Benjamin Britten : new perspectives on his life and work

Author(s)

    • Walker, Lucy, Ph. D.

Bibliographic Information

Benjamin Britten : new perspectives on his life and work

edited by Lucy Walker

(Aldeburgh studies in music, v. 8)

Boydell Press, 2009

Available at  / 3 libraries

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Note

Includes bibliographical references and indexes

Description and Table of Contents

Description

An essay collection which examines Britten's juvenilia, influences such as Shostakovich and Verdi, his opera Owen Wingrave and a libretto written by Australian novelist Patrick White with the hope of a future collaboration. Benjamin Britten: New Perspectives on his Life and Work reveals the extent to which Britten scholarship is reaching outside the confines of Anglo-American criticism. The volume engages with juvenilia and other orchestral works from the 1920s and examines a broad range of influences on Britten, including the works of Shostakovich and Verdi, the poetry of Ovid, and the cinema. Among his operatic works the dramatic qualities of Owen Wingrave arediscussed through a close study of Piper's libretto and we witness the genesis of a libretto written by Australian novelist Patrick White and submitted to Britten with the hope of a future collaboration. The volume uncovers the generally hostile reception Britten's operas received in Paris until around the 1990s. Britten's status as 'outsider' in both the USA and in his own country when he returned in 1942 is discussed: the possibility is that Britten wasbecoming nervous of the gathering US involvement in the war and the real chance he may be called up to serve in the US forces is also discussed here.

Table of Contents

  • Introduction - Lucy Walker Going Behind Britten's Back - Colin Matthews Performing Early Britten: Signs of Promise and Achievement in Poemes Nos 4 and 5 (1927) - Sharon Choa Shostakovich's Fourteenth Symphony: A Response to War Requiem? - Six Metamorphoses After Ovid and the Influence of Classical Mythology on Benjamin Britten - George Caird Britten and the Cinematic Frame - David Crilly Storms, Laughter and Madness: Verdian 'Numbers' and Generic Allusions in Benjamin Britten's Peter Grimes - Jane Brandon Dramatic Invention in Myfanwy Piper's Libretto for Owen Wingrave - Frances Spalding 'The Minstrel Boy to the War is Gone': Father Figures and Fighting Sons in Britten's Owen Wingrave - Arne Muus Made You Look! Children in Salome and Death in Venice - From the Borough to Fraser Island - Claire Seymour Britten and France
  • or the Late Emergence of a Remarkable Lyric Universe - Maena Py Why did Britten Return to Wartime England? - Brian McMahon

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