Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Benjamin Britten written by Mervyn Cooke and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1999-06-28 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Cambridge Companion to Benjamin Britten is a comprehensive guide to the composer's work, aimed both at the non-specialist and music student. It sheds light on both the composer's stylistic and personal development, offering new interpretations of his operatic works and discussing his characteristic working methods. Topics treated here in detail for the first time include Britten's work in the cinema in the 1930s, his lifelong pacifism and his strong interest in the music of the Far East; other chapters include reassessments of his relationship with W. H. Auden and his attitude towards childhood, comprehensive analyses of major works and a concise history of the Aldeburgh Festival. A distinguished team of contributors include some who worked with the composer during his lifetime, as well as leading representatives of the younger generation of Britten scholars on both sides of the Atlantic.

Download or read book The Borough written by George Crabbe and published by BoD – Books on Demand. This book was released on 2018-09-20 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reproduction of the original: The Borough by George Crabbe

Download or read book Britten s Musical Language written by Philip Rupprecht and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2006-11-23 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Blending insights from linguistic and social theories of speech, ritual and narrative with music-analytic and historical criticism, Britten's Musical Language offers interesting perspectives on the composer's fusion of verbal and musical utterance in opera and song and provides close interpretative studies of the major scores.

Download or read book Music and Sexuality in Britten written by Philip Brett and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2006-11-17 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Publisher description

Download or read book Britten s Children written by John Bridcut and published by . This book was released on 2007-06 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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'.

Download or read book Benjamin Britten written by Lucy Walker and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2009 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book The Music of Benjamin Britten written by Peter Evans and published by . This book was released on 1996 with total page 614 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Peter Evans discusses all the published compositions in subdivisions of genre and period, and devotes a separate chapter to each opera. With the help of over 300 music examples and diagrams, he demonstrates Britten's mastery of the art of composition - tonal and harmonic structures, thematic cast and transformation, textual variety and the imaginative deployment of voices and instruments. Since this book's appearance in 1979, Britten's publishers have made available a considerable number of works withheld during the composer's lifetime; some are juvenilia, but others date from a late as the Peter Grimes period. In a postscript to this first paperback edition, Peter Evans assesses the creative stature of these works and their significance in Britten's development. The catalogue of works now includes these additional titles, and the selective bibliography has been revised.

Download or read book On Music written by Benjamin Britten and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2003 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Benjamin Britten was a most reluctant public speaker. Yet his contributions were without doubt a major factor in the transformation during his lifetime of the structure of the art-music industry. This book, by bringing together all his published articles, unpublished speeches, drafts, and transcriptions of numerous radio interviews, explores the paradox of a reluctant yet influential cultural commentator, artist, and humanist. Whether talking about his own music, about the role of the artist in society, about music criticism, or wading into a debate on Soviet ideology at the height of the cold war, Britten always gave a performance which reinforced the notion of a private man who nonetheless saw the importance of public disclosure.

Download or read book Britten s Peter Grimes written by Michael Steen and published by Icon Books Ltd. This book was released on 2012-07-16 with total page 68 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Britten's opera Peter Grimes is based on George Crabbe's horrifying poem The Borough about early 19th century Aldeburgh, a North Sea fishing town in East Anglia. Its premiere at Sadlers Wells in 1945, shortly after VE Day, was a landmark moment in British operatic history. Britten's partner Peter Pears – like Britten a pacifist and conscientious objector – was in the title role. Britten and Pears, together with Montagu Slater, a communist journalist, created the libretto.Grimes, a fisherman and sadistic child abuser, is a loner longing for social acceptance, and the wealth to marry the retired schoolmistress Ellen Orford. Britten, a homosexual whose circle included E.M. Forster and Christopher Isherwood, wanted to win sympathy for outsiders. Yet after Grimes has destroyed yet another apprentice, and himself committed suicide, life just goes on as usual in the bustling, hypocritical town. 'The Borough' has a pompous mayor, a typical pub landlady, a drunken Methodist, an ineffectual parson, a drug-addicted rich widow. A pub brawl and barn dance conceal the dark side of this community: its hysteria, its busybodies, its lynch-mob justice. The opera and its story, as depicted in Britten's evocative music, haunts the audience long after the curtain comes down. Written by Michael Steen, author of the acclaimed The Lives and Times of the Great Composers, 'Short Guides to Great Operas' are concise, entertaining and easy to read. They are packed with useful information and informed opinion, helping to make you a truly knowledgeable opera-goer, and so maximising your enjoyment of a great musical experience.Other 'Short Guides to Great Operas' that you may enjoy include La Bohème, Don Giovanni and Eugene Onegin.

Download or read book Benjamin Britten written by Paul Kildea and published by Penguin Classics. This book was released on 2014-02-27 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Paul Kildea's Benjamin Britten: A Life in the Twentieth Century is the definitive biography of Britain's greatest modern composer - now in paperback Benjamin Britten was Britain's greatest twentieth-century composer, who broke decisively with figures such as Elgar and Vaughan Williams and recreated English music in a fresh, modern, European form. Paul Kildea's biography has been acclaimed as the definitive account of Britten's extraordinary life, exploring his deeply held and controversial pacifism; his complex forty-year relationship with Peter Pears; and his creation of an artistic community in Aldeburgh. Above all, however, this book helps us understand the relationship of Britten's music to his life, and takes us as far into its unique alchemy as we are ever likely to go. PAUL KILDEA is a writer and conductor who has performed many of the Britten works he writes about, in opera houses and concert halls from Sydney to Hamburg. His previous books include Selling Britten (2002) and (as editor) Britten on Music (2003). He was Head of Music at the Aldeburgh Festival between 1999 and 2002 and subsequently Artistic Director of the Wigmore Hall in London, and lives in Berlin. 'Must now rank as the standard work' Financial Times 'Indispensable ... This is a masterly, highly readable account and the most comprehensive to date of the life and work of one of the 20th century's great musical figures' Barry Millington, Evening Standard ' A] wise, cautious, challenging book ... Kildea's verbal explorations of the music are done with level-headed sensitivity leavened by a quirky lightness of touch' Alexandra Harris, New Statesman

Download or read book Benjamin Britten written by Peter John Hodgson and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work constitutes the largest and most comprehensive research guide ever published about Benjamin Britten. Entries survey the most significant published materials relating to the composer, including bibliographies, catalogs, letters and documents, conference reports, biographies, and studies of Britten's music.

Download or read book Middlebrow Modernism written by Christopher Chowrimootoo and published by University of California Press. This book was released on 2018-11-06 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At publication date, a free ebook version of this title will be available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. Situated at the intersections of twentieth-century music history, historiography, and aesthetics, Middlebrow Modernism uses Benjamin Britten’s operas to illustrate the ways in which composers, critics, and audiences mediated the “great divide” between modernism and mass culture. Reviving mid-century discussions of the middlebrow, Christopher Chowrimootoo demonstrates how Britten’s works allowed audiences to have their modernist cake and eat it: to revel in the pleasures of consonance, lyricism, and theatrical spectacle even while enjoying the prestige that came from rejecting them. By focusing on moments when reigning aesthetic oppositions and hierarchies threatened to collapse, this study offers a powerful model for recovering shades of grey in the traditionally black-and-white historiographies of twentieth-century music.

Download or read book Disordered Heroes in Opera written by John Cordingly and published by Defining Opera. This book was released on 2015 with total page 203 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The psychiatrist John Cordingly examines twelve operatic heroes under six sub-categories of personality disorder, placing them within the histories of mental disorder, sexuality, Byronism and their cultural contexts.

Download or read book Benjamin Britten written by Michael Oliver and published by Phaidon Press. This book was released on 2008-04-23 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A portrait of the life and work of Benjamin Britten.

Download or read book The Music of Elliott Carter written by David Schiff and published by Da Capo Press, Incorporated. This book was released on 1983 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Arguably the most important American composer of the century, Elliott Carter often has been more highly regarded in Europe than in his native land. Interest in his work has grown rapidly in recent years, however, and the celebration of his ninetieth birthday in December, 1998, accompanied by numerous performances and new recordings, undoubtedly will increase the attention of his fellow citizens to this remarkable figure.

Download or read book Young Person s Guide to the Orchestra Hps written by Benjamin Britten and published by . This book was released on with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Elizabeth and Essex written by Lytton Strachey and published by . This book was released on 1950 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: