Benjamin Britten in Context

Benjamin Britten in Context
Author: Vicki P Stroeher
Publisher: Composers in Context
Total Pages: 427
Release: 2022-04-21
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1108496695

A thematically organised overview of the musical, social and cultural contexts for the multi-faceted career of this pivotal British composer.

Benjamin Britten

Benjamin Britten
Author: Paul Francis Kildea
Publisher: Penguin Global
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2013
Genre: Biography
ISBN: 9781846142321

Benjamin Britten was Britain's greatest twentieth-century composer - and in the eyes of many, the greatest since Purcell (a figure who often inspired him) 300 years earlier. Britten broke decisively with the romantic, nationalist school of figures such as Parry, Elgar and Vaughan Williams and recreated English music in a fresh, modern, European form. With Peter Grimes(1945) and Billy Budd(1951) and The Turn of the Screw(1954) he composed arguably the last operas - from any composer in any country - that have entered both the popular consciousness and the musical canon. He did all this while carrying two disadvantages to worldly success - his passionately held pacifism, which made him very suspect to the authorities in the years during and immediately after the Second World War - and his homosexuality, specifically his forty-year relationship with Peter Pears, for whom many of his greatest operatic roles and vocal works were created. One of the strengths of Kildea's book is the way it traces the development of this relationship - its frailties and anxieties as well as its centrality to them both - and portrays their life together. For Britten, that life was increasingly lived in and around Aldeburgh, whose atmosphere and personalities form another wonderful dimension to the book. Kildea shows clearly how Britten made this creative community, notably with the foundation of the Aldeburgh Festival and the building of Snape Maltings, but also how costly the determination that this required was in terms of his friendships and the lives of some of those around him. Above all, this book helps us understand the relationship of Britten's music to his life, and takes us as far into his creative process as we are ever likely to go. Kildea reads dozens of Britten's works with enormous intelligence and sensitivity, and always in a way which those without formal musical training can understand. It is one of the most moving and enjoyable biographies of a creative artist of any kind to have appeared for years.

Britten's Children

Britten's Children
Author: John Bridcut
Publisher:
Total Pages: 334
Release: 2007-06
Genre: Composers
ISBN: 9780571228409

Britten's Children confronts the edgy subject of the composer's obsessional yet strangely innocent relationships with adolescent boys. One of the hallmarks of Benjamin Britten's music is his use of boys' voices, and John Bridcut uses this to create a fresh prism through which to view the composer's life. Interweaving discussion of the music he wrote for and about children with interviews with the boys whom Britten befriended, Bridcut explores the influence of these unique friendships - notably with the late David Hemmings - and how they helped Britten maintain links with his own happy childhood. In a remarkable part of the book Bridcut tells for the first time the full story of Britten's love affair in the 1930s with the 18-year-old German Wulff Scherchen, son of the conductor Hermann Scherchen. As Paul Hoggart of The Times commented, 'this type of love belonged to an emotional landscape that has vanished for ever, and we are the poorer for it'. Since making the film, the author has extended his research to include friendships Britten had with children which have not previously been documented.The documentary Britten's Children won the Royal Philharmonic Society's 2005 Award for Creative Communication: 'this serious and beautiful film explored one aspect of a composer's life in great depth. Avoiding the temptation of sensationalism, Britten's Children was imaginatively researched and both touching and revelatory'.

Mozart in Context

Mozart in Context
Author: Simon P. Keefe
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 427
Release: 2018-12-20
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1316850838

The vibrant intellectual, social and political climate of mid eighteenth-century Europe presented opportunities and challenges for artists and musicians alike. This book focuses on Mozart the man and musician as he responds to different aspects of that world. It reveals his views on music, aesthetics and other matters; on places in Austria and across Europe that shaped his life; on career contexts and environments, including patronage, activities as an impresario, publishing, theatrical culture and financial matters; on engagement with performers and performance, focusing on Mozart's experiences as a practicing musician; and on reception and legacy from his own time through to the present day. Probing diverse Mozartian contexts in a variety of ways, the contributors reflect the vitality of existing scholarship and point towards areas primed for further study. This volume is essential reading for students and scholars of late eighteenth-century music and for Mozart aficionados and music lovers in general.

Britten's Musical Language

Britten's Musical Language
Author: Philip Ernst Rupprecht
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 258
Release: 2001
Genre: Music
ISBN: 9780521631549

Examines Britten's fusion of verbal and musical sound in opera and song.

Benjamin Britten and Russia

Benjamin Britten and Russia
Author: Cameron Pyke
Publisher: Aldeburgh Studies in Music
Total Pages: 367
Release: 2016
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781783271139

Explores Benjamin Britten's deeply-felt cultural affinity with Russia and influences on the 'Russian' Britten.

Liszt in Context

Liszt in Context
Author: Joanne Cormac
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 400
Release: 2021-10-31
Genre: Music
ISBN: 9781108421843

Liszt in Context explores the political, social, philosophical and professional currents that surrounded Franz Liszt and illuminates the competing forces that influenced his music. Liszt was immersed in the religious, political and cultural debates of his day, and moved between institutions, places, and social circles with ease. All of this makes for a rich contextual tapestry against which Liszt composed some of the most iconic, popular, and also contentious music of the nineteenth century. His significance and astonishing reach cannot be over-stated, and his presence in nineteenth-century European culture, and his continuing influence into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, are overwhelming. The focus on context, reception, and legacy that this volume provides reveals the multifaceted nature of Liszt's impact during his lifetime and beyond.

Benjamin Britten

Benjamin Britten
Author: Lucy Walker
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Total Pages: 218
Release: 2009
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1843835169

An essay collection which examines Britten's juvenilia, influences such as Shostakovich and Verdi, his opera Owen Wingrave and a libretto written by Australian novelist Patrick White with the hope of a future collaboration.

Benjamin Britten Studies

Benjamin Britten Studies
Author: Vicki P. Stroeher
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Total Pages: 556
Release: 2017
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1783271957

The shock of exile / Paul Kildea -- Britten, Paul Bunyan, and American-ness / Vicki P. Stroeher -- Collaborating with Corwin, CBS, and the BBC / Jenny Doctor -- An empire built on shingle / Justin Vickers -- Save me from those suffering boys / Byron Adams -- Britten's (and Pears's) Beloved / Louis Niebur -- Notes of unbelonging / Lloyd Whitesell -- Take these tokens that you may feel us near / Colleen Renihan -- Traces of Nō / Kevin Salfen -- Britten and the augmented sixth / Christopher Mark -- Quickenings of the heart / Philip Rupprecht -- Reviving Paul Bunyan / Danielle Ward-Griffin -- Striking a compromise / Thornton Miller -- From Boosey & Hawkes to Faber Music / Nicholas Clark -- The man himself / Lucy Walker -- Epilogue / Vicki P. Stroeher and Justin Vickers