Britten in Pictures

by Lucy Walker

A photographic journey, including a selection of previously unpublished images, that reveal the man 'behind the scenes' at work and play. A new and often surprising portrait of this major musical genius.

Britten in Pictures

Author: Lucy Walker

Publisher:

ISBN: 9781843837497

Page: 266

View: 599

A photographic journey, including a selection of previously unpublished images, that reveal the man 'behind the scenes' at work and play. A new and often surprising portrait of this major musical genius.

Benjamin Britten

by Neil Powell

Britten and Pears, 1975 Pictures reproduch crummy of the Britten-Pears Foundation (wwwhrimmpeamorg): l. PHH/'Z; 2. PHI4/l7; 3. PHI-HR; 4.

Benjamin Britten

Author: Neil Powell

Publisher: Random House

ISBN: 1409038246

Page: 528

View: 804

Benjamin Britten was the greatest English composer of the twentieth century and one of the outstanding musicians of his age. Born in Lowestoft, Suffolk, in 1913, Britten was the youngest child of a dentist father and amateur musician mother. After studying at the Royal College of Music, he became a vital part of London’s creative and intellectual life during the 1930s, collaborating with W. H. Auden and meeting his lifelong partner, the tenor Peter Pears. At the outbreak of the Second World War, Britten and Pears were already in America, earning a precarious living as freelance musicians before re-crossing the Atlantic by ship in the perilous days of 1942. But the east coast of England was where Britten, as he himself said, belonged: this was where he returned to write his most famous opera, Peter Grimes, and – with Pears and Eric Crozier – to found the Aldeburgh Festival in 1948. In the years that followed, his worldwide reputation grew steadily, helped by a busy schedule of international tours and, for many, crowned by the extraordinary success of his War Requiem. Meanwhile, his festival went from strength to strength, its progress symbolised by the opening of Snape Maltings Concert Hall in 1967. Britten was a mass of paradoxes: a solitary, introspective thinker who came to ebullient life in the company of young people, for whom he composed some of his most memorable works; a man of the political left who was on the friendliest terms with members of the royal family; a composer inspired by some of the twentieth century’s deepest preoccupations who combined innovation with a profound understanding of musical tradition. Devoted to his friends, protégés and fellow musicians, he was, above all, someone who lived for music. Neil Powell’s book is the landmark biography for Britten’s centenary year: a subtle and moving portrait of a brilliant, complex and ultimately loveable man.

The Sea in the British Musical Imagination

by Eric Saylor

This serves to reinforce the biographical connections between the work's composer and the monarchy, such as those articulated in the famous photo of Britten ...

The Sea in the British Musical Imagination

Author: Eric Saylor

Publisher: Boydell & Brewer

ISBN: 1783270624

Page: 288

View: 289

10 Political Visions, National Identities, and the Sea Itself: Stanford and Vaughan Williams in 1910 -- 11 Bax's 'Sea Symphony' -- 12 'Close your eyes and listen to it': Special Sound and the Sea in BBC Radio Drama, 1957-59 -- Afterword : Channelling the Swaying Sound of the Sea -- Index

Benjamin Britten Studies

by Vicki P. Stroeher

After 1998 I treaded on the outskirts of Britten scholarship, ... occupied my early Britten research volumes: tattered, torn, and faded copies of Pictures ...

Benjamin Britten Studies

Author: Vicki P. Stroeher

Publisher: Boydell & Brewer

ISBN: 1783271957

Page: 526

View: 801

Bringing together established authorities and new voices, this book takes off the 'protective arm' around Britten.

War Pictures

by Kent Puckett

In Britten, it works to balance without resolving different aspects of war: its beauty and its squalor, its imagined order and its practical futility, ...

War Pictures

Author: Kent Puckett

Publisher: Fordham Univ Press

ISBN: 0823276511

Page: 288

View: 464

In this original and engaging work, author Kent Puckett looks at how British filmmakers imagined, saw, and sought to represent its war during wartime through film. The Second World War posed unique representational challenges to Britain’s filmmakers. Because of its logistical enormity, the unprecedented scope of its destruction, its conceptual status as total, and the way it affected everyday life through aerial bombing, blackouts, rationing, and the demands of total mobilization, World War II created new, critical opportunities for cinematic representation. Beginning with a close and critical analysis of Britain’s cultural scene, War Pictures examines where the historiography of war, the philosophy of violence, and aesthetics come together. Focusing on three films made in Britain during the second half of the Second World War—Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), Lawrence Olivier’s Henry V (1944), and David Lean’s Brief Encounter (1945)—Puckett treats these movies as objects of considerable historical interest but also as works that exploit the full resources of cinematic technique to engage with the idea, experience, and political complexity of war. By examining how cinema functioned as propaganda, criticism, and a form of self-analysis, War Pictures reveals how British filmmakers, writers, critics, and politicians understood the nature and consequence of total war as it related to ideas about freedom and security, national character, and the daunting persistence of human violence. While Powell and Pressburger, Olivier, and Lean developed deeply self-conscious wartime films, their specific and strategic use of cinematic eccentricity was an aesthetic response to broader contradictions that characterized the homefront in Britain between 1939 and 1945. This stylistic eccentricity shaped British thinking about war, violence, and commitment as well as both an answer to and an expression of a more general violence. Although War Pictures focuses on a particularly intense moment in time, Puckett uses that particularity to make a larger argument about the pressure that war puts on aesthetic representation, past and present. Through cinema, Britain grappled with the paradoxical notion that, in order to preserve its character, it had not only to fight and to win but also to abandon exactly those old decencies, those “sporting-club rules,” that it sought also to protect.

Benjamin Britten

by Peter J. Hodgson

Benjamin Britten l9l3-l976: Pictures from a Life. London: Faber and Faber, l978. 456 p. ISBN 0-684-l5974-0. ML 4l0 .B853. Described as "A Pictorial ...

Benjamin Britten

Author: Peter J. Hodgson

Publisher: Routledge

ISBN: 1135580375

Page: 245

View: 717

This work constitutes the largest and most comprehensive research guide ever published about Benjamin Britten. Entries survey the most significant published materials relating to the composer, including bibliographies, catalogs, letters and documents, conference reports, biographies, and studies of Britten's music.

Benjamin Britten

by Igor Toronyi-Lalic

173Benjamin Britten: Pictures from a Life 1913–1976, complied by Donald Mitchell and John Evans, picture 96. 174 HCBB, p. 584. 175 PKBB, p. 559.

Benjamin Britten

Author: Igor Toronyi-Lalic

Publisher: Penguin UK

ISBN: 0241967589

Page: 50

View: 295

Benjamin Britten was one of the most important and unusual figures in twentieth-century music. This is the perfect introduction to his many wonderful works and his fascinating, controversial life. Benjamin Britten single-handedly transformed the reputation of British classical music. The enormous popular appeal of his great works, such as Peter Grimes (1945) and the Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra (1946), make him the most successful opera composer of any born in the twentieth century. But his success was not without controversy and pain: he was accused of fleeing Britain to avoid military service, he was widely known to be sexually obsessed with boys and he suffered an astonishing array of illnesses. This short book combines a colourful overview of his life with pithy descriptions of all of his major musical works, providing an intimate portrait of this highly unusual man and a persuasive account of his influences, reputation and importance. Each chapter tackles a key episode and theme in his life, from his first compositions at the age of 5, his early friendship and collaboration with W H Auden and the beginnings of his life-long relationship with the tenor Peter Pears, through to his great musical successes and the establishment of the influential, if tempestuous, Aldeburgh Festival, as well as his failures, such as his coronation opera Gloriana (known as 'Boriana') and being satirised by Dudley Moore in Beyond the Fringe - and ending with frank discussions of his naïve politics, his troubling sexuality and his glorious musical legacy. Published to coincide with his 100th anniversary of his birth, this is the perfect introduction to a towering figure of British culture. Igor Toronyi-Lalic is a critic and curator. He writes regularly on music for, among others, The Times and Sunday Telegraph. He is a founder of theartsdesk.com, the author of What's That Thing? (2012), a report on public art, and co-director of the London Contemporary Music Festival.

Britten and the Far East

by Mervyn Cooke

Asian Influences in the Music of Benjamin Britten Mervyn Cooke. shrines filled with images which have stood there since 600AD . We fed the famous holy deer ...

Britten and the Far East

Author: Mervyn Cooke

Publisher: Boydell & Brewer

ISBN: 9780851158303

Page: 279

View: 957

Investigation into the influence of Eastern music on Britten's composition.

Reader s Guide to Music

by Murray Steib

After Britten's death in 1976, more attention has been given to his biography not only to gain a more complete picture of his life as a whole but also to ...

Reader s Guide to Music

Author: Murray Steib

Publisher: Routledge

ISBN: 1135942625

Page: 928

View: 827

The Reader's Guide to Music is designed to provide a useful single-volume guide to the ever-increasing number of English language book-length studies in music. Each entry consists of a bibliography of some 3-20 titles and an essay in which these titles are evaluated, by an expert in the field, in light of the history of writing and scholarship on the given topic. The more than 500 entries include not just writings on major composers in music history but also the genres in which they worked (from early chant to rock and roll) and topics important to the various disciplines of music scholarship (from aesthetics to gay/lesbian musicology).

Journeying Boy

by John Evans

Journeying Boy is a selection of his diaries that offer the reader an unseen insight into this complex man.

Journeying Boy

Author: John Evans

Publisher: Faber & Faber

ISBN: 0571274641

Page: 608

View: 532

Best remembered for his operas and his War Requiem, Benjamin Britten's radical politics and his sexuality have also ensured that he remains a controversial public figure. Journeying Boy is a selection of his diaries that offer the reader an unseen insight into this complex man. Encompassing the years 1928-1938, they explore some key periods of Britten's life - his early compositions, his education first under composer Frank Bridge and then at the Royal College of Music, an unhappy but productive period studying under John Ireland and Ralph Vaughan Williams, and his reluctant and often painful process of parting from the warm, safe environment of his family home and his beloved mother. The diaries cast light on an often misrepresented musician whose technique, originality and musical prowess have entranced audiences for generations and who continues to inspire composers and musicians around the world.

The Cambridge Companion to Benjamin Britten

by Dr. David Rowland

She is currently Cataloguing Manager at the Britten - Pears Library ... his other studies of the composer include Benjamin Britten : Pictures from a Life ...

The Cambridge Companion to Benjamin Britten

Author: Dr. David Rowland

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

ISBN: 9780521574761

Page: 350

View: 126

A comprehensive Companion to Britten's music and life.

Benjamin Britten The Turn of the Screw

by Patricia Howard

Tribute to Benjamin Brittén on his Fiftieth Birthday , London , 1963 Headington ... D. & Evans , J. Benjamin Britten , 1913-1976 : Pictures from a Life ...

Benjamin Britten The Turn of the Screw

Author: Patricia Howard

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

ISBN: 9780521283564

Page: 164

View: 327

This book is designed to introduce the non-specialist music lover to Britten's opera, The Turn of the Screw. The opening chapters by Vivien Jones and Patricia Howard deal with the literary source of the opera Oames's novella), the structure of the libretto, and the technique by which a short story was transformed into an opera. The central chapter, on the musical style and structures of the opera, includes an account of the composition process deduced from early sketches of the work by John Evans, an analysis of the unique form of the opera with a more detailed examination of the last scene by Patricia Howard, and an account of the significance and effect of the orchestration by Christopher Palmer. Finally, Patricia Howard traces the stage history of the work, from its initial reception in Venice in 1954, through some seminal reinterpretations in the 1960s to its present established position in the repertoire. The book is generously illustrated and there is also a bibliography and discography.

Benjamin Britten Death in Venice

by Donald Mitchell

... Donald and Evans , John , Benjamin Britten : Pictures from a Life , 1913-1976 , Faber , London , 1978 Oja , Carol J. , ' Colin McPhee : composer turned ...

Benjamin Britten Death in Venice

Author: Donald Mitchell

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

ISBN: 9780521319430

Page: 229

View: 221

This book is a source of first-hand information on Britten's final operatic achievement.

On Mahler and Britten

by Philip Reed

1978 Publication of DM's pictorial biography of Britten , Pictures from a Life ( with John Evans ) . 1979 Delivers the T. S. Eliot Memorial Lectures ...

On Mahler and Britten

Author: Philip Reed

Publisher: Boydell & Brewer

ISBN: 9780851156149

Page: 355

View: 956

Critical essays and studies reflecting the latest thinking on two major figures in 20c music.

Music and Sexuality in Britten

by Philip Brett

“What Do We Know About Britten Now?” In Palmer, Britten Companion, 39–45. ———, comp. Benjamin Britten, 1913–1976: Pictures from a Life.

Music and Sexuality in Britten

Author: Philip Brett

Publisher: Univ of California Press

ISBN: 0520939123

Page: 295

View: 671

Philip Brett’s groundbreaking writing on Benjamin Britten altered the course of music scholarship in the later twentieth century. This volume is the first to gather in one collection Brett’s searching and provocative work on the great British composer. Some of the early essays opened the door to gay studies in music, while the discussions that Brett initiated reinvigorated the study of Britten’s work and inspired a generation of scholars to imagine "the new musicology." Addressing urgent questions of how an artist’s sexual, cultural, and personal identity feeds into specific musical texts, Brett examines most of Britten’s operas as well as his role in the British cultural establishment of the mid-twentieth century. With some of the essays appearing here for the first time, this volume develops a complex understanding of Britten’s musical achievement and highlights the many ways that Brett expanded the borders of his field.

The Music of Britten and Tippett

by Arnold Whittall

5 Donald Mitchell and John Evans , Benjamin Britten . Pictures from a life ( London , 1978 ) , caption to no . 328 . 6 Thomas Mann , Death in Venice ...

The Music of Britten and Tippett

Author: Arnold Whittall

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

ISBN: 9780521386685

Page: 325

View: 588

A unique double portrait of the two leading composers of their generation.