Benjamin Britten: A Life for Music (Hardcover)

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Benjamin Britten (1913–76) is acknowledged to be the greatest English composer since Henry Purcell (1659–95), one of the greatest twentieth-century composers, and the greatest operatic composer after Puccini. Powell’s centenary biography doesn’t echo all those assessments so much as it is completely uninterested in disputing them. It is a deeply sympathetic and appreciative work that represents Britten’s life as one of constant composition, performance, and labor for the life of music, the last including, most saliently, founding the prestigious Aldeburgh Festival on the Suffolk coast, where he was born and lived the preponderance of his days. The phenomena of that coast—the sea, the wind, the isolation—informed and animated his music, as Powell often reminds us as he discusses each major piece of it. Britten’s other chief inspiration was his love for the tenor Peter Pears, who shared with Clara Schumann the rare distinction of premiering nearly all the finest music of a composer of Olympian stature because he, like she, was the master-musician life-partner of a musical genius. Shy and insecure, Britten yet also accomplished a nonmusical feat that Powell calls his third “enduring” legacy. He and Pears showed that a homosexual couple could “live decently and unapologetically.” There are and will be other important biographies of Britten. That any of them will manifest a more intelligently affectionate appreciation of him seems unlikely. –Ray Olson

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