BENJAMIN BRITTEN - (1913 1976) A BOY WAS BORN

Genius is a rare gift which lands very infrequently out

of nowhere and emerging in the most unlikely of
places. Such a genius, a boy, was born in the Suffolk
town of Lowestoft on 22nd November 1913, St Cecilias
Day as it happens, the patroness of music and church
music. The parents of this newly born were not yet
to know that it was a genius which had arrived in their
midst. They were Robert Britten, a local dentist and
his wife Edith who was a reasonably talented amateur
singer. The boy was named Edward Benjamin Britten
but to the family he was Beni. The Brittens at that time
already had three children, Barbara aged 11, Robert
aged 6 and Beth aged 4. Beni was unexpected
according to his mother; an accident waiting to happen
Saint Cecilia
but a fortunate one as it turned out.
They were a fairly well to do middle class family, although at the time even doctors
were not regarded as high in the middle class social order and dentists were well
beneath them in the rankings.
Benis siblings displayed no particular musical talent. He himself was introduced at
age 4 by his mother both to the piano and notation and he was soon able to pick out
tunes and note them down. By the time he was 10 he had composed over a hundred
works (800 according to unreliable sources in Wikipaedia) which he stored away and
catalogued with opus numbers. It was his sister Beth who recalled in a television film
that the realization dawned on her that Beni was a possible prodigy. Apart from his
mother and piano teacher he was to all intents and purposes self informed, learning
from Steiners musical manual and reading scores. They had no radio or
gramophone in the house and Beni would acquire his knowledge of a work from
playing piano versions of the music, especially Beethoven and later Brahms. At age
7 he started piano lessons with Miss Jennie Astle, a friend of his mother and a
teacher in his local prep school, and continued under her throughout his prep school
years until he went on to Greshams School at 13. His mother saw to it that he
received favoured access to the piano over his brother and the girls. Apparently or
apocryphally people were known to stop outside the Britten house just to listen in
wonder to this boy practising away and perhaps to cite his example to their own
children.
Later when he was 10 he started taking viola lessons. It was the viola he was to
regard as his instrument and here he was keeping good company following the
precedent set by Mozart, then Beethoven and also Schubert. The viola is not an
instrument from which to acquire virtuosic attraction. It is self effacing but, being
central in the middle of the strings, an observation point for a composer or performer
to learn what is going on around and about. His teacher was another local, Audrey
Alston who had been a professional quartet player and had contact with others in the
profession, including Frank Bridge, also a viola player. Thinking about it, Ben had no
great virtuosi teaching him. One so often hears of one great pianist having studied
with another great maestro. Clifford Curzon with Schnabel, Imogen Cooper with

Curzon. For good TV entertainment, you can see Lang Lang receiving a master
class from Barenboim. Later, when at the Royal College of Music, young Britten,
then 17, studied piano, It was under the Australian composer, Arthur Benjamin, best
remembered for his composition for four hands, Jamaican Rumba, but not someone
whose name rings out as one of the great pianists.
One wonders where did Britten get it from, his performing skills,. He had no ambition
to be a performing matinee idol or an evening one. He had little time with his
studying and composing to keep his piano technique constantly in trim. He
expressed self doubts as to his ability to be the soloist even for his own piano
concerto in the 1939 proms. Britten certainly had his showy spell in making his name
in the late thirties and during his three years in America which would give rise for
some critics describing him as clever-clever. Actually he would then have been
about the same age as Beethoven was when he went from Bonn to Vienna where he
took part in showy concourses and piano duals. The fact is that Britten eschewed the
limelight of being a virtuoso professional performer. There has been no shortage of
great performers. People can queue up all night if they wish to get tickets to hear
no, to see, the Horowizs and the like in the belief that what they hear will be
interpretations and sounds never before attained, which they themselves will have
an ability to distinguish even though half of them will go on to cough away during the
performance without actually appreciating that they are ruining for everyone else the
very thing they have paid through the nose to go and see in the first place. Britten
usually partnered another performer such as Menuhin, Rostropovitch or Curzon or
otherwise singers such as Pears or Ferrier. One almost felt when he played as if it
were the composer himself playing, which in fact it was. It was Benjamin Britten...in
the guise of Mozart or Schubert, almost like some compositional descendant. No
great showy flurries came from him, never a circus act to bring the house down, but
a simple display of quiet intensity which was just... music.
Returning to young Beni, his first school was South Lodge which was just down the
road from the Britten house in Lowestoft where he started when he was 9. Bang next
to the sea, it surely prepared him for Peter Grimes! It was a prep school largely for
boarders whose parents could deposit them there. In the case of Britten minor - his
brother Rob was already there he was a day boy but his timetable was designed
for boarders, 7.30 am to 8.00 pm. when only then was he free for his compositional
studies after he got home. He always claimed that he worked best when under
pressure with little time to spare. South Lodge which was owned by a Captain Sewell
who had seen service in the Great War sounds a little like something out of To Serve
Them All My Days. There were some thirty pupils spanning some three years and
Ben fitted in well despite his musical quirkiness. He could hold his own if it came to
fisticuffs and excelled at cricket, eventually becoming vice captain. He did well at
maths and
brought great credit to the school on attaining, at 11, intermediate grades of the RAM
and RCM with 95 marks out of 99. For his last term he was appointed school
captain.
Discipline was somewhat traditional and at times imposed by cane which Sewell
would administer on the boys bare bottoms. Humphrey Carpenter in his biography
of Britten spends some time pondering whether that would have resulted in some
form of sexual interference but there is no evidence of this from other

contemporaries and we shall never know. All in all, South Lodge reminds me of
Christ College at St Germans Place in Blackheath which was the last school in the
country to use the cane and chose go out of business rather than submit to change.
Their headmaster and bursar tried to justify to me their cane culture on the grounds
that it was what the parents of their boys, mostly from Africa and Asia, wanted.
At about the time of his going to South Lodge, the ten year old Britten was taken by
his Miss Alston to a concert at the Norwich Triennial Festival where Britten first heard
live orchestral music. He was knocked sideways by the orchestral suite, The Sea,
by Frank Bridge. This was a romantic work dating from 1911. Bridge was
commissioned to write a new work for the next festival set for 1927. Entitled Enter
Spring, it was a more modern work. By then Bridge was nodding towards Vienna
rather than following the English rustic school. On both occasions Bridge stayed as a
guest with Miss Alston. She again took Ben along, now 13. Her object was not only
for him to hear the music but for her to seek to introduce him to Bridge. Bridge
himself was not particularly keen on meeting yet again some promising pupil but he
could hardly turn down a request from his own host. Just as well because within10
minutes of meeting Ben, he had made up his mind that this clearly brilliant child
needed expert training. Although he had never sought to take on any other pupil, he
wanted Ben to study with him in London on a one to one basis apart from piano
tuition to be given by Harold Samuel . Plans were already in place for Ben to go to
Greshams, a public school in Holt because it gave a small bursary for music. A
family decision was therefore made under the more restraining influence of Bens
father that Ben would go to Greshams, but in the meantime could travel up to the
Bridges Kensington flat to spend one day at a time with Bridge and stay overnight
with one of his sisters both of whom were living in London. Arrangements were also
made with Greshams that Ben would be allowed time out for similar excursions.
Bridges teaching played an important part in Brittens musical development. He was
born in 1879 and with his broad brimmed hat and long hair looked like the archetypal
Bohemian. In his Sussex country cottage he and Mrs Bridge lived alongside Marjorie
Fass, an amateur musician and painter in what appeared to the composer, Howard
Ferguson, to be a mnage trois - and here I am not referring to playing piano trios.
As a composer, Bridge was not a hot favourite with the public compared to his
contemporaries. He did not give theoretical teaching to Ben. What he did was to
emphasize to him that he should know the timbre of each instrument, what it could
do and to question himself as to why he had written any passage in a particular way.
More generally he emphasized the need for the composer to understand himself, a
difficult prospect for a thirteen year old to achieve. Bridge had no sense of time
passing and spent all day without a break until Mrs Bridge would interrupt to point
out to her husband that the boy should have a rest for half an hour. These lessons
could leave Ben close to tears. He would remain devoted to Bridge all his life. It was
soon after this meeting that Ben would write the incredible Four French Songs.
Boarding at Greshams did not turn out to be an entirely happy experience for Ben.
His relationship with Walter Greatorex, head of music there, did not get off
particularly well with Greatorex churlishly saying so you are the person who knows
Stravinsky Ben had not in fact yet heard any Stravinsky - and then proceeding to
criticize the boys piano technique. In all probability Ben was already ahead of him
and said just what he thought of Greatorexs technique in a letter home to his

mother. Michael Oliver in his book suggests that Greatorex felt resentment at this
boy being taught by others. Still, they had to get on and it was Greatorex, at a school
concert, who played the piano in a bagatelle for piano trio written by Ben who himself
played the viola part. The school itself was said to be easy going and liberal.
Joining the school cadet force was not compulsory as in most public schools and
Ben opted out straight away. Bullying (they didnt actually have dormitories but
single cells to sleep in) was like something out of Tom Browns Schooldays (tossing
the victim in a sheet) during which Ben fainted. He spent time in the sanatorium to
escape the worst of bullying whilst finding time to compose there. His letters home,
expressed in almost oedipal terms, evidenced how unhappy he was. Ben did not
wish to take the route of higher education and then on to university which Bridge
recommended but his parents wanted him at least to take his school certificate.
It turned out that there was an annual competition at the Royal College of Music
where the one winning student would be granted a place and in 1930, without having
yet taken school cert, Ben submitted some of his works. He was invited to sit the
three hour written examination which Ben said he completed in twenty minutes
before handing in his paper! His mother thought that he must have failed but he was
recalled that afternoon for an interview before a panel consisting of Vaughan
Williams, John Ireland and S P Waddington and was then confirmed the winner of
the competition. What is a middle class English public schoolboy doing, writing
music like that? Vaughan Williams is supposed to have commented. Ben wanted to
leave Greshams immediately without awaiting the result of his school certificate. In
fact, to his disbelief, he was to gain one pass and five credits.
The RCM was a conservative institution where Ben, not yet 17 mind, made few
friends, an exception being the Welsh composer Grace Williams. He lived with his
sister Beth but also found lodgings where he could practise the piano to the
annoyance of his fellow tenants. He now was to study the piano with Arthur
Benjamin and composition with John Ireland, just one lesson a week, not a
strenuous timetable. Ireland was invariably late for lessons and sometimes failed to
turn up at all. Yet when it came to teaching he would be more rigorous than Bridge,
whom he did not like and disparaged for not having taught Britten anything. Ben,
always a fastidious person and who did not care for swearing, found Ireland as
slovenly and his house in Chelsea in a squalid state. On one occasion Ben had to
wait there all day for his lesson and when Ireland did turn up he was drunk and
proceeded to urinate on the floor. The world which did open up for Ben however
was being able to go to concerts, ballet, opera and theatre. He began to think about
going to Vienna to study with Alban Berg. As far as the RCM was concerned this
was anti-Christ. Schoenberg and Berg were beyond the pale of musical decency.
After all Elgar was still alive for Gods sake. Even Mrs Britten advised Ben against as
she considered Berg would be a bad influence - maybe she was a Eurosceptic at
heart but her objection might have been more concerned with moral, as opposed
to musical, influences. Humphrey Carter suggests she would have been conscious
of Bens possible homosexual susceptibilities. It was undoubtedly Bergs influence
which was behind Brittens sinfonietta for ten instruments to which he decided to
accord his opus number one and which he dedicated to Frank Bridge. Matthew
illustrated this to us in his first lecture of the series. From then on Benjamin Britten
found himself in the big wide world looking to make his living and his future as a
composer.