Benjamin Britten

Benjamin Britten wrote for documentary film, radio and theatre through the 1930s. He had studied with Frank Bridge as a boy and at the Royal College of Music with John Ireland; Peter Grimes was staged at Sadler's Wells in 1945. Billy Budd, Gloriana, A Midsummer Night's Dream and Death in Venice followed, alongside The Turn of the Screw and the church parables, with many tenor roles written for the voice of Peter Pears. Around them stand the Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings, The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra and the War Requiem, first heard on 30 May 1962 during the celebrations for the rebuilt Coventry Cathedral. With Pears and Eric Crozier he founded the Aldeburgh Festival in 1948, and the Suffolk coast remained his base and, in Grimes and Curlew River alike, his subject. He died in 1976. He took up the piano at seven and the viola at ten, and began lessons with Bridge in his teens; in 1947, the year before the festival, he co-founded the English Opera Group. Friendship with Shostakovich and Rostropovich in the 1960s produced the cello suites, the Cello Symphony and the Cello Sonata, the dedication of the last church parable, The Prodigal Son, to Shostakovich, and Britten's own conducting of the first performance outside Russia of Shostakovich's Fourteenth Symphony. He was the first recipient of the Ernst von Siemens prize, was created Baron Britten of Aldeburgh at the end of his life, and was mourned by Arvo Pärt in Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten of 1977.