Benjamin Britten: A Life for Music

Born in 1913 to a music-loving mother who wanted her son to become a musician, Benjamin Britten, the celebrated British composer, wrote no fewer than 534 works by the time he was 14. In this crisply narrated biography, Powell (George Crabbe) elegantly traces the development of Britten’s musical gifts from his childhood and youth in England to his travels to America, his meetings and lifelong friendship with W.H. Auden, and his crucial role in helping to establish the Alderburgh Festival. While Britten admired Brahms early in life, by the end of his college days, much of that composer’s music repulsed him; he then turned to Mahler, Stravinsky, and Elgar. Powell’s book is more than a staid, detailed, year-by-year chronicle of the composer’s life; the author’s incisive explorations of Britten’s operas and other musical compositions sing with life. He probes the genius of Britten’s compositions from Sinfonietta, which premiered in 1933, to the triptych of Peter Grimes (based on the epic poem of fellow Suffolk resident George Crabbe), Billy Budd, and Death in Venice. Peter Grimes, for example, is at once “old-fashioned in its construction of linked set pieces and radical in its borrowing of montage techniques from the composer’s experience in film and radio.” In this powerful biography, Powell pays eloquent tribute to Britten’s musical genius. Agent: Natasha Fairweather, United Agents. (Aug.)