Life
Bridge was born in Brighton and studied at the Royal College of Music in London from 1899 to 1903 under Charles Villiers Stanford and others. He played the viola in a number of string quartets, most notably the English String Quartet (along with Marjorie Hayward), and conducted, sometimes deputising for Henry Wood, before devoting himself to composition, receiving the patronage of Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge.
Bridge had strong pacifist convictions, and he was deeply disturbed by the First World War, after which his compositions, beginning with the Piano Sonata, were marked by a radical change in musical language (Payne, Hindmarsh, and Foreman 2001). Bridge was frustrated that his later works were largely ignored while his earlier "Edwardian" works continued to recieve attention (Hindmarsh 1980).
He privately tutored a number of pupils, most famously Benjamin Britten, who later championed his teacher's music and paid homage to him in the Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge (1937), based on a theme from the second of Bridge's Three Idylls for String Quartet (1906). Bridge died in Eastbourne.
Read more about this topic: Frank Bridge
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