Group, with Britten as artistic director, composer, and conductor. This undertaking gave rise to the Aldeburgh Festival The Rape of Lucretia marked the inception of the English Opera Made use of one of the medieval Chester miracle plays. An earlier church-pageant opera, Noye's Fludde (1958) Two other church parables, The Burningįiery Furnace (1966) and The Prodigal Son (1968), followed.

Influences from the Japanese no theatre and English medieval religious drama. With the church parable Curlew River (1964), his conception of musical theatre which took a new direction, by combining Wingrave (television, 1971), and Death in Venice (1973 after Thomas Mann). His later operas include The Rape of Lucretia (1946), the comic Albert Herring ( 1947), Billy Budd (1951 after Herman Melville), Gloriana (1953, which was written for the coronation of QueenĮlizabeth II), then The Turn of the Screw (1954, done after Henry James), A Midsummer Night's Dream (1960) Owen Slater after GeorgeCrabbe's poem The Borough, which placed Britten in theįorefront of 20th-century composers of opera. Peter Grimes (1945, libretto was done by M. A commission by the Koussevitzky Foundation led to the composition of his opera

Auden. In 1937 his Variations on a Theme ofįrank Bridge, for string orchestra, won him international acclaim.įrom 1939 to 1942 he was in the United States, where his first work for the stage, the operetta Paul Bunyan (1941 Radio, theatre, and cinema, coming into close contact with the poet W.H. He later studied under John Ireland and Arthur Benjamin at the Royal College of Music in London and while thereĬomposed the set of choral variations A Boy Was Born (1933 revised, 1958).

He was also an outstanding pianist and conductor.īritten composed as a child and at the age of 12 began several years of study under the composer and teacher Frankīridge. Of the mid-20th century, whose operas are considered the finest English operas since those of Henry Purcell in the 17thĬentury. Edward Benjamin Britten, (born 1913, Lowestoft, Suffolk, Eng.-died 1976, Aldeburgh, Suffolk), leading British composer

Britten rejoice in the lamb midi files