Essential Britten
If it was Ralph Vaughan Williams who defined English music in the early decades of the 20th century, it was Benjamin Britten who was its voice post war. Gone was nostalgic pastoralism, replaced by a cooler, cleverer, more cosmopolitan style – a bruised musical beauty for a bruised nation, picking up the pieces after the violence and destruction of two world wars.
Read more…When London's Sadler's Wells theatre reopened in 1945 it was with Peter Grimes. Britten’s first opera was a rebirth, the symbolic beginning of a rich new era for English music – not only in the opera house but beyond. In many ways the work is a microcosm of the composer’s style and preoccupations. Again and again through his career Britten would return to its deeply personal themes of innocence abused, of the role of the outsider, of the tension between public duty and private desire. Musically too, the work establishes a bittersweet, muscular lyricism, a sensitivity to text and a balance between intricate structural process and outward directness, simplicity that are typical of the composer’s music.
An instinctive understanding and love of the human voice (and particularly the voice of his long-term partner, tenor Peter Pears), runs through an output dominated by vocal forms – opera, song-cycle, sacred music. Even when voices are absent there is often a sense of song, a lyrical line running through music that always fights for beauty, for resolution, even if it sometimes hard-won.