Benjamin Britten: A Life for Music - Hardcover

Powell, Neil

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0805097740 ISBN 13: 9780805097740

Publisher: Henry Holt & Co, 2013

Synopsis

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.

About this title

Review:

"Neil Powell is a poet, and it shows. Fluent... intimate... psychologically adept... [Powell does] an exceptional job of bringing this strange, neurotic and evasive man to life." (Bryan Appleyard Sunday Times)

"A sensible, well-written book by an author who is a literary scholar: this is the biography to choose if you are new to Britten and want an introduction to his life." (Country Life)

"Powell carries the torch into the present, naming those singers now performing the work anew, painting a portrait of the Aldeburgh festival as it is today. His account has air and light, and brings alive the sense of landscape – the East Anglian coast, the marshes, the wind and waves – which have coloured so much of Britten's music." (Observer)

"[A] fine biography... Powell has a more personal touch... takes a more literary approach, and is good at relating the vocal pieces to their sources." (Daily Telegraph)

"Tightly focused... sympathetic. Powell lives in Suffolk and has a strong understanding of the composer’s cultural rootedness in that part of the world." (Economist)

Book Description:

Benjamin Britten is the greatest of our English composers and 2013 marks the centenary of his birth: Neil Powell’s Benjamin Britten: A Life for Music is the landmark biography of this pioneering musician's rich life and work.

About this edition

• Publisher: Henry Holt & Co
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 0805097740
• ISBN 13: 9780805097740
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 508