Benjamin Britten: A Biography
Uses Britten's diaries, letters, and manuscripts to offer a personal glimpse of the British composer, discusses the impact of his homosexuality on his life, and looks at his major compositions
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This is the long-awaited full-scale biography of Benjamin Britten, one of the greatest composers and musicians of the twentieth century. Working independently but with the full cooperation of Britten's estate, Humphrey Carpenter has used Britten's diaries, letters and manuscripts, as well as the recollections of the people closest to Britten, to create an enthralling narrative of genius in action.Humphrey Carpenter, the renowned biographer of W. H. Auden, J. R. R. Tolkien and Ezra Pound, reveals Britten, who died in 1976 at the age of sixty-three, as a man whose personality and musical brilliance were magnetic from the start. For nearly forty years, Britten enjoyed a secure homosexual "marriage" to Peter Pears, interpreter par excellence of his music, yet he was racked by depression and self-doubt, and was driven to form a series of dangerously close friendships with young boys. Carpenter illuminates Britten's key relationships with such luminaries as W. H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, Aaron Copland, Mstislav Rostropovich, E. M. Forster and Dame Janet Baker, and his exhaustive research has uncovered the very private backgrounds of many of Britten's most famous works, including The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra, War Requiem, Peter Grimes, Billy Budd, Death in Venice and The Turn of the Screw. Written with the vividness and freshness of approach that characterize all of Carpenter's books, this remarkable biography draws an unforgettable portrait of a man who was, in Leonard Bernstein's words, "at odds with the world."
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