Classical Music
The opening of a new British opera was still a popular event and in 1951 Benjamin Britten's opera Billy Budd premièred at the end of the year to great acclaim.
While it mainly attracted a middle class audience, opera in general and other forms of classical music were popular in concert and on the radio. It was a sophisticated music and with the operas sung in English it struck a note of patriotism in a nation still recovering from the Second World War and just signed up to the Global War on Communism in Korea and South East Asia.
Read more about this topic: 1951 In British Music
Famous quotes related to classical music:
“Compare the history of the novel to that of rock ‘n’ roll. Both started out a minority taste, became a mass taste, and then splintered into several subgenres. Both have been the typical cultural expressions of classes and epochs. Both started out aggressively fighting for their share of attention, novels attacking the drama, the tract, and the poem, rock attacking jazz and pop and rolling over classical music.”
—W. T. Lhamon, U.S. educator, critic. ‘Material Differences,’ Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s, Smithsonian (1990)