Britten: 1913-76

In June he was awarded a life peerage that entitled him to be called, although no one did, Lord Britten. It was an honor that acknowledged Benjamin Britten's rank as Britain's finest living composer and one of its best throughout a long history. In 1945 he produced the one contemporary opera, Peter Grimes, that has found a firm place in international repertory. Of the 14 other operas that he wrote, Billy Budd may soon earn a similar popularity, and if it does not, the underappreciated A Midsummer Night's Dream should. His plentiful songs and chamber works show the soulful, reflective side of his nature. The declamatory, powerful War Requiem (1962), which deploys huge forces and intersperses liturgical Latin with antiwar poetry, is perhaps his best work. Not one to compose in a vacuum or ivory tower, Britten in 1948 joined with friends to found the Aldeburgh Festival in a little town on the bleak Suffolk coast he called home.

There last week at the age of 63, Britten died peacefully in bed when his weakened heart gave out. He had never fully recovered from open-heart surgery early in 1973 for implantation of an artificial heart valve. He came out of the anesthesia with partial paralysis of his right arm. The pity was that it ended his performing career. Playing with Cellist Mstislav Rostropovich and his friend Tenor Peter Pears, with whom he shared a semi-manorial brick house in Aldeburgh, Britten was a deft, expressive accompanist at the piano. He was an exceptional conductor, not only of his own works but also of Bach, Purcell and Mozart. His graceful, impassioned version of Mozart's Symphony No. 40 in G minor, for example, is the best on records.

Britten's music embraced a variety of styles--from church modes to 20th century dissonance--and there were those who felt that made him less of an original or innovator. History may decide differently. In his firm unwillingness to cut all links with the musical past, as so many important 20th century composers did, Britten prophesied a trend toward an assimilation of styles, old and new, that is only now gaining strength.

A lean, tweedy, modest man, Britten hated it when people referred to this composer or that, even him, as "the greatest." "Of course you can be the tallest composer," he said once. "Alban Berg was probably the tallest composer and Mahler was probably the shortest. But how can you judge that a particular composer was the greatest? Today Bach is considered greater than Handel, yet 100 years ago the opposite was true." For Britten it was enough, as he put it, "if people want to hear what you have written." In his case they did.

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