Edward Benjamin Britten English composer, conductor, violist and pianist, was born in Lowestoft, Suffolk on 22 November 1913 and died on the 4 December 1976. He was the son of a dentist and his mother a talented amateur musician. He adored Aldeburgh and made it his home for much of his life,
In 1927 he studied with Frank Bridge and then at Royal College of Music.
Britten met with the tenor Peter Pears in 1937, who was to become his musical collaborator and inspiration as well as his partner and muse.
They initially lived in Crag House, right on the shingle beach at Aldeburgh, Suffolk.
Then moved to The Red House in Aldeburgh which is now a museum.
Here Britten wrote some of his greatest works, many of which are bound up with the locale, the sea, an insularity natural to this corner of Suffolk, and a Britishness that has nothing to do with quaint Victorian pomposity or even 20th-century gritty realism.
Instead, it is distant, spare and objective: introverted, tormented, yet delivered with the chilly eye of a perfectionist.
Peter Grimes, arguably Britten's greatest opera, is set in Aldeburgh itself; his children's opera The Little Sweep takes place in a mansion near Aldeburgh, and the comedy Albert Herring in neighbouring Loxford, while the devastating Billy Budd plays out its tragedy on a ship.
But inspiration goes further than the stories of his operas: there's a searing, knife-edge quality to such abstract works as the broodingly powerful Violin Concerto and the Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge, a virtuoso creation for string orchestra that cannot help but recall the elemental power of nature in a place where the chill and the quiet can turn a creative mind inwards.
Britten founded the Aldeburgh Festival with Pears and the writer and producer Eric Crozier in 1948, initially to provide a home for the English Opera Group, their touring company. Today it remains an annual celebration not only of the composer, but also his successors. New music has always been a vital part of its programme, and since 1999 the festival has been under the artistic directorship of Thomas Adès, only in his mid-thirties but already one of the UK's most celebrated composers.
Its principal venue is the Snape Maltings concert hall. Converted from a malting house in the late 1960s (it burned down several years later and was reconstructed in 1970), it boasts a vaulted roof and a bare brick-and-wood interior - an accumulation of atmosphere in which one half expects Britten and Pears to stroll onto the stage at any moment.
Stay at Pelican Cottage
Click to see
holiday cottage facilities
Bookmark page |
||
 |
 |
 |
