Britten's Children
Britten's Children

Author: John Bridcut

Publisher: Faber & Faber

Published: 2011-04-21

Total Pages: 267

ISBN-13: 0571260926

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Britten's Children confronts the edgy subject of the composer's obsessional yet strangely innocent relationships with adolescent boys. One of the hallmarks of Benjamin Britten's music is his use of boys' voices, and John Bridcut uses this to create a fresh prism through which to view the composer's life. Interweaving discussion of the music he wrote for and about children with interviews with the boys whom Britten befriended, Bridcut explores the influence of these unique friendships - notably with the late David Hemmings - and how they helped Britten maintain links with his own happy childhood. In a remarkable part of the book Bridcut tells for the first time the full story of Britten's love affair in the 1930s with the 18-year-old German Wulff Scherchen, son of the conductor Hermann Scherchen. As Paul Hoggart of The Times commented, 'this type of love belonged to an emotional landscape that has vanished for ever, and we are the poorer for it'. Since making the film, the author has extended his research to include friendships Britten had with children which have not previously been documented. The documentary Britten's Children won the Royal Philharmonic Society's 2005 Award for Creative Communication: 'this serious and beautiful film explored one aspect of a composer's life in great depth. Avoiding the temptation of sensationalism, Britten's Children was imaginatively researched and both touching and revelatory'.

John Britten
John Britten

Author: Jennifer Beck

Publisher:

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 58

ISBN-13:

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John Britten struggled through his early school life. Marked as a boy who 'could do better', his learning difficulties did not stop him from following his passion and realising his dream. This is the inspirational story of a design and engineering genius, creator of the Britten motorcycle. Ages 8+.

Rethinking Britten
Rethinking Britten

Author: Philip Rupprecht

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2013-09-19

Total Pages: 345

ISBN-13: 0199794804

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This book offers a new account of the composer's enduring popularity. 12 essays by a group of leading senior and emerging scholars offer fresh historical and interpretive contexts for all phases of Britten's career.

Benjamin Britten
Benjamin Britten

Author: Paul Kildea

Publisher: Penguin Classics

Published: 2014-02-27

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781846142338

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Paul Kildea's Benjamin Britten: A Life in the Twentieth Century is the definitive biography of Britain's greatest modern composer - now in paperback Benjamin Britten was Britain's greatest twentieth-century composer, who broke decisively with figures such as Elgar and Vaughan Williams and recreated English music in a fresh, modern, European form. Paul Kildea's biography has been acclaimed as the definitive account of Britten's extraordinary life, exploring his deeply held and controversial pacifism; his complex forty-year relationship with Peter Pears; and his creation of an artistic community in Aldeburgh. Above all, however, this book helps us understand the relationship of Britten's music to his life, and takes us as far into its unique alchemy as we are ever likely to go. PAUL KILDEA is a writer and conductor who has performed many of the Britten works he writes about, in opera houses and concert halls from Sydney to Hamburg. His previous books include Selling Britten (2002) and (as editor) Britten on Music (2003). He was Head of Music at the Aldeburgh Festival between 1999 and 2002 and subsequently Artistic Director of the Wigmore Hall in London, and lives in Berlin. 'Must now rank as the standard work' Financial Times 'Indispensable ... This is a masterly, highly readable account and the most comprehensive to date of the life and work of one of the 20th century's great musical figures' Barry Millington, Evening Standard ' A] wise, cautious, challenging book ... Kildea's verbal explorations of the music are done with level-headed sensitivity leavened by a quirky lightness of touch' Alexandra Harris, New Statesman

Journeying Boy
Journeying Boy

Author: John Evans

Publisher: Faber & Faber

Published: 2010-10-21

Total Pages: 602

ISBN-13: 0571274641

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Best remembered for his operas and his War Requiem, Benjamin Britten's radical politics and his sexuality have also ensured that he remains a controversial public figure. Journeying Boy is a selection of his diaries that offer the reader an unseen insight into this complex man. Encompassing the years 1928-1938, they explore some key periods of Britten's life - his early compositions, his education first under composer Frank Bridge and then at the Royal College of Music, an unhappy but productive period studying under John Ireland and Ralph Vaughan Williams, and his reluctant and often painful process of parting from the warm, safe environment of his family home and his beloved mother. The diaries cast light on an often misrepresented musician whose technique, originality and musical prowess have entranced audiences for generations and who continues to inspire composers and musicians around the world.

Essential Britten
Essential Britten

Author: John Bridcut

Publisher: Faber & Faber

Published: 2012-10-30

Total Pages: 363

ISBN-13: 0571290744

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John Bridcut, author of the acclaimed 'Britten's Children', has included significant fresh material which will make the book indispensable for Britten aficionados as well as for those who are discovering the composer's music for the first time. This guide is all about finding a way into Britten's music. An outline of planned chapters: - The Top Ten Britten pieces - Critics' First Impressions - Britten's Life - Britten and Pears - The things they said - The Music (stage works, choral works, songs, chamber music, orchestral works) - The Interpreters of Britten's work - Britten as Performer - The Impresario (English Opera Group and Aldeburgh Festival) - Britten's Homes - Trivial Pursuits

Benjamin Britten: The Turn of the Screw
Benjamin Britten: The Turn of the Screw

Author: Patricia Howard

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1985-09-19

Total Pages: 184

ISBN-13: 9780521283564

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This book is designed to introduce the non-specialist music lover to Britten's opera, The Turn of the Screw. The opening chapters by Vivien Jones and Patricia Howard deal with the literary source of the opera Oames's novella), the structure of the libretto, and the technique by which a short story was transformed into an opera. The central chapter, on the musical style and structures of the opera, includes an account of the composition process deduced from early sketches of the work by John Evans, an analysis of the unique form of the opera with a more detailed examination of the last scene by Patricia Howard, and an account of the significance and effect of the orchestration by Christopher Palmer. Finally, Patricia Howard traces the stage history of the work, from its initial reception in Venice in 1954, through some seminal reinterpretations in the 1960s to its present established position in the repertoire. The book is generously illustrated and there is also a bibliography and discography.

Benjamin Britten
Benjamin Britten

Author: Neil Powell

Publisher: Macmillan + ORM

Published: 2013-08-06

Total Pages: 580

ISBN-13: 0805097759

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This spellbinding centenary biography by Neil Powell looks at the music, the life, and the legacy of the greatest British composer of the twentieth century Benjamin Britten was born on November 22, 1913, in the East Suffolk town of Lowestoft. Displaying a passion and proficiency for music at an early age, to the delight of his mother, Edith, a talented amateur musician herself, he began composing music when he was only five years old. After studying at the Royal College of Music, Britten went on to write documentary scores for the General Post Office Film Unit, where he met and collaborated with the poet W. H. Auden. Of more lasting importance was Britten's introduction in 1937 to the tenor Peter Pears, who was to become the inspirational center of his emotional and musical life. Their partnership lasted nearly four decades, during a dangerous time when homosexuality was illegal in England. Conscientious objectors, Britten and Pears followed Auden to America before the war began in 1939. While there, they joined the extraordinary Brooklyn ménage of George Davis, Louis MacNeice, and Paul Bowles. Eventually intense homesickness, provoked in part by George Crabbe's poem "Peter Grimes," drove the pair home to East Anglia in 1942 and gave Britten the inspiration for his finest opera. Throughout his career, Britten did not want modern music to be just for "the cultured few" and instead always composed his music to be "listenable-to." The shared quotidian lives of Britten and Pears unfold in this intimate biography and the story of two men who created a truly remarkable legacy.

Church and Patronage in 20th Century Britain
Church and Patronage in 20th Century Britain

Author: Peter Webster

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2017-11-07

Total Pages: 263

ISBN-13: 1137369108

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This book is the first full-length treatment of Walter Hussey's work as a patron between 1943 and 1978, first for the Anglican parish church of St Matthew in Northampton, and then at Chichester Cathedral. He was responsible for the most significant sequence of works of art commissioned for the British churches in the twentieth century. They included music by Benjamin Britten, Leonard Bernstein and William Walton, visual art by Henry Moore, Graham Sutherland and Marc Chagall, and poetry by W. H. Auden. Placing Hussey in theological context and in a period of rapid cultural change, it explores the making and reception of the commissions, and the longer-term influence of his work, still felt today. As well as contributing to the religious and cultural history of Britain, and of Anglo-Catholicism and the cathedrals in particular, the book will be of interest to all those concerned with the relationship between theology and the arts, and to historians of music and the visual arts.