Letters from a Life: Selected Letters, 1946-1951

by Benjamin Britten, Donald Mitchell (Editor), Philip Reed (Editor)

The third volume of the annotated selected letters of composer Benjamin Britten covers the years 1946-51, during which he wrote many of his best-known works, founded and developed the English Opera Group and the Aldeburgh Festival, and toured widely in Europe and the United States as a pianist and conductor.

Correspondents include librettists Ronald Duncan ( The Rape of Lucretia ), Eric Crozier ( Albert Herring , Saint Nicolas , The Little Sweep ) and E. M. Forster ( Billy Budd ); conductor Ernest Ansermet and composer Lennox Berkeley; publishers Ralph Hawkes and Erwin Stein of Boosey & Hawkes; and the celebrated tenor Peter Pears, Britten's partner. Among friends in the United States are Christopher Isherwood, Elizabeth Mayer and Aaron Copland, and there is a significant meeting with Igor Stravinsky.

This often startling and innovative period is vividly evoked by the comprehensive and scholarly annotations, which offer a wide range of detailed information fascinating for both the Britten specialist and the general reader.

Donald Mitchell contributes a challenging introduction exploring the interaction of life and work in Britten's creativity, and an essay examining for the first time, through their correspondence, the complex relationship between the composer and the writer Edward Sackville-West.

Genres: Music

784 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1991

About the author

Edward Benjamin Britten, Baron Britten, Order of Merit, Order of the Companions of Honour, was an English composer, conductor, and pianist.

Britten's interests as a composer were wide-ranging; he produced important music in such varied genres as orchestral, choral, solo vocal, chamber and instrumental, as well as film music. He also took a great interest in writing music for children and amateur performers, and was a fine pianist and conductor.

Reviews

[Kevin · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's been decades since I read the first two volumes of Britten's letters and being a much younger man, the copious footnotes seemed luxurious to me at the time. I imagine that it is me who has changed and not Donald Mitchell, but Mitchell's voice quite swamps Britten's (though not to the point of disguising the fact that he was not a very interesting correspondent to begin with). The footnotes are beyond thorough. They are repetitive to the point of assuming the reader has suffered repeated concussion as he turns the pages and schoolmasterish to a nonce. My favorite is footnote #3 to Britten's short, awkward note to E. M. Forster, forwarding a commissioning fee for his libretto for "Billy Budd" and (attempting?) to express pleasure at the collaboration. After a dozen pages of excerpts of reviews of the premiere that constitute footnote #2, Mitchell tells us that the Biro Britten apologizes for using was the "trade name (after its Hungarian inventor, Ladislao Biro) of the ball-point pen, which gained currency in the UK during the early 1950s." If the internet ever goes down, a good deal 20th Century music history and trivia could be reconstructed from Dr. Mitchell's footnotes.

None of this matters, of course. Britten fans, if they are given to reading collections of letters, will and should read it anyway.

[James Lark · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another fascinating, inspiring and invaluable volume in the series - the most entertaining yet, in fact, since Britten doesn't hold back with the bitchy comments about some of his contemporaries, for all that he still comes across as very human and largely good natured.

The correspondence says much more about the man than many a biography has managed to, and it makes for hugely evocative reading - of the period, the location, and of the arduous work that being a composer entails. Reading about Britten's struggle to write the Spring Symphony and to the sheer effort Billy Budd took him, as well as the performances he had to cancel and the day to day irritations of normal life and relationships bursting in, not to mention the financial precariousness of the English Opera Group, ought to be greatly encouraging to all of us creative folk suffering the same troubles for our art.

(Mind you, he writes The Little Sweep in a single fortnight - the book does nothing if not emphasise his brilliance.)

My only gripe is with the endnotes, which make this a far less fluent read than it might have been. Surely biographical details could have been saved for an appendix (much more useful, too, for those of us who know full well who half of the characters are but keep forgetting the other half). Much of the rest I feel sure would have squeezed into footnotes to save the endless turning of pages backwards and forwards.

Otherwise, a joy from start to finish, the letters complemented by insightful essays and supporting materials (excerpts from reviews and suchlike), an absolute must for aficionados of 20th century music and a jolly good read for anyone else.