Britten, (Edward) Benjamin, Baron Britten of Aldeburgh 1913-76
English composer

Benjamin Britten was born in Lowestoft. He studied the piano under Harold Samuel (1879-1937) and composition under Frank Bridge. Awarded a scholarship to the Royal College of Music, he worked there under John Ireland; he was already a prolific composer, and some of his student works have survived to stand beside more mature compositions: notable among these is the set of choral variations, A Boy was Born (1933). During the 1930s Britten wrote a great deal of incidental music for plays and documentary films, collaborating at times with W H Auden, whose poetry provided texts for the song cycles Our Hunting Fathers (1936) and On This Island (1937).

From 1939 to 1942 Britten worked in the USA, producing his large-scale instrumental works, the Violin Concerto (1939) and the Sinfonia da Requiem (1940). After his return to the UK, his works were mostly vocal and choral; significant exceptions are the Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Purcell (The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra, 1946), the String Quartets No.1 (1941) and No.3 (1945), the Cello Symphony (1963), the Cello Sonata (1961) and three suites for solo cello (1964, 1967, 1972); the last group of these works was all for the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich.

After 1945, in addition to his choral and vocal works, notably the 'Spring' Symphony (1949), Britten's reputation was due largely to his achievement in opera. His first work, Peter Grimes (1945), was an immediate success, and is generally regarded as the first great English opera since Henry Purcell. Britten wrote two further operas on a large scale, Billy Budd (1951) and Gloriana (1953), the latter for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, and five 'chamber operas', including The Turn of the Screw (1954, based on the Henry James novella), which are on a smaller scale and employ a basic orchestra of 12 players.

Britten displays to great effect a special genius in writing with a simplicity that attracts amateur performers while retaining artistic and dramatic effectiveness; this quality is especially marked in the 'children's operas' The Little Sweep, incorporated in Let's Make an Opera! (1949), and Noye's Fludde (1958), which is a musical rendering of a 14th-century miracle play. His later operas include A Midsummer Night's Dream (1960), Owen Wingrave (1970) and Death in Venice (1973). In addition to his enormous activity as a composer, Britten was an accomplished pianist, usually heard as an accompanist, particularly of Peter Pears, with whom he and Eric Crozier founded in 1948 the annual Aldeburgh Festival. Several of his own works hadtheir first performances there. He was awarded a life peerage in 1976.

In recent years, Britten's personal life and in particular his homosexuality have been more openly considered in the context of his musical achievement, where the role of the outsider in society is a crucial element (notably in the operas). In 1996, discussion of a possible memorial to Britten in Aldeburgh gave rise to some quite astonishingly disparaging remarks in the press about him, especially by Malcolm Williamson.

Bibliography: There are good biographies of Britten by H Carpenter (1992) and M Kennedy, written from a mainly personal and a mainly musical viewpoint respectively. See also D Mitchell and P Reed, Letters from a Life: Selected Letters and Diaries of Benjamin Britten (2 vols, 1991); P Evans, The Music of Benjamin Britten (1989); A Blyth, Remembering Britten (1981); A Gishford (ed), Tribute to Benjamin Britten on His Fiftieth Birthday (1963).