CitySolicitor


Lionel Rosenblatt, Liveryman


Benjamin Britten and the early lives and struggles of Verdi and Wagner


This year witnesses the bicentenary of two outstanding opera composers, two colossi – Wilhelm Richard Wagner, born 22 May 1813 in Leipzig, and Giuseppe Fortunino Francesco Verdi, born 10 October 1813 in Roncole nr. Busseto. The fates were not content to leave us simply with these two magnificent celebrations, but contrived to give us yet a further opportunity to rejoice the centenary of the birth of Edward Benjamin Britten, Baron Britten of Aldeburgh, born 22 November 1913 in Lowestoft.


Because of lack of space and my inability to spin three plates at the same time, I have chosen to concentrate on the contributions of Verdi and Wagner, if only because they were composing (largely) in the same years and regularly give rise to the question – ‘Which composer was the greater?’. However, to deal fully with the careers of Verdi and Wagner will take two articles.


secretary for the Lowestoft Choral Society, was the last of their four children.


Britten’s first music drama, Paul Bunyan (libretto by W H Auden), was premiered at Columbia University on 5 May 1941. Britten, a man of deep pacifist convictions, was in America from 1939 to 1942. Whilst there, he read an article by E M Forster about the Suffolk poet, George Crabbe. Crabbe’s writings included a section dealing with a fisherman, Peter Grimes. Britten was immediately seized with the idea of composing an opera dealing with the sadistic nature of Grimes, accused of ill-treating and murdering his apprentices. Grimes’ appealed to Britten as an outsider in society (the first of several operatic anti-heroes which feature in Britten’s operas), reflecting Britten’s own situation as a homosexual and conscientious objector.


Peter Grimes premiered at Sadler’s Wells Theatre on 7 June 1945, a date now recognised as a watershed in the history of British music. Its first conductor in the US was Leonard Bernstein and, in Milan, Tullio Serafin. Within three years, it had been produced in all of the major opera houses of Europe.


Benjamin Britten


Nevertheless, we must first pay full tribute to Britten; the first major composer born in England for 300 years and (before I receive a ‘large’ post bag) who was, first and foremost, an opera composer. This son of a dentist, and whose mother worked as a


8 • City Solicitor • Issue 81


Though Grimes was staged at Covent Garden in 1947, Britten’s operatic future was not ultimately to be linked with large opera houses. The Rape of Lucretia premiered at Glyndebourne in 1946, and Albert Herring in 1947. Several of Britten’s compositions first saw life in Aldeburgh, where Britten


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