such as those who mined coal (Coal Face) or ensured the delivery of mail (Night Mail).

Here Britten collaborated with the poet W. H. Auden, who supplied the narrative for some of the films accompanied by Britten’s music. Their working relationship extended beyond the G.P.O. When Britten was commissioned to write a work for the Norwich Festival in 1936 he used a text devised by Auden, Our Hunting Fathers op.8. for a symphonic song cycle for high voice and orchestra. Ostensibly about animals in their relationship to human beings, this speaks just as strongly against the inhumanity that both composer and poet saw in the emergence of Nazism.

Other compositions at this time reflected Britten’s versatility. The Simple Symphony op.4 of 1934 comprised themes from some of his juvenilia, also in 1934 came the Suite for violin and piano op.6; the twelve songs of Friday Afternoons, op. 7 (1935) were written for Friday afternoon music at his brother's school, Clive House, Prestatyn, and in 1936 he composed the music for the feature film Love from a Stranger, based on a short story by Agatha Christie and starring Ann Harding and Basil Rathbone.

1937-1938

1937 began sadly for Britten. In January his sister Beth caught influenza, and infected her mother, who had come to London to nurse her. Weakened by the illness, Mrs Britten died of a heart attack. On 27 April his friend, the writer Peter Burra, was killed in a plane crash. Burra had owned a small cottage at Bucklebury and it fell to Britten and one of Burra's closest friends, the young singer Peter Pears, to sort out his papers. The two men soon formed a strong friendship that grew into a life-long personal and artistic partnership.

The young composer had been devastated by his mother’s death, but Edith Britten had left her son sufficient money to enable him to buy a disused windmill in the Suffolk village of Snape, on the river Alde. This was converted into a suitable residence by Beth Britten’s future father-in-law, the architect Arthur Welford, and Britten moved in in 1938. The lower floor housed a drawing room with a grand piano, the upper floor a bedroom and balcony from which Britten could see the river and a long established maltings building. At the Old Mill he was host to many friends such as the composers Lennox Berkeley and Aaron Copland, the writers W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood, as well as Peter Pears.

By the late 1930s Britten was receiving commissions from the BBC for incidental music for The Company of Heaven (1937), The World of the Spirit (1938), D. G. Bridson’s King Arthur (1937) and T. H. White’s The Sword in the Stone (1939). From this time too comes incidental music for the theatre – Auden and Christopher Isherwood’s The Ascent of F6 (1937), On the Frontier (1938) and J. B. Priestley’s Johnson over Jordan (1939). These years also saw the composition of the suite of orchestral movements from Rossini, Soirées musicales, op. 9 (1936) which later, with Matinées musicales op.24 of 1941, became a ballet Divertimento for the American Ballet Company, and his one and only Piano Concerto, op.13 (1938).

1939-1940

The enormous success of the Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge op.10, which were composed for the Boyd Neel Orchestra to perform at the 1937 Salzburg Festival, had increased Britten's national and international standing, but despite this Britten felt frustrated and disillusioned by the lack of musical perception in the English establishment. In 1939 he and Peter Pears followed Auden and Isherwood across the Atlantic, giving a number of concerts in Canada before moving south through the States, intending to reach Hollywood where there had been the tentative offer of a film commission. On the way Pears wrote to a German emigrée friend, Elizabeth Mayer, asking if they might visit. This led to the Mayers offering them a room in their own home, a small cottage in the grounds of the hospital run by Dr Mayer on Long Island. When war broke out in September 1939 Britten and Pears wanted to return to England, but were told they would be more valuable if they stayed in the States and increased sympathy for Britain there. After the USA entered the war they tried again for visas to return home, but had such difficulty in gaining these that their ‘short stay’ lasted until March 1942.

During this American period Britten wrote the Violin Concerto, op.15 which was premiered in New York in 1940 by Antonio Brosa and the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. Other instrumental works included Young Apollo, op.16, a tour-de-force for piano, string quartet and string orchestra, the Canadian Carnival op.19,  both of 1939, and the Sinfonia da Requiem, op. 20 of 1940. This was composed in memory of his parents although commissioned to celebrate the 2,600 Anniversary of the Founding of the Japanese Empire. It was not, however performed at the Japanese celebrations, ostensibly because of its Christian content.

Late in 1940 Britten and Pears moved for a while into a house in Brooklyn Heights, New York City with a number other artistic figures, headed by W. H. Auden who then collaborated with Britten on the operetta Paul Bunyan, op. 17, based on the American folk tale of a giant lumberjack who founded the nation. Although it found great favour with its audiences at the time, this work was largely discarded by both Auden and Britten until, near the end of his life, Britten made a revised version which was staged at the Aldeburgh Festival in 1976.

Move back to 1913-33Move forward to 1941-50

Terms & Conditions | Accessibility Statement | Contact Britten-Pears Foundation

All content Copyright © Britten-Pears Foundation 2010