Ballets By Benjamin Britten - Life and Career

Life and Career

===Early years===hi wmd

Britten was born in the fishing port of Lowestoft in Suffolk, on the east coast of England. He was the youngest of the four children of Robert Victor Britten (1878–1934) and his wife Edith Rhoda, née Hockley (1874–1937). Robert Britten's youthful ambitions to become a farmer had been thwarted by lack of capital, and he had instead trained as a dentist, a profession he practised successfully but without pleasure. While studying at Charing Cross Hospital in London he met Edith Hockley, the daughter of a junior Home Office official. They were married in September 1901 at St John's, Smith Square, London.

The consensus among biographers of Britten is that his father was a loving but somewhat stern and remote parent, with a liking for whisky. Britten, according to his sister Beth, "got on well with him and shared his wry sense of humour, dedication to work and capacity for taking pains". Edith Britten was a talented amateur musician and secretary of the Lowestoft Musical Society. In the English provinces of the early 20th century the distinctions of social class were taken very seriously. Britten described his family as "very ordinary middle class", but there were aspects of the Brittens that were not ordinary: Edith's father was illegitimate and her mother an alcoholic; Robert Britten was an agnostic and refused to attend church on Sundays. Music was the principal means by which Edith Britten strove to maintain the family's social standing, inviting the pillars of the local community to musical soirées at the house.

When Britten was three months old he contracted pneumonia, from which he nearly died. The illness left him with a damaged heart; doctors warned his parents that he would probably never be able to lead a normal life. He recovered more fully than expected, and as a boy was a keen tennis player and cricketer. To Edith Britten's great delight he was an outstandingly musical child, unlike his sisters, who inherited their father's indifference to music, or his brother, who was musically talented but interested in ragtime rather than serious music. Edith gave the young Britten his first lessons in piano and notation. He made his first attempts at composition when he was five. He started piano lessons when he was seven years old, and viola lessons at the age of ten. He was one of the last composers brought up on exclusively live music: his father refused to have a gramophone, or, later, a radio in the house.