Famous people. Benjamin britten

Britten went his own way

• Neither in the early years, nor at the later stages of his creative evolution, did Britten set himself the task of discovering new techniques of composition or theoretical substantiations of his individual style.
• Unlike many of his peers, Britten was never fond of pursuing the "newest", just as he did not try to find support in the established methods of composition inherited from the masters of previous generations.
• He is guided primarily by the free flight of imagination, fantasy, realistic expediency, and not by belonging to one of the many "schools" of our century.
• Britten has always valued and appreciates creative sincerity more than scholastic dogma, no matter how ultramodern outfits she is clothed.

• Creative
• sincerity

• scholastic
• dogma

Benjamin Britten allowed all the winds of the era to penetrate his creative laboratory, but not dispose of it. His work was influenced by Mahler, Shostakovich, Alban Berg, Stravinsky and Prokofiev.

• Benjamin Britten allowed all the winds of the era to penetrate his creative laboratory, but not dispose of it. His work was influenced by Mahler, Shostakovich, Alban Berg, Stravinsky and Prokofiev.

Love for native English music

• Benjamin Britten is unthinkable outside the specific national environment that shaped him and tied him to itself with thousands of threads. In childhood, youth, and adulthood, he expresses his musical thoughts without resorting to quotations, folklore, or stylization. But he loves his English music.
• Between 1945 and 1948 he arranges English folk songs and publishes two collections, and between them a collection of French songs. Prior to that, he composed "Canadian Carnival" for orchestra and Scottish Ballad for two pianos and orchestra. But not only folklore origins formed its language.

• In 1939 he left for the USA, where he stayed for three years. One of the best compositions of this triennium is Michelangelo's Seven Sonnets for tenor and piano, music of mental confusion, melancholy and bitterness. It was not at all easy to find a performer endowed with a subtle understanding not only of vocal tasks, but of the logic and style of the modern melodic chant of the poems of the great sculptor and poet of the Renaissance. The meeting with Peter Pearce marked the beginning of a new stage in Britten's creative path.

• Communication with Pierce, a singer of exceptionally high culture, combining in his art passionate pathos with profound intellectualism, played a role in the birth of Britten's interest in vocal music and, as a result, led him to the operatic genre. For many years, the opera became for Britten the main field of application of his enormous talent.

• Interest in Britten, followed by fame, comes from abroad. In Italy (1934), Spain (1936), Switzerland (1937) at modern music festivals, he is highly acclaimed for his works. And here the sad parable about the prophet and the fatherland remains in force ...

• Britten
• in America

• Britten knew that many considered opera to be a dying genre, kept on the stage only thanks to the audience, which traditionally filled the tiered boxes of gilded theater halls. Invading this new genre for himself, Britten had high hopes for it, given the most important thing - the mass audience of opera lovers. The first opera "Peter Grimes " immediately brought world fame to its author. The plot is borrowed from the short story "The Town" by the English writer of the early 19th century George Crabb.

• It is hard to imagine that, taking up his first opera, the composer saw in the future more than a dozen operas of various genres that followed it. But it's easy to imagine that Britten knew how long ago, how stubbornly many composers of the 20th century struggled to solve the problem of a modern, innovative opera capable of capturing the hall.