Benjamin Britten: A Life in the Twentieth Century

"This is a great big, heavy book of 600+ pages. It’s exactly the opposite kind of book to Rosen’s little monograph. Again, it’s by a musician. Paul Kildea is a conductor and a pianist, as well as a music administrator and the author of other books, including editing a collection of Britten’s own writings. Britten is very much his specialty. I was looking at this book again today and realizing how rich and fully researched this life is. It’s so detailed. Whilst it’s a life of our time—Britten died in 1976—it’s surprising what we don’t know about him. In spite of the huge archive of letters and diaries, it’s still not always easy to know what was going on inside Britten’s head. He was a rather private figure, and a lot of it is guesswork. There is a danger that we always assume that a composer is composing their own life. In Schoenberg’s case, his Viennese origins and his moving to America and ending up in Hollywood is a fascinating backdrop to the music—but I don’t know that it necessarily explains the music. In Britten’s case, he was incredibly strait-laced. He was in a gay relationship that everybody knew about but was not acknowledged because it wasn’t legal until the last decade of his life. You get the impression that Britten himself disapproved of his homosexuality. The other thing that comes out in the book is that he never properly grew up. His famous association with boys was probably at some level erotic in his mind—there’s no suggestion that he ever acted on it—but it was also him wanting to stay a boy. He wanted to be the clever schoolboy rather than the famous man. There’s a sense with Britten that the music itself is rather stitched up, and none the worse for it. It doesn’t always wear its heart on its sleeve. Sometimes it’s more difficult to penetrate emotionally when you listen to it. I’m an enormous admirer of Britten’s music and I find him an endlessly fascinating figure—possibly because he’s so difficult to know and wants to keep us at arm’s length. So when somebody like Paul Kildea comes along to write a biography and to try to get underneath that surface… Many people have written biographies of Britten and attempted it, but it’s a tall order. Kildea does it so well because he knows the music so well. This is very much a life and works. It’s called Benjamin Britten: A Life in the Twentieth Century , but the music is always there. Kildea writes beautifully about the music and integrates it into the narrative of the life. You end up wanting to go away and listen to everything again, which, ultimately, is the acid test of any book about music—that it sends you back to the music. He’s with the Byzantine Empire—he’s not even mentioned. I would love to have put Britten in the book. I’ve often written about him in articles. As I’ve said, many of my favorite composers didn’t make the final cut of my Shortest History of Music. Where would he have gone? Goodness. He was not sympathetic to Schoenberg. One of the things that you find in Britten is a sense of continuity with the past in a harmonic sense. Britten is very distinctive but he’s seldom atonal, and when he is it’s only for a particular, dramatic reason. So there’s that, musically speaking. The other thing is that he showed the continued viability of opera as a commercial enterprise. He set up his own opera company, and he made it work in the way that Handel had done in the 1700s in London. We have come to think of opera as a high-end commodity that is only appreciated by snobs and can only be attended by the very rich. But that’s not its origins. Even today, if you go to an opera house in Italy, there are families with picnics sitting up in the gods. It’s not just a connoisseur’s art form. In his rather short life, Britten was very good at proving that and putting out operas which were quite modern but had a very broad appeal. In its first year, Peter Grimes had a ridiculous number of performances all around the world and not just in Europe. There’s not really been anything since on a par, operatically speaking."