Famous people. Benjamin britten

Opera "Billy Budd"

• Beggar's Opera was followed by Billy Budd. And here the composer turns to the complex spiritual world of the characters. Billy Badd, a young sailor, a good-natured, cheerful, sociable person, is opposed by the savagery of the boatswain Clagardt. In a collision with him, the bearer of inhumanity, without wanting it himself, Billy kills the boatswain and goes to execution.
• Billy Badd's intonations naturally form into melodic lines, akin to folk origins. The boatswain, on the other hand, uses a very limited intonation vocabulary of a recitative nature. In the replicas of the orchestra accompanying the "speech" of the boatswain, naturalistic details are often heard. As in "Peter Grimes", we have a hero endowed with complex, contradictory features, and therefore his image is so vitally truthful.
• Operas without choir and ballet, without the bulky symphony orchestra, operas designed for the most portable stage setting, are not Britten's inventions. Small one-act interlude operas were known as early as the 18th century, in the time of Pergolesi. In the struggle for the fate of the opera, Britten revives on a new basis the forgotten traditions of the genre, which is no less important today than in the years of the birth of Pergolesi's The Maid-Madame, one of the most popular interlude operas of the 18th century to this day.

The main idea of Britten's operas

• The modern drama "Peter Grimes", the ancient tragedy "The Desecration of Lucretia", the satire on the English society of the Victorian era "Albert Herring" and the denunciation of the morals of the English capital of the 18th century. Britten draws a cross-cutting thought about the evil, vulgarity, criminality of the world, where base passions reign, where hypocrisy and hypocrisy are covered by a "position in society", where the spirit of buying and selling embraces not only three-penny market transactions with conscience.

• Britten's ethical ideal is humanism, but not that kind of it that is expressed by passive sympathy or an equally inactive condemnation of evil. In the work of Britten, humanism is reflected in the desire to involve the widest audience in the circle of ethical problems, to capture it, to call for effective forms of combating evil. (The following will be works, facts that testify to how creatively Britten reacted to the most pressing problems.

• Indignation and deep sympathy, an ironic smile and a caustic satirical intonation, reverence for purity and a fiery denunciation of evil - such is the amplitude of the composer's spiritual movements, in each work he takes a clear position - a certain attitude towards the heroes of the musical stage action.