Sign our
guestbook

Benjamin Britten was born at Lowestoft in 1913.  Music was an early love of his and he started to compose at the age of five.  It was in 1927 that it was arranged that he would begin composition lessons with Frank Bridge; unaware that he would later win an open scholarship in composition, giving him a place at the Royal College of Music in 1930.  By this time Britten already had a technical virtuosity that went beyond the basic contrapuntal skills required.  Amongst Britten’s early publications were many choral works and solo songs.  After a series of compositions he found himself concentrating upon operatic works and from 1945 he became prominent as a opera composer.  The absence of a continuous tradition of British opera since Purcell was justification enough for Britten’s task of writing operas.  Perhaps the controversial  idea that after 1945 opera would never again become the medium for radical innovations and new developments, as it had been at various times between Monteverdi and Wagner, attracted Britten to the thought of being the next operatic composer.  Michael Kennedy talks about Britten’s opera Peter Grimes as being ‘the first opera  by an English composer to enter the international repertoire and to hold its place there; it was the opera with which Britten began his self-appointed task of forging and establishing an English operatic idiom.’[1]