Cyrus Cylinder

The Cyrus cylinder has been housed at the British Museum in London since its discovery in Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq) in 1879. Adopted as a symbol by the Shah of Iran's pre-1979 government, it was on loaned display in Tehran in 1971 to commemorate 2,500 years of the Iranian monarchy. 

The baked clay tablet which measures 22 centimetres in length has an Akkadian cuneiform inscription upon it is disputably the first ever declaration of human rights which includes the lines-

I am Cyrus, king of the world, the great king, the powerful king, king of Babylon, king of Sumer and Akkad, king of the four quarters of the world.

Cyrus the Great, the ruler of ancient Persia who lived circa 580-529 B.C was the first Zoroastrian Persian Emperor and the founder of an empire without precedent— a world-empire of major historical importance.

The Persian King who defeated the Greeks is praised in the Bible and by the Greek historian Xenophon in his Cyropaedia, an idealized account of his education. To the Greek historian Xenophon (circa 431-355 BCE) writing over a hundred years after the death of Cyrus, King Cyrus was a model ruler and an ideal 'philosopher King' who possessed the triple merits of Warrior-Ruler, Priest and Philosopher.

The religious tolerance of Cyrus is demonstrated by the fact that under his rule he freed the Jews and allowed the temple at Jerusalem to be re-built. He is mentioned in the Biblical books of Ezra, Ezekiel and Daniel, but it was the prophet Isaiah who developed the role of Cyrus as a messiah-figure. In Isaiah 45: 1-4 one reads-

The Lord has chosen Cyrus to be king! He has appointed him to conquer nations;.... to Cyrus the Lord says "I myself will prepare your way...I will give you treasures from dark, secret places, then you will know that I am the Lord, and that the God of Israel has called you by name. I appoint you to help my servant Israel...I have given you great honour, although you do not know me...I will give you the strength you need, although you do not know me. (Good News Translation).

Cyrus is the only non-Semite in the Old Testament to be called the Lord's Anointed and the Lord's Shepherd. A more prosaic reason why Cyrus liberated the Jews may simply be because as a follower of the monotheistic religion of Zoroastrian he was naturally sympathetic to the monotheism of the Hebrews.                                                              
                                                 *

Few literary critics have ever asked this question - why was Cyrus of such significance to Sir Thomas Browne as to entitle his 1658 Discourse The Garden of Cyrus after the Persian shah? Remembering historically that in 1649 Oliver Cromwell had ordered the execution of King Charles and abolished the rights of Kings, Royalists such as Browne believed England to be devoid of true, enlightened government; Browne's nomination of Cyrus to entitle his Discourse represents his own ideal of the perfect Ruler and is a thinly-disguised critique of Cromwell and his proto-Republic. To Browne's deeply-held Christian faith King Cyrus was a Redeemer figure who restored tolerant, God-given rule and freed those oppressed from the rule of tyrant or unjust government. This is the primary reason why Cyrus, alongside Solomon, the patriarchs Moses and Abraham, Alexander the Great and the Roman Emperor Augustus are named in The Garden of Cyrus  - as examples of the archetype of 'the wise ruler'. For Browne, living in the uncertain times of the Lord Protectorate of Cromwell, (1649-1658) King Cyrus embodied the ideals of the enlightened ruler. Thus the garden of delights rapturously discoursed upon by Browne is one which anticipates the return of an enlightened, humanitarian government; an aspiration which many in British society hold at present.

The Garden of Cyrus (1658) is in many ways a highly experimental and unique literary work. Among its varied motivations is an attempt to demonstrate the existence of the archetypes. Indeed one of the first examples of the word 'archetype' along with 'prototype' in English language can be found in the Discourse.

Alchemical authors such as Browne often found inspiration and amplification of their proto-psychology through Greek and Roman myths. In fact the very opening page of The Garden of Cyrus cites an alternative Creation myth to the Bible, the Greek myth of the Creation as recorded in the Fabulae by Hyginus.[1]

That Vulcan gave arrows unto Apollo and Diana the fourth day after their Nativities, according to Gentile Theology, may passe for no blinde apprehension of the Creation of the Sunne and Moon, in the work of the fourth day; When the diffused light contracted into Orbes, and shooting rayes, of those Luminaries.

Astute scholars of comparative religion such as Browne constantly stressed the shared common heritage and harmony which originally existed between world-religions. Though little acknowledged Browne was in fact the first western author to make note of the religion of Zoroastrianism. There can be little doubt that the Cyrus cylinder would have fascinated the worthy Norwich physician-philosopher, both as an archaeological discovery and as a significant artefact of world religion. In addition to strictly adhering to its tenets, Browne, as his highly original proper-name Biblical symbolism suggests, recognised the Bible as a rich source of psychological and archetypal material. As C.G. Jung reminds us-

We must read the Bible or we shall not understand psychology. Our psychology, whole lives, our language and imagery are built upon the Bible......The statements made in Holy Scripture are also utterances of the soul....they point to realities that transcend consciousness. These entia are the archetypes of the collective unconscious.

Books consulted

The Bible and the Psyche - Individuation Symbolism in the Old Testament by Edward F. Edinger 1986 Inner City books

Xenophon - Cyropaedia Forgotten Books 2008

Jung quote cited by Edinger from 'The Visions Seminar'  vol. 1 p.156

[1] 1711 Auction Sales Catalogue page 13 no. 35  Hyginus Fabulae Paris 1578

Wiki-Link  Cyrus Cylinder

Translated text of the Cyrus Cylinder

Winter scene with skaters

Two contrasting faces of Winter to end the year with.

In the Dutch painter Frederick Marinus Kruseman's Winter scene with skaters many characteristics associated with later nineteenth century Romanticism and its idealized view of Nature as a benevolent and beautiful phenomena are present. The fun of the winter sport of ice-skating performed in a setting of scenic snow and ice against a backdrop of a spectacular castle and a dramatic cloudscape, all warmly coloured, are featured in Kruseman's romantic painting.

Paintings of winter scenery and landscapes are a peculiarly Dutch genre. Begun in the Renaissance by Jan Bruegel and developed by Hendrick Avercamp (1585-1634) the crowded scenes of Dutch winter paintings give strong clues as to the high density of the Netherlands population during the century which saw the zenith of Dutch ambitions, establishing an overseas Empire and in European cultural influence.

I've a sinking feeling however that a certain painting  from the seventeenth century, the Golden Age of Dutch art by Jacob van Ruisdael (1628–1682) may in the light of this year's economic and environmental woes, today exert a greater resonance to a large percentage of society than the sweetness and light of Kruseman's romantic painting.

In Jacob Ruisdael's painting's nature has a far less benevolent relationship towards humanity. In Winter Landscape I (1670) the sky is uncompromisingly gloomy and threatening, while in its foreground something has occurred which is rarely depicted in winter scenes, yet which invariably must happen to those skating, a person has fallen down onto the ice. To the credit of Ruisdael he has also depicted an onlooker expressing  an awareness of common humanity, dashing to assist the unfortunate faller. 

Although now more than ever we all appear to be skating upon the thin-ice of the world economy and climate, may I take this opportunity to wish all visitors to this blog a Happy Xmas and a New Year full of the rosy-cheeked, cheerful optimism of the above painting, with little of the black gloom of Winter as depicted below.

Crome Yellow

Aldous Huxley's first novel Crome Yellow (1921) is a dazzling display of wit which satirizes the follies and foibles of post world-war society. It established Huxley's literary name and anticipates in its themes, setting and didactic dialogue, subsequent literary works written in the 1920's decade by the English novelist and essayist.

The template of Huxley's early novels resembles those of the Victorian novelist Thomas Love Peacock (1785-1866) whose Nightmare Abbey (1818) and Crotchet Castle (1837) involve a gathering of a variety of characters in the setting of an ancestral manor. Once arrived, the various guests are used as voice-pieces to represent differing view-points and outlooks on life. By setting the main action within the walls of a castle or ancestral Hall, the 'English country house' approach to novel-writing, the novelist gives rein for characters to inter-act with each other and their view-point is satirized, often mercilessly, sometimes with hilarious effect, as in Peacock's dialogue novels. 

In Crome Yellow, Dennis, a would-be-poet searching for the meaning of life, visits the ancestral manor of Crome as a guest of Henry Wimbush and his wife. Once there he encounters several other guests, each representing a specific point of view, these include his hostess Priscilla who is fascinated with 'spiritual vibrations' and casts horoscopes of racing horses and football teams, the hedonistic painter and bon-viveur Gombrich who has aesthetically developed beyond abstract painting, and the journalistic-cum-mystic Mr. Barbecue-Smith who is capable of writing hundreds of meaningful aphorisms on life before breakfasting.

Throughout the novel topics such as the place of women in the modern world, sex and morality, art and the role of the individual in society are humorously touched upon, while event's witness the protagonist's increasing indecisiveness in love. In some ways early novels such as Crome Yellow and Antic Hay read not unlike an highly intellectualized version of a P.G.Wodehouse novel; over time however, the formula of P.G. Wodehouse's country house novels portray a fossilized English world, far removed from the realities and changes in the world.

The serious and deteriorating situation of the world in politics and economics during the 1930's obliged Huxley to take a less light-hearted approach to novel-writing to debate on humanity and its future, in particular humanity's relationship to science. Anticipating the theme of Huxley's later novel Brave New World (1931) its the cynical and slightly sinister Mr. Scogan in Crome Yellow who speaks of -

an "impersonal generation" of the future that will "take the place of Nature's hideous system. In vast state incubators, rows upon rows of gravid bottles will supply the world with the population it requires. The family system will disappear; society, sapped at its very base, will have to find new foundations.

Huxley's Brave New World retains its power to shock and challenge the reader and its mood of prophetic doom remains thought-provoking.

In his 1994 introduction to Crome Yellow, the English novelist Malcolm Bradbury (1932-2000) and co-founder with fellow novelist Angus Wilson (1913-1991) of the prestigious MA Creative writing course at UEA, Norwich,  stated -

For the fact is that, though there is personal satire involved, Crome Yellow, like any good book, easily transcends all its first stimuli. The characters become unmistakeably Huxleyan, just as their world of obsessive ideas becomes the means for the author to analyse a time when chatter does not disguise despair, people all live alone in their own individual worlds of story, and all lives, as Denis comes to see, are parallel straight lines...................................The comic novel of ideas is one of the treasures of British fiction, not always sufficiently appreciated. Crome Yellow is one of the modern classics, which is why, well after its time, it can go on being read with complete delight and pleasure. [1]

Although I've now read and re-read a fair percentage of Huxley's novels over the decades (see book-shelf bottom of page) Crome Yellow was the first novel I've ever read on a Kindle. It's a gadget which would have appealed to Huxley who suffered with poor eye-sight throughout his life, giving it as the main reason for migrating to California in 1937. I don't doubt that Huxley would have viewed a the Kindle reader as an example of how science and technology has transformed the lives of millions in the twentieth century. Huxley himself suffered from poor eyesight, but had he lived to witness its invention, he would with little doubt enthused over the Kindle reader's ability to enlarge its reading font.  

A few tenuous connections may be indulged and noted between Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) and Sir Thomas Browne. Both literary figures share a reputation of being leading intellectuals of their day who were capable of discoursing upon metaphysical questions in a bold and original manner. Both authors also had a penchant towards mysticism and are sometimes termed as mystics themselves. It's quite likely that Huxley read Browne, as he was in vogue during the 1920's due to attention received from Virginia Woolf and members of the Bloomsbury group. It's even possible that in terms of literary style, Browne may have influenced Huxley in his use of parallelisms, that is, stating the same thing twice within a single sentence in a variant manner, it's a literary technique found in the writings of both authors.

Aldous Huxley, like Browne before him, also took an interest in drugs. His essay on his empirical psycho-nautical experiments with mescaline, The Doors of Perception (1954) has now acquired a near legendary cult-status. All that Huxley attempted to articulate upon the transcendent may however be succinctly summarized in the lyrics of the song Tomorrow never knows from the Beatles album Revolver (1966)  in the line - It is not dying. 

It's interesting to note in passing that it was due to Browne's early interest in what is now known  as the medical fields of psychology and psychiatry, that the word 'Hallucination' was introduced into the English language. More recently, the eminent neurologist Oliver Sacks (b. 1933) discusses the psychological implications of medical case-histories such as phantom limbs, the bereaved sensing the presence of a deceased partner, synaesthesia and his own psycho-nautical experiments in his new book Hallucinations (2012).[2]

Of far greater interest, there seems to be some kind of play on words in  the title of Huxley's first novel. The colour chrome yellow, as it is correctly spelt, was first discovered by Louis Nicolas Vauquelin in the mineral crocoite (lead chromate) in 1797. Chrome Yellow became available as a pigment for oil-painters around 1816 after the cessation of the Napoleonic wars. Aldous Huxley has in all probability, rather slyly one suspects, conflated the fictitious setting of his first novel and the surname of an English painter with the technical name of a colour pigment.

The founding father of the Norwich School of Painters, John Crome  (1768 - 1821) was inspired by the natural beauty of the Norfolk landscape and painted several master-works, some of which are set in urban riverscapes. In his late work Late Afternoon on Norwich river circa 1819, John Crome draws the viewer's eye to the centre of his painting through colour. At the  painting's centre  a young woman seated at a boat's stern can be seen wearing a fashionable early Georgian dress. The colour of her dress, a bright chrome yellow, as painted by Crome, is reflected in water.

Finally, just as the composer Sergei Prokofiev's death was overshadowed by the dying on the  same day as Joseph Stalin, so too Aldous Huxley's death was overshadowed for on the 22nd of November, 1963, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated.

Notes
[1] 1994 Introduction by Malcolm Bradbury to Crome Yellow pub. Vintage Classics 2004
[2]  Hallucinations - Oliver Sacks - pub. Picador Nov. 8th 2012

Sleeping Beauty: A Gothic Romance

Matthew Bourne is surely one of the most innovative choreographers in the modern dance world. His male-roled Swan Lake (1994) propelled him to international fame and he's continued creating highly original productions which are performed throughout the world ever since. His latest production Sleeping Beauty: A Gothic Romance  re-interprets one of the most-established works in the ballet repertoire. Recognising the age in which Sleeping Beauty was first performed, the 1890's, as an era in which beneath a straight-laced exterior there was a fascination with the supernatural involving stories of vampires, fairies and angels along with romantic tales of love enduring beyond the grave, Bourne's ballet fully indulges in Gothic fantasy and spans over a century, from 1891 to the present-day. In his new interpretation of one of ballet's near fossilized works, Bourne breathes new life into a well-worn classic, effectively reclaiming Tchaikovsky's highly danceable, lush and sensual orchestral score with a new interpretation of an old fairy-tale. 

Featuring designs by Olivier Award-winners Lez Brotherston (set and costumes) Paule Constable (lighting) with sound design by Paul Groothuis, the audience's attention is seized from the very opening, with the crying and tantrums of a life-size marionette baby. However, its during a dazzling change of setting to the Edwardian era of picnics and tennis on summer lawns bathed in a golden light, that the evening's brightest star enters. Hannah Vassallo, in the lead role of Aurora, charmed the audience with her innocence and vulnerability. Other memorable highlights include striking Gothic-style make-up for the dancers, the use of angel's wings to identify who among the dancers were among the dead, a hilarious Waltz of the flowers and a stage flooded with a deep, ruby red light at the dénouement of the up-dated fairy-tale. A recorded sound-track also allowed for a variety of sound-effects to create a suitably Gothic atmosphere to the ballet. 

Not wanting to post spoilers for those attending Sadler's Wells, London, where Sleeping Beauty:A Gothic Romance will be performed from December 4th to January 26th 2013, I will just say that Bourne's humour is very much of the now-you-see-it-now-you-don't variety, rewarding the attentive viewer with quick-witted and often very funny incidents and gestures. Its worth remembering that modern ballet includes not only innovative dance, and many original dance movements occurred throughout the performance, but also mime and gesture, which in their turn are augmented by costume and scenery; it's the overall combination of these varied factors which modern choreographers such as Bourne fully integrates into his vision of ballet. More than any other production I've ever seen by Bourne's company, there seemed to be a complete harmony and togetherness in the ensemble of dancers. Although on the night several individual dancers shone in performance, none, not even the charming Hannah Vassallo in the lead-role of Aurora, out-shone at the expense of the collective ensemble. 

Remarkably, after the last performance on Saturday, the manager of the Theatre Royal for seventeen years, Peter Wilson came onto the stage. He reminded the evening's audience that the theatre had now hosted no less than three productions by Matthew Bourne - Highland Fling (1995) and Edward Scissorhands (2005) were all first performed at the Theatre Royal before being staged in London.  I too  remember seeing both productions at the Norwich theatre. Although he could not persuade choreographer Matthew Bourne OBE (b. 1960) to come up onto the stage, seizing the moment, Wilson led the audience in giving Bourne and his company New Adventures, now celebrating their 25th anniversary, a standing ovation from an audience which is renowned for its appreciation of dance. 

Here's  a video clip from Matthew Bourne's Highland Fling

Benjamin Britten

Today is the feast day of Saint Cecilia, the patron saint of music, and also the birthday of the English composer Benjamin Britten (1913-1976).

Throughout next year there will be a multitude of performances and analysis of Britten’s music, including a nation-wide project involving over 75,000 school-children who will be coordinated to sing simultaneously on his birthday. There's even to be a 50 pence coin issued in 2013 with a portrait of Britten on its reverse, such will be the high-profile centenary celebrations of arguably, the greatest British composer since Henry Purcell (1659-1695).

With its close geographical proximity to Lowestoft, the east coast town where Britten was born, Norwich and its rich musical heritage played no small part in Benjamin Britten’s musical development. The city is home to England's oldest music festival and several early musical compositions by Britten were premièred there.  

Benjamin Britten exhibited all the traits associated with a child prodigy. He had his first piano lessons aged four and began writing music aged five, nurtured by his mother’s amateur talent. Such was young Britten’s musical precocity that he was soon acquiring and studying orchestral scores of major works of classical music. His viola teacher, Audrey Alston who played in the Norwich Quartet, obtained tickets for him to hear the Ravel string quartet in Norwich as well as the Beethoven E minor (opus 59 no. 2) which the ten-year old school-boy described as ‘absolutely ripping’. More importantly, Audrey Alston also chaperoned the budding composer to a concert in October 1924, at the Norfolk and Norwich Triennial Festival, to hear Frank Bridge conducting his orchestral suite The Sea (1911). Britten, aged ten, latter described himself as being ‘knocked sideways’ upon hearing the music of his future teacher and mentor. Audrey Alston subsequently introduced her pupil to Frank Bridge (1879-1941) and the young composer later took lessons from him. Britten's first published work, Sinfonietta (1932) is dedicated to his mentor, Variations on a theme of Frank Bridge (1937) written for string orchestra and the Four Sea Interludes which intersperse the action of the opera Peter Grimes (1945) are compositions which pays homage to his influential music-teacher. 

Like his mentor, Britten rejected the 'Little Englander' perspective of Elgar and Vaughan Williams in favour of mainstream continental influences. Much of Britten's music is a fine equilibrium between the influence of more progressive European composers such as Mahler, Berg, Bartok, and Stravinsky, counter-balanced with the best of the tradition of English music-making, an aesthetic choice which has reaped dividends for his musical legacy. 

Britten’s musical genius developed in 1930 with his A Hymn to the Virgin a choral work composed when convalescing from an illness at Gresham’s Public School in North Norfolk. During his boarding at Gresham's there must also have been occasions when the young school-boy passed through Norwich when returning home to Lowestoft during the school holidays, or visited the city to purchase one of the many 78 r.p.m. shellac discs or orchestral scores which he avidly collected throughout his life. A Hymn to the Virgin was first performed in January 1931 at the church of Saint John's, Lowestoft. Many years later, Britten wrote Hymn to Saint Peter (op.55) for the quincentenary anniversary of the church of Saint Peter Mancroft at Norwich.  C.J.R.Coleman, who had been organist at St. John’s Lowestoft in the 1930's, was by 1955, organist at Saint Peter Mancroft at Norwich. Coleman and his son, with young Benjamin and his father, had made music together during Britten's childhood. Britten held a deep attachment to memories of his youth, and the composition for St.Peter's was, like several others, written in gratitude for early encouragement from his mentors.

With the opportunity to enlist at the Royal School of Music in 1931, Britten’s knowledge of music, through study and attendance at concerts in London developed considerably. Upon completion of his studies at the R.C.M. he was however dissuaded from travelling to Vienna in order to study composition further under the tuition of Alan Berg. However, sometime in 1932 Britten met another composer he also admired, Arnold Schoenberg.  

Britten returned to Norwich to conduct the first performance of his Simple Symphony for string orchestra in 1934. Recycling and re-arranging various juvenile compositions, nearly all of which were written between the young age of nine to twelve, Simple Symphony indulges in youthful humour, heavily hinted in each movement's titles- Boisterous Bouree, Playful Pizzicato, Sentimental Serenade and Frolicsome Finale. It was dedicated to his viola teacher, Audrey Alston. Britten's first fully professional engagement however was in 1936 at the Norwich Festival, where he conducted the première of his song-cycle for soloist and orchestra Our Hunting Fathers. It features a dominant theme in Britten's music, mankind's inhumanity. In the first of Britten's many song-cycles, it is cruelty towards animals and the barbaric blood sport of hunting, as its title suggests, which is strongly condemned. The libretto of Our Hunting Fathers was supplied by the poet W. H. Auden. The work is startling modern, influenced by the lieder of Mahler. 

Britten travelled to America in 1939, however his sojourn in America was short-lived, he soon became home-sick and returned to England in 1942. The sea is a big theme in Britten's music , its featured prominently in Peter Grimes, Billy Budd and Death in Venice, but it was while actually at  at sea, in the cramped conditions of a cabin, avoiding ice-bergs and U-Boats on the way, that  Britten composed A Ceremony of Carols. Written for boy's choir and harp, each of the nine poignant medieval carols besides being technically demanding, has a magical innocence and a winter-like atmosphere rarely  evoked in English music. A Ceremony of Carols was first performed in Norwich during the darkest days of World War II, December 1942. Since its first performance A Ceremony of Carols has become one of the most recorded of all Britten's works and dozens of recordings are currently available of one of his most popular works and continues to be performed at Advent at Saint Peter's, Mancroft, Norwich. 

Britten’s great international success came in 1945 with the opera Peter Grimes, a work which brought the composer world-wide fame and which single-handedly re-invented English opera. Peter Grimes is the first of several operas by Britten which explore the theme of the individual who suffers from social prejudice. With his life-long pacifism (he registered as a conscientious objector upon returning to England  from America in 1942) Britten could easily relate to the plight of the outsider who is castigated by society. The central character of Albert Herring, Billy Budd, Owen Wingrave and Death in Venice explores the relationship and conflict between the outsider and society, each in quite different ways.

In addition to his anti-war beliefs, Britten’s open relationship with the tenor Peter Pears (1910-1986) his partner for almost forty years, also caused him to be the subject of prejudice (homosexuality was illegal in Britain until 1967). In reality however, Britten and Pears relationship is a love story which is testimony to love enduring in the face of, at times, intense social prejudice. Britten wrote some of his finest music with the voice of Peter Pears in mind and the musical sensibilities of both Pears and Britten were considerably enhanced in their mutual artistic support to each other. Together they established the world-renowned Aldeburgh music festival, settling permanently in the Suffolk coastal town from 1947 until Britten's death in 1976.

Britten’s association with Norwich continued when he included the ancient, medieval city as a setting of one of the acts of his opera Gloriana. Written as part of the celebrations for the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953, Britten's opera features a visit made by Queen Elizabeth I to the city in 1578. Act Two of Gloriana is set against the back-drop of the the flint-knapped Guildhall at Norwich. Elizabeth I is welcomed by the City Recorder, a masque is performed which she and the Royal court watch. In total six dances, including a Morris dance are performed. Personifications of Time and Concord are among the principle characters in a masque which, accompanied by a chorus of rustic country maids and fishermen, concludes the entertainment with a homage to the Queen.

Biographical details of Britten’s life reveal the fact that there was hardly a single year of his life in which he was not ill, often quite seriously, and towards the end of life, fatally, nor is there hardly a single year in his life in which he did not travel extensively abroad. He often combined a holiday with performing, accompanying his life-time partner Peter Pears in song-recitals on the piano. He visited what was the Soviet Union no less than seven times, becoming a close friend of the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, his wife, the mezzo-soprano Galina Vishnevskaya and the composer Dmitri Shostakovich, who once said to him in broken English, ‘You great composer, I little composer’. Rostropovich and Britten's music-making is now legendary and Britten wrote more music for the Russian cellist than any other musician other than Pears. His friendship with Shostakovich was also rather special by all accounts. Shostakovich gave Britten gifts of recordings of his symphonies, while towards the end of his life Britten granted Shostakovich a private view of his work-in-progress score of his last opera Death in Venice, a rare and intimate gesture which he granted to few.

One of Britten’s most distinguished musical admirers wrote in her diary for 1970 -

‘The record of Les Illuminations has arrived and Ruth & I have played it several times, & listened with the greatest joy. There is no sound here except the shushing of the sea & the crying of the seabirds, & this music is exactly right for the atmosphere here of sea & sky & silence. I find it extraordinary moving’. 

Britten’s admirer was Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother (1900-2002). Although in the 1930's Britten held communist sympathies, in common with many artists in the 1930's, his relationship with the Royal family, in particular with  the Queen Mother developed throughout the decades of 60's and early 70's into a respectful relationship. Britten and Pears not only performed at the Royal Estate of Sandringham in Norfolk, but Britten became the first composer to ever be awarded the honour of Life-Peer. 

Britten was no musical elitist and much of his music is arranged for the ease of amateur performance. While he admitted to no personal liking for pop music he nevertheless kept abreast of the latest developments in English music, stating in 1968 - 

Everything I read about the Beatles gives me pleasure. They have a wit and they have a directness – a freshness of approach which gives me a great pleasure, and I also think they are frightfully funny. 

and a copy of the Beatles long-playing vinyl disc A Hard Day's Night (1964) is listed as once in Britten's vast record collection.

Britten had an innate ear for literary texts to set to music and was one of the 20th century’s most well-read composers. His first opera was based upon the poetry of fellow Suffolk artist, George Crabbe. Other notable literary figures Britten set to music include Rimbaud, Keats, Blake, Shakespeare, Henry James, Herman Melville and W.H.Auden with whom he collaborated on a number of occasions.

Like many school-children I was disinclined from listening to Benjamin Britten’s music after over-exposure to his pedagogic Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra. His music struck me as traditional and conservative in nature and there seemed to be more interesting music to discover and explore; my favourite British contemporary music L.P recording as a teenager Michael Tippett's Concerto for Double-string Orchestra (1936) and Symphony no.2 (1953); however in 1973, during what was one of the last rehearsals for a performance of  Britten's Church parable Noyes Fludde as part of what was the Norfolk and Norwich Triennial Festival (now the N&N Festival) a sudden hush fell upon the rehearsal at Saint Andrew's Hall, a surprise visitor had arrived, the composer himself had called to thank all the boys and girls for their hard work rehearsing. The photo at the top of this post is how I remember him. The photo below is of Britten wearing his school cricket blazer and cap, aged circa 13.

I've only covered a brief review of Britten's music up to the international success of his opera Peter Grimes in this post. Rather than waste any more of the reader's time, and far more informative on Britten than words, is my exhortation to seek out and hear Britten's music. A large percentage of it is vocal, choral or operatic, while the themes of the Sea, the social outcast, innocence betrayed and Man's inhumanity to man are often encountered, especially in his operas. The Britten 100 web-page allows the  new listener to the composer's music to select samples by  genre, mood, instrument and tempo. Here's a brief list of Britten's music which I've found rewarding and recommend hearing.

Peter Grimes
Four Sea Interludes
Pasacaglia op.33b
Simple Symphony
Violin Concerto
Piano Concerto
Serenade for horn, strings and tenor
String Quartets 2 and 3
Prince of the Pagodas
A Ceremony of Carols

Books consulted

The Faber Pocket Guide to Britten - John Bridcut pub. Faber & Faber 2010
An accessible book, full of facts, insights and trivia about Britten.
Highly recommended

Benjamin Britten by Michael Oliver pub. Phaidon Press 1996