Honours, Awards and Commemorations
State hours awarded to Britten included Companion of Honour (Britain) in 1953; Commander of the Royal Order of the Polar Star (Sweden) in 1962, and the Order of Merit (Britain) in 1965. He received honorary degrees and fellowships from 19 conservatoires and universities in Europe and America. His awards included the Hanseatic Goethe Prize, (1961); the Aspen Award, Colorado, (1964); the Royal Philharmonic Society's Gold Medal (1964); the Sibelius Prize (1965); the Mahler Medal of Honour (Bruckner and Mahler Society of America, 1967); the Léonie Sonning Music Prize (Denmark, 1968); the Ernst von Siemens Prize (1974); and the Ravel Prize (1974).
Prizes for individual works included UNESCO's International Rostrum of Composers 1961, (for A Midsummer Night's Dream); and for the War Requiem Grammy Awards 1963 – Classical Album of the Year, Best Classical Composition by a Contemporary Composer and Best Classical Performance – Choral (Other than Opera); the BRIT Awards 1977 – Best Orchestral Album of the past 25 years; and the Grammy Hall of Fame Award 1998.
The Red House in Aldeburgh, where Britten and Pears lived and worked together from 1957 until Britten's death in 1976, is now the home of the Britten-Pears Foundation, established to promote their musical legacy. In Britten's centenary year his studio at the Red House was restored to the way it was in the 1950s and opened to the public. The converted hayloft was designed and built by H. T. Cadbury-Brown in 1958 and was described by Britten as a "magnificent work". In June 2013 Dame Janet Baker officially opened the Britten-Pears archive in a new building in the grounds of the Red House.
A memorial stone to Britten was unveiled in the north choir aisle of Westminster Abbey in 1978. There are memorial plaques to him at two of his London homes: 45a St John's Wood High Street, and 8 Halliford Street in Islington. In April 2013 Britten was honoured by the Royal Mail in the UK, as one of ten people selected as subjects for the "Great Britons" commemorative postage stamp issue.
Other creative artists have celebrated Britten. In 1970 Walton composed Improvisations on an Impromptu of Benjamin Britten, based on a theme from Britten's Piano Concerto. Works commemorating Britten include Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten an orchestral piece written in 1977 by Arvo Pärt, and Sally Beamish's Variations on a Theme of Benjamin Britten, based on the second Sea Interlude from Peter Grimes; she composed the work to mark Britten's centenary. Alan Bennett depicts Britten in a 2009 play The Habit of Art, set while Britten is composing Death in Venice and centred on a fictional meeting between Britten and Auden. Britten was played in the premiere production by Alex Jennings.
Read more about this topic: Ballets By Benjamin Britten