title: James Toney

text: Toney won five fights throughout 1993, then defeated Tony "The Punching Postman" Thornton in his 1st title defense in October, via a landslide points victory. In his second defense, Toney beat the 24–0 Tim Littles by a 4th-round KO. During this bout, Toney suffered a bad cut which caused the referee and ringside doctor to intervene before round 4, allowing him one more round to try to end the fight. His next defense was against former IBF Light Heavyweight champion Prince Charles Williams. Despite having a point deducted for hitting Williams after the bell in one round and having his left eye completely swollen shut, Toney knocked Williams out in the 12th and final round. This win paved the way for his fight with undefeated 1988 Olympic silver medalist Roy Jones Jr.


title: James Toney

text: Jones won a landslide decision over Toney, an upset at the time, briefly flooring Toney for the first time with a flash knockdown in the 3rd round. Jones used one of his "cockfighting" feints to lure Toney in, and as Toney mocked Jones, Toney got caught with a leaping left hook. After the fight Toney blamed making the weight for his flat performance and the loss of his cherished unbeaten record. It was his last fight at the weight.


title: James Toney

text: His next fight saw him lose to Montell Griffin at light heavyweight in February 1995. After then winning a series of fights at light heavyweight, cruiserweight, and even heavyweight, he again faced Montell Griffin in December 1996 and once again lost a close decision. He beat old foe Mike McCallum in February 1997, but then lost to journeyman Drake Thadzi in his next fight.


title: James Toney

text: After taking some time off from the ring, Toney came back in 1999, seemingly focused on reclaiming his status as an elite fighter. He defeated former title holders and title contenders Adolpho Washington, Steve Little, Ramón Garbey, Saul Montana, Sione Asipeli, Courtney Butler, and Michael Rush. In August 2002, Toney beat Jason Robinson in an IBF Cruiserweight title elimination fight. This set up a fight between Toney and the champion, Vassiliy Jirov. After a postponement, the fight happened on April 26, 2003. Going into the 12th and final round, with the scores fairly even and the fight in the balance, Toney knocked the undefeated Jirov down in the 12th. The Kazakh rose from the canvas to go to the distance, but Toney got the judges verdict and was now a three-weight World Champion.


title: James Toney

text: For Toney's performance he was awarded comeback of the year and named fighter of the year. The fight itself was named "Fight Of The Year" by "The Ring" magazine. Immediately afterward, Toney moved up to heavyweight, where he campaigned for the next 7 years.


title: James Toney

text: After stepping back down to Cruiserweight, on November 4, 2011, Toney stepped into the ring at 199 lbs, the lowest he has been since 2003 against Russian star Denis Lebedev in Russia for the interim WBA World cruiserweight title. Toney was never competitive throughout the bout after encountering problems with his left knee during round two, and the judges all had it 120–108 for Lebedev. A week after the fight it was revealed Toney needed surgery to repair his knee.


title: James Toney

text: As far back as Toney's middleweight years, he insisted that he would one day be the heavyweight champion of the world. His October 4, 2003, victory over aging former heavyweight champion Evander Holyfield was Toney's entry into the heavyweight division. After a shaky first round, Toney picked apart Holyfield with shots to the body and head before stopping him in the 9th round. After the fight Toney declared he was "undestructable", that he "got milk baby" and didn't want any "bad ass questions" from announcer Jim Gray.


title: James Toney

text: On September 23, 2004, Toney faced off with Rydell Booker. Although Toney injured his left arm, he was still able to defeat the clearly outmatched Booker, getting a 12-round unanimous decision for the fringe IBA heavyweight title.


title: James Toney

text: On April 30, 2005, he defeated John Ruiz by a unanimous decision in a 12-round match for the World Boxing Association (WBA) heavyweight Championship. However, Toney failed his post-fight drug test, testing positive for the anabolic steroid stanozolol. This led to the New York Athletic Commission changing the bout's official outcome to a "no-contest", deducting the win from Toney's career record and banning him from boxing for 90 days. The WBA ordered that Ruiz be reinstated as its champion and that Toney be ineligible for another WBA Heavyweight title shot for two years. Toney defended himself by claiming that the steroids were given to him by a doctor to treat the arm injury he suffered during the Rydell Booker fight.


title: James Toney

text: In his bout after the Ruiz fight, Toney won a unanimous decision victory over former heavyweight contender Dominic Guinn. Toney next fought against Hasim Rahman on March 18, 2006, for the WBC Heavyweight title. The result was a twelve-round majority draw.


title: James Toney

text: Toney's next two outings were losses to Samuel Peter. The first fight was held in Los Angeles, California on September 2, 2006. Toney lost by split decision. The return bout was held in Hollywood, Florida, on January 6, 2007, and Toney once again lost to Peter, this time by unanimous decision. Both fights were WBC eliminator bouts for the belt held by Oleg Maskaev.


title: James Toney

text: Toney's next bout came on December 13, 2008, against Fres Oquendo. Oquendo was penalized one point in round eight for a rabbit punch, which would prove to be the deciding factor in the fight. Toney won a close, controversial split decision. On September 12, 2009, James fought heavyweight fighter Matthew Greer (12–5–0 11KO) at the Pechanga Resort & Casino. James won via TKO victory in round two.


title: James Toney

text: On February 24, 2011, Toney made his return to boxing and won a ten-round unanimous decision against Damon Reed. All three judges scored the bout 100–90. For this bout Toney weighed in at a career high of 257 lbs.


title: James Toney

text: On April 7, 2012 Toney fought Bobby Gunn and won by a fifth round stoppage due to a hand injury sustained by Gunn. This was recognized as a world title by the International Boxing Union, a minor boxing organization.


title: James Toney

text: Toney travelled to Australia in April 2013 to face Lucas Browne for the WBF heavyweight title. Toney lost the fight by wide unanimous decision. Seven months later on November 14, Toney travelled to London, England to compete in the heavyweight Prizefighter Series held at the famous York Hall venue. It was a special UK vs USA tournament with six fighters facing off in three round bouts. In the quarter final, Toney faced English journeyman Matt Legg, and won by TKO in the third round, advancing to the semi finals. In the semi final, he faced fellow American Jason Gavern and lost by majority decision, and was eliminated from the tournament.


title: James Toney

text: Toney's final bout came on May 13, 2017 at the age of 48. He defeated Mike Sheppard by sixth round stoppage; winning the WBF heavyweight title. After a career spanning 29 years and 92 professional bouts, Toney has confirmed he is officially retired.


title: James Toney

text: Toney is well known for his "old school" or "throwback" style of boxing, which consisted of frequent head movement and shoulder rolls to avoid punches, as well as his ability to fight off the ropes using slick upper body movement and in-fighting. As such, he is said to have possessed a very high ring IQ. Although Toney was considered a defensive fighter by many, he still applied pressure to his opponents and usually forced his style against them; in some ways he could be considered a defensive pressure fighter. Because of his experience, defensive skills and extremely durable chin, he was never stopped in his 29-year professional career and was rarely knocked down.


title: James Toney

text: Toney was spotted in attendance at UFC 108 on January 2, 2010, which led to talks between him and UFC President Dana White regarding fighting in the organization. On March 3, it was confirmed by White that the two had agreed and signed a multi-fight deal with the company, at the age of 42.


title: James Toney

text: To help his transition into MMA, Toney was coached by trainer Juanito Ibarra. Toney was later coached by Trevor Sherman.


title: James Toney

text: His debut fight was against UFC Hall of Famer and former UFC Heavyweight and Light Heavyweight champion Randy Couture at UFC 118 on August 28, 2010. Couture scored a takedown against Toney early in the first round, and went on to submit Toney with an arm-triangle choke. Toney was subsequently released from his contract with the UFC. The match achieved notoriety, though it drew criticisms of being a freak show fight, among them by UFC President Dana White himself.


title: Artemis 2

text: Artemis 2 (officially Artemis II) is the second scheduled mission of NASA's Artemis program, and the first scheduled crewed mission of NASA's Orion spacecraft, currently planned to be launched by the Space Launch System (SLS) in May 2024. The crewed Orion spacecraft will perform a lunar flyby test and return to Earth. This is planned to be the first crewed spacecraft to travel beyond low Earth orbit since Apollo 17 in 1972. Formerly known as Exploration Mission-2 (EM-2), the mission was renamed after the introduction of the Artemis program. Originally, the crewed mission was intended to collect samples from a captured asteroid in lunar orbit by the now canceled robotic Asteroid Redirect Mission.


title: Artemis 2

text: The Artemis 2 mission plan objective is to send four astronauts in the first crewed Orion MPCV Spacecraft into a lunar flyby for a maximum of 21 days using the Block 1 variant of the Space Launch System. The mission profile is a multi-trans lunar injection (MTLI), or multiple departure burns, and includes a free return trajectory from the Moon. The Orion spacecraft will be sent to a high Earth orbit with a period of roughly 42 hours. During this time the crew will perform various checkouts of the spacecraft's life support systems as well as an in-space rendezvous and proximity operations demonstration using the spent Interim Cryogenic Propulsion Stage (ICPS) as a target. When Orion reaches perigee once again, it will fire its main engine to complete the TLI maneuver which will send it to a lunar free return trajectory, before returning to Earth.


title: Artemis 2

text: In 2017, Exploration Mission-2 was a projected single-launch mission of a Space Launch System (SLS) Block 1B with an Exploration Upper Stage, lunar Block 1 Orion spacecraft, and a payload insertion of . The plan was to rendezvous with an asteroid previously placed in lunar orbit by the robotic Asteroid Redirect Mission and have astronauts perform space-walks and gather samples. After the cancellation in April 2017 of the Asteroid Redirect Mission, an eight-day mission was proposed with a crew of four astronauts, sent on a free return trajectory around the Moon. Another proposal suggested in 2017 was to take four astronauts aboard Orion on an 8-to-21-day trip around the Moon to deliver the first element of the Deep Space Gateway. In March 2018, it was decided to launch the first Gateway module on a commercial launch vehicle because of delays in building the Mobile Launcher needed to hold the more powerful Exploration Upper Stage. The launcher was selected to be the Falcon Heavy.


title: Artemis 2

text: While personnel have not yet been announced for the mission, the four-person crew of Artemis II will include a Canadian Space Agency (CSA) astronaut, the first Canadian and non-American to travel beyond low Earth orbit, under the terms of a 2020 treaty between the United States and Canada. Later missions will have international crews including European and Asian astronauts.


title: Artemis 2

text: NASA's CubeSat Launch Initiative (CSLI) sought proposals in 2019 from U.S. institutions and U.S. companies to fly their CubeSat missions as secondary payloads aboard the SLS on the Artemis II mission. NASA would accept proposals for both six-unit () and 12-unit () CubeSats. As with the Artemis I mission, the CubeSats flying on Artemis II were to be mounted on the inside of the stage adapter ring between the SLS upper stage and the Orion spacecraft, and will be deployed after Orion separates. Selections were initially planned to be made by February 2020, but the date passed with no official announcement. In October 2021, NASA dropped all secondary payloads from the mission.


title: Artemis 2

text: During preliminary reviews in 2011, the launch date was placed somewhere between 2019 and 2021, but afterwards the launch date was delayed to 2023 on a Space Launch System (SLS) launch vehicle. Although, as of December 2022, the mission is pegged for a May 2024 launch, the need to recycle and refurbish components from Orion that flew on Artemis 1 will likely push this back to late 2024 or even the first quarter of 2025.


title: Artemis 2

text: In 1968, the Apollo 8 mission, crewed by astronauts Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and William Anders, was designed to test-fly command and service module beyond low Earth orbit. Although similar to Artemis 2 in that it was crewed and did not land on the Moon, it differed by completing 10 orbits of the Moon. Apollo 13 (1970) was the only Apollo mission that flew past the Moon by a free-return trajectory.


title: Artemis 2

text: In 2005, the company Space Adventures announced plans to take two tourists within of the lunar surface using a Soyuz spacecraft piloted by a professional cosmonaut. The mission, named DSE-Alpha, has been priced at US$150 million per seat and is expected to last 8–9 days when scheduled. Company CEO Eric Anderson stated in 2011 that one seat had been sold, but the launch date has continually slipped since the second seat remains unsold .


title: Artemis 2

text: A SpaceX lunar tourism mission was initially proposed for late 2018 and would have been similar to Artemis 2 in crew size, with two space tourists paying for a free-return loop around the Moon and back to Earth, using the Crew Dragon capsule and launched on the Falcon Heavy. After the first flight of Falcon Heavy in 2018, SpaceX announced that Falcon Heavy would not be used for crewed flights to focus their future development on Starship and indicated that the lunar mission would more likely be carried out with the Starship. On September 14, 2018, SpaceX officially announced that it had signed one of the paying passengers, Yusaku Maezawa, for the "#dearMoon project" mission using the Starship, scheduled for 2023, and that he would invite 6 to 8 artists to join him.


title: Police ranks of the Philippines

text: The following are the ranks of officials and officers of the Philippine National Police (PNP). These men and women report to the following:


title: Police ranks of the Philippines

text: As of February 2019, a new ranking classification for the Philippine National Police was adopted, eliminating the confusion of old ranks.


title: Police ranks of the Philippines

text: However, the usage of this classification internally by the PNP was put on hold in March 2019 during the creation of rules and regulations (IRR) of the rank classification, which determined how each rank would be officially abbreviated. The new rank abbreviations and the IRR of the new rank system officially took effect on March 25, 2019.


title: Police ranks of the Philippines

text: The National Police has no rank holders of Second Lieutenant, Technical Sergeant, Sergeant and Patrolman First Class.


title: Police ranks of the Philippines

text: The Department of the Interior and Local Government Act of 1990 or Republic Act No. 6975 established the Philippine National Police under the Department of the Interior and Local Government, and later orders of the Department formed the basis for the creation of a common rank system for the public security forces of the republic, which the National Police used for over two decades.


title: Police ranks of the Philippines

text: Philippine Constabulary, which lasted between 1901 to 1991, was a gendarmerie police force which initially had its ranks and insignia er modelled after the United States Army upon its foundation before switching to Philippine Army styling with branch-specific shoulder board and sleeve insignia.


title: Police ranks of the Philippines

text: The defunct Integrated National Police adopted a paramilitary-styled ranking classification based on Presidential Decree No. 1184 (the Integrated National Police Personnel Professionalization Law of 1977) issued by then-President Ferdinand Marcos as part of the joint command it shared with the PC, which began in 1975.


title: Police ranks of the Philippines

text: Prior to the adoption of the 2019 classification, the police has informally used military ranks to address to each other; such as "tiniente" or lieutenant for officers who had recently graduated from the Philippine National Police Academy while Chief Superintendents up to the Director General were colloquially referred to as Generals.


title: Benjamin Britten

text: Edward Benjamin Britten, Baron Britten (22 November 1913 – 4 December 1976, aged 63) was an English composer, conductor, and pianist. He was a central figure of 20th-century British music, with a range of works including opera, other vocal music, orchestral and chamber pieces. His best-known works include the opera "Peter Grimes" (1945), the "War Requiem" (1962) and the orchestral showpiece "The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra" (1945).


title: Benjamin Britten

text: Born in Lowestoft, Suffolk, the son of a dentist, Britten showed talent from an early age. He studied at the Royal College of Music in London and privately with the composer Frank Bridge. Britten first came to public attention with the "a cappella" choral work "A Boy was Born" in 1934. With the premiere of "Peter Grimes" in 1945, he leapt to international fame. Over the next 28 years, he wrote 14 more operas, establishing himself as one of the leading 20th-century composers in the genre. In addition to large-scale operas for Sadler's Wells and Covent Garden, he wrote chamber operas for small forces, suitable for performance in venues of modest size. Among the best known of these is "The Turn of the Screw" (1954). Recurring themes in his operas include the struggle of an outsider against a hostile society and the corruption of innocence.


title: Benjamin Britten

text: Britten's other works range from orchestral to choral, solo vocal, chamber and instrumental as well as film music. He took a great interest in writing music for children and amateur performers, including the opera "Noye's Fludde", a "Missa Brevis", and the song collection "Friday Afternoons". He often composed with particular performers in mind. His most frequent and important muse was his personal and professional partner, the tenor Peter Pears; others included Kathleen Ferrier, Jennifer Vyvyan, Janet Baker, Dennis Brain, Julian Bream, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Osian Ellis and Mstislav Rostropovich. Britten was a celebrated pianist and conductor, performing many of his own works in concert and on record. He also performed and recorded works by others, such as Bach's "Brandenburg Concertos", Mozart symphonies, and song cycles by Schubert and Schumann.


title: Benjamin Britten

text: Together with Pears and the librettist and producer Eric Crozier, Britten founded the annual Aldeburgh Festival in 1948, and he was responsible for the creation of Snape Maltings concert hall in 1967. In his last year, he was the first composer to be given a life peerage.


title: Benjamin Britten

text: Britten was born in the fishing port of Lowestoft in Suffolk, on the east coast of England on 22 November 1913, the feast day of Saint Cecilia. He was the youngest of four children of Robert Victor Britten (1877–1934) and his wife Edith Rhoda, "née" Hockey (1874–1937). Robert Britten's youthful ambition 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 Hockey, the daughter of a civil service clerk in the British Government's Home Office. They were married in September 1901 at St John's, Smith Square, London.


title: Benjamin Britten

text: The consensus among biographers of Britten is that his father was a loving but somewhat stern and remote parent. 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, 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 was 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.


title: Benjamin Britten

text: When Britten was three months old he contracted pneumonia and nearly died. The illness left him with a damaged heart, and 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 his mother's great delight he was an outstandingly musical child, unlike his sisters, who inherited their father's indifference to music, while his brother, though musically talented, was interested only in ragtime. 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 three years later began to play the viola. 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.


title: Benjamin Britten

text: When he was seven Britten was sent to a dame school, run by the Misses Astle. The younger sister, Ethel, gave him piano lessons; in later life he said that he remained grateful for the excellence of her teaching. The following year he moved on to a prep school, South Lodge, Lowestoft, as a day boy. The headmaster, Thomas Sewell, was an old-fashioned disciplinarian; the young Britten was outraged at the severe corporal punishments frequently handed out, and later he said that his lifelong pacifism probably had its roots in his reaction to the regime at the school. He himself rarely fell foul of Sewell, a mathematician, in which subject Britten was a star pupil. The school had no musical tradition, and Britten continued to study the piano with Ethel Astle. From the age of ten he took viola lessons from a friend of his mother, Audrey Alston, who had been a professional player before her marriage. In his spare time he composed prolifically. When his "Simple Symphony", based on these juvenilia, was recorded in 1956, Britten wrote this pen-portrait of his young self for the sleeve note:


title: Benjamin Britten

text: Audrey Alston encouraged Britten to go to symphony concerts in Norwich. At one of these, during the triennial Norfolk and Norwich Festival in October 1924, he heard Frank Bridge's orchestral poem "The Sea", conducted by the composer. It was the first substantial piece of modern music he had ever encountered, and he was, in his own phrase, "knocked sideways" by it. Audrey Alston was a friend of Bridge; when he returned to Norwich for the next festival in 1927 she brought her not quite 14-year-old pupil to meet him. Bridge was impressed with the boy, and after they had gone through some of Britten's compositions together he invited him to come to London to take lessons from him. Robert Britten, supported by Thomas Sewell, doubted the wisdom of pursuing a composing career; a compromise was agreed by which Britten would, as planned, go on to his public school the following year but would make regular day-trips to London to study composition with Bridge and piano with his colleague Harold Samuel.


title: Benjamin Britten

text: Bridge impressed on Britten the importance of scrupulous attention to the technical craft of composing and the maxim that "you should find yourself and be true to what you found." The earliest substantial works Britten composed while studying with Bridge are the String Quartet in F, completed in April 1928, and the "Quatre Chansons Françaises", a song-cycle for high voice and orchestra. Authorities differ on the extent of Bridge's influence on his pupil's technique. Humphrey Carpenter and Michael Oliver judge that Britten's abilities as an orchestrator were essentially self-taught; Donald Mitchell considers that Bridge had an important influence on the cycle.


title: Benjamin Britten

text: In September 1928 Britten went as a boarder to Gresham's School, in Holt, Norfolk. At the time he felt unhappy there, even writing in his diary of contemplating suicide or running away: he hated being separated from his family, most particularly from his mother; he despised the music master; and he was shocked at the prevalence of bullying, though he was not the target of it. He remained there for two years and in 1930, he won a composition scholarship at the Royal College of Music (RCM) in London; his examiners were the composers John Ireland and Ralph Vaughan Williams and the college's harmony and counterpoint teacher, S P Waddington.


title: Benjamin Britten

text: Britten was at the RCM from 1930 to 1933, studying composition with Ireland and piano with Arthur Benjamin. He won the Sullivan Prize for composition, the Cobbett Prize for chamber music, and was twice winner of the Ernest Farrar Prize for composition. Despite these honours, he was not greatly impressed by the establishment: he found his fellow-students "amateurish and folksy" and the staff "inclined to suspect technical brilliance of being superficial and insincere." Another Ireland pupil, the composer Humphrey Searle, said that Ireland could be "an inspiring teacher to those on his own wavelength"; Britten was not, and learned little from him. He continued to study privately with Bridge, although he later praised Ireland for "nurs[ing] me very gently through a very, very difficult musical adolescence."


title: Benjamin Britten

text: Britten also used his time in London to attend concerts and become better acquainted with the music of Stravinsky, Shostakovich and, most particularly, Mahler. He intended postgraduate study in Vienna with Alban Berg, Arnold Schoenberg's student, but was eventually dissuaded by his parents, on the advice of the RCM staff.


title: Benjamin Britten

text: The first of Britten's compositions to attract wide attention were composed while at the RCM: the Sinfonietta, Op. 1 (1932), the oboe quartet "Phantasy", Op. 2, dedicated to Léon Goossens who played the first performance in a BBC broadcast on 6 August 1933, and a set of choral variations "A Boy was Born", written in 1933 for the BBC Singers, who first performed it the following year. In this same period he wrote "Friday Afternoons", a collection of 12 songs for the pupils of Clive House School, Prestatyn, where his brother was headmaster.


title: Benjamin Britten

text: In February 1935, at Bridge's instigation, Britten was invited to a job interview by the BBC's director of music Adrian Boult and his assistant Edward Clark. Britten was not enthusiastic about the prospect of working full-time in the BBC music department and was relieved when what came out of the interview was an invitation to write the score for a documentary film, "The King's Stamp", directed by Alberto Cavalcanti for the GPO Film Unit.


title: Benjamin Britten

text: Britten became a member of the film unit's small group of regular contributors, another of whom was W. H. Auden. Together they worked on the documentary films "Coal Face" and "Night Mail" in 1935. They also collaborated on the song cycle "Our Hunting Fathers" (1936), radical both in politics and musical treatment, and subsequently other works including "Cabaret Songs", "On This Island", "Paul Bunyan" and "Hymn to St Cecilia". Auden was a considerable influence on Britten, encouraging him to widen his aesthetic, intellectual and political horizons, and also to come to terms with his homosexuality. Auden was, as David Matthews puts it, "cheerfully and guiltlessly promiscuous"; Britten, puritanical and conventional by nature, was sexually repressed.


title: Benjamin Britten

text: In the three years from 1935 to 1937 Britten wrote nearly 40 scores for the theatre, cinema and radio. Among the film music of the late 1930s Matthews singles out "Night Mail" and "Love from a Stranger" (1937); from the theatre music he selects for mention "The Ascent of F6" (1936), "On the Frontier" (1938), and "Johnson Over Jordan" (1939); and of the music for radio, "King Arthur" (1937) and "The Sword in the Stone" (1939).


title: Benjamin Britten

text: In 1937 there were two events of huge importance in Britten's life: his mother died, and he met the tenor Peter Pears. Although Britten was extraordinarily devoted to his mother and was devastated at her death, it also seems to have been something of a liberation for him. Only after that did he begin to engage in emotional relationships with people his own age or younger. Later in the year he got to know Pears while they were both helping to clear out the country cottage of a mutual friend who had died in an air crash. Pears quickly became Britten's musical inspiration and close (though for the moment platonic) friend. Britten's first work for him was composed within weeks of their meeting, a setting of Emily Brontë's poem, "A thousand gleaming fires", for tenor and strings.


title: Benjamin Britten

text: During 1937 Britten composed a "Pacifist March" to words by Ronald Duncan for the Peace Pledge Union, of which, as a pacifist, he had become an active member; the work was not a success and was soon withdrawn. The best known of his compositions from this period is probably "Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge" for string orchestra, described by Matthews as the first of Britten's works to become a popular classic. It was a success in North America, with performances in Toronto, New York, Boston, Chicago and San Francisco, under conductors including John Barbirolli and Serge Koussevitzky.


title: Benjamin Britten

text: In April 1939 Britten and Pears sailed to North America, going first to Canada and then to New York. They had several reasons for leaving England, including the difficult position of pacifists in an increasingly bellicose Europe; the success that Frank Bridge had enjoyed in the US; the departure of Auden and his friend Christopher Isherwood to the US from England three months previously; hostile or belittling reviews of Britten's music in the English press; and under-rehearsed and inadequate performances. Britten and Pears consummated their relationship and from then until Britten's death they were partners in both their professional and personal lives. When the Second World War began, Britten and Pears turned for advice to the British embassy in Washington and were told that they should remain in the US as artistic ambassadors. Pears was inclined to disregard the advice and go back to England; Britten also felt the urge to return, but accepted the embassy's counsel and persuaded Pears to do the same.


title: Benjamin Britten

text: Already a friend of the composer Aaron Copland, Britten encountered his latest works "Billy the Kid" and "An Outdoor Overture", both of which influenced his own music. In 1940 Britten composed "Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo", the first of many song cycles for Pears. Britten's orchestral works from this period include the Violin Concerto and "Sinfonia da Requiem". In 1941 Britten produced his first music drama, "Paul Bunyan", an operetta, to a libretto by Auden. While in the US, Britten had his first encounter with Balinese gamelan music, through transcriptions for piano duo made by the Canadian composer Colin McPhee. The two met in the summer of 1939 and subsequently performed a number of McPhee's transcriptions for a recording. This musical encounter bore fruit in several Balinese-inspired works later in Britten's career.


title: Benjamin Britten

text: Moving to the US did not relieve Britten of the nuisance of hostile criticism: although Olin Downes, the doyen of New York music critics, and Irving Kolodin took to Britten's music, Virgil Thomson was, as the music scholar Suzanne Robinson puts it, consistently "severe and spiteful". Thomson described "Les Illuminations" (1940) as "little more than a series of bromidic and facile 'effects' ... pretentious, banal and utterly disappointing", and was equally unflattering about Pears's voice. Robinson surmises that Thomson was motivated by "a mixture of spite, national pride, and professional jealousy." "Paul Bunyan" met with wholesale critical disapproval, and the "Sinfonia da Requiem" (already rejected by its Japanese sponsors because of its overtly Christian nature) received a mixed reception when Barbirolli and the New York Philharmonic premiered it in March 1941. The reputation of the work was much enhanced when Koussevitzky took it up shortly afterwards.


title: Benjamin Britten

text: In 1942 Britten read the work of the poet George Crabbe for the first time. "The Borough", set on the Suffolk coast close to Britten's homeland, awakened in him such longings for England that he knew he must return. He also knew that he must write an opera based on Crabbe's poem about the fisherman Peter Grimes. Before Britten left the US, Koussevitzky, always generous in encouraging new talent, offered him a $1,000 commission to write the opera. Britten and Pears returned to England in April 1942. During the long transatlantic sea crossing Britten completed the choral works "A Ceremony of Carols" and "Hymn to St Cecilia". The latter was his last large-scale collaboration with Auden. Britten had grown away from him, and Auden became one of the composer's so-called "corpses" – former intimates from whom he completely cut off contact once they had outlived their usefulness to him or offended him in some way.


title: Benjamin Britten

text: Having arrived in Britain, Britten and Pears applied for recognition as conscientious objectors; Britten was initially allowed only non-combatant service in the military, but on appeal he gained unconditional exemption. After the death of his mother in 1937 he had used money she bequeathed him to buy the Old Mill in Snape, Suffolk which became his country home. He spent much of his time there in 1944 working on the opera "Peter Grimes". Pears joined Sadler's Wells Opera Company, whose artistic director, the singer Joan Cross, announced her intention to re-open the company's home base in London with Britten's opera, casting herself and Pears in the leading roles. There were complaints from company members about supposed favouritism and the "cacophony" of Britten's score, as well as some ill-suppressed homophobic remarks. "Peter Grimes" opened in June 1945 and was hailed by public and critics; its box-office takings matched or exceeded those for "La bohème" and "Madame Butterfly", which were staged during the same season. The opera administrator Lord Harewood called it "the first genuinely successful British opera, Gilbert and Sullivan apart, since Purcell." Dismayed by the in-fighting among the company, Cross, Britten and Pears severed their ties with Sadler's Wells in December 1945, going on to found what was to become the English Opera Group.


title: Benjamin Britten

text: A month after the opening of "Peter Grimes", Britten and Yehudi Menuhin went to Germany to give recitals to concentration camp survivors. What they saw, at Belsen most of all, so shocked Britten that he refused to talk about it until towards the end of his life, when he told Pears that it had coloured everything he had written since. Colin Matthews comments that the next two works Britten composed after his return, the song-cycle "The Holy Sonnets of John Donne" and the Second String Quartet, contrast strongly with earlier, lighter-hearted works such as "Les Illuminations". Britten recovered his "joie de vivre" for "The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra" (1945), written for an educational film, "Instruments of the Orchestra", directed by Muir Mathieson and featuring the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Malcolm Sargent. It became, and remained, his most often played and popular work.


title: Benjamin Britten

text: Britten's next opera, "The Rape of Lucretia", was presented at the first post-war Glyndebourne Festival in 1946. It was then taken on tour to provincial cities under the banner of the "Glyndebourne English Opera Company", an uneasy alliance of Britten and his associates with John Christie, the autocratic proprietor of Glyndebourne. The tour lost money heavily, and Christie announced that he would underwrite no more tours. Britten and his associates set up the English Opera Group; the librettist Eric Crozier and the designer John Piper joined Britten as artistic directors. The group's express purpose was to produce and commission new English operas and other works, presenting them throughout the country. Britten wrote the comic opera "Albert Herring" for the group in 1947; while on tour in the new work Pears came up with the idea of mounting a festival in the small Suffolk seaside town of Aldeburgh, where Britten had moved from Snape earlier in the year, and which became his principal place of residence for the rest of his life.


title: Benjamin Britten

text: The Aldeburgh Festival was launched in June 1948, with Britten, Pears, and Crozier directing. "Albert Herring" played at the Jubilee Hall, and Britten's new cantata for tenor, chorus, and orchestra, "Saint Nicolas", was presented in the parish church. The festival was an immediate success and became an annual event that has continued into the 21st century. New works by Britten featured in almost every festival until his death in 1976, including the premieres of his operas "A Midsummer Night's Dream" at the Jubilee Hall in 1960 and "Death in Venice" at Snape Maltings Concert Hall in 1973.


title: Benjamin Britten

text: Unlike many leading English composers, Britten was not known as a teacher, but in 1949 he accepted his only private pupil, Arthur Oldham, who studied with him for three years. Oldham made himself useful, acting as musical assistant and arranging "Variations on a Theme by Frank Bridge" for full orchestra for the Frederick Ashton ballet "Le Rêve de Léonor" (1949), but he later described the teacher–pupil relationship as "beneficial five per cent to [Britten] and ninety-five per cent to me!"


title: Benjamin Britten

text: Throughout the 1950s Britten continued to write operas. "Billy Budd" (1951) was well received at its Covent Garden premiere and was regarded by reviewers as an advance on "Peter Grimes". "Gloriana" (1953), written to mark the coronation of Elizabeth II, had a cool reception at the gala premiere in the presence of the Queen and the British Establishment "en masse". The downbeat story of Elizabeth I in her decline, and Britten's score – reportedly thought by members of the premiere's audience "too modern" for such a gala – did not overcome what Matthews calls the "ingrained philistinism" of the ruling classes. Although "Gloriana" did well at the box office, there were no further productions in Britain for another 13 years. It was later recognised as one of Britten's finer operas. "The Turn of the Screw" the following year was an unqualified success; together with "Peter Grimes" it became, and at 2013 remained, one of the two most frequently performed of Britten's operas.


title: Benjamin Britten

text: In the 1950s the "fervently anti-homosexual" Home Secretary, Sir David Maxwell Fyfe, urged the police to enforce the Victorian laws making homosexual acts illegal. Britten and Pears came under scrutiny; Britten was visited by police officers in 1953 and was so perturbed that he discussed with his assistant Imogen Holst the possibility that Pears might have to enter a sham marriage (with whom is unclear). In the end nothing was done.


title: Benjamin Britten

text: An increasingly important influence on Britten was the music of the East, an interest that was fostered by a tour there with Pears in 1956, when Britten once again encountered the music of the Balinese gamelan and saw for the first time Japanese Noh plays, which he called "some of the most wonderful drama I have ever seen." These eastern influences were seen and heard in the ballet "The Prince of the Pagodas" (1957) and later in two of the three semi-operatic "Parables for Church Performance": "Curlew River" (1964) and "The Prodigal Son" (1968).


title: Benjamin Britten

text: By the 1960s, the Aldeburgh Festival was outgrowing its customary venues, and plans to build a new concert hall in Aldeburgh were not progressing. When redundant Victorian maltings buildings in the village of Snape, six miles inland, became available for hire, Britten realised that the largest of them could be converted into a concert hall and opera house. The 830-seat Snape Maltings hall was opened by the Queen at the start of the twentieth Aldeburgh Festival on 2 June 1967; it was immediately hailed as one of the best concert halls in the country. The hall was destroyed by fire in 1969, but Britten was determined that it would be rebuilt in time for the following year's festival, which it was. The Queen again attended the opening performance in 1970.


title: Benjamin Britten

text: The Maltings gave the festival a venue that could comfortably house large orchestral works and operas. Britten conducted the first performance outside Russia of Shostakovich's Fourteenth Symphony at Snape in 1970. Shostakovich, a friend since 1960, dedicated the symphony to Britten; he was himself the dedicatee of "The Prodigal Son". Two other Russian musicians who were close to Britten and regularly performed at the festival were the pianist Sviatoslav Richter and the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich. Britten composed his cello suites, "Cello Symphony" and Cello Sonata for Rostropovich, who premiered them at the Aldeburgh Festival.


title: Benjamin Britten

text: One of the best known of Britten's works, the "War Requiem", was premiered in 1962. He had been asked four years earlier to write a work for the consecration of the new Coventry Cathedral, a modernist building designed by Basil Spence. The old cathedral had been left in ruins by an air-raid on the city in 1940 in which hundreds of people died. Britten decided that his work would commemorate the dead of both World Wars in a large-scale score for soloists, chorus, chamber ensemble and orchestra. His text interspersed the traditional Requiem Mass with poems by Wilfred Owen. Matthews writes, "With the "War Requiem" Britten reached the apex of his reputation: it was almost universally hailed as a masterpiece." Shostakovich told Rostropovich that he believed it to be "the greatest work of the twentieth century".


title: Benjamin Britten

text: In 1967 the BBC commissioned Britten to write an opera specially for television. "Owen Wingrave" was based, like "The Turn of the Screw", on a ghost story by Henry James. By the 1960s Britten found composition much slower than in his prolific youth; he told the 28-year-old composer Nicholas Maw, "Get as much done now as you can, because it gets much, much more difficult as you grow older." He did not complete the score of the new opera until August 1970. "Owen Wingrave" was first broadcast in Britain in May 1971, when it was also televised in Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, the US and Yugoslavia.


title: Benjamin Britten

text: In September 1970 Britten asked Myfanwy Piper, who had adapted the two Henry James stories for him, to turn another prose story into a libretto. This was Thomas Mann's novella "Death in Venice", a subject he had been considering for some time. At an early stage in composition Britten was told by his doctors that a heart operation was essential if he was to live for more than two years. He was determined to finish the opera and worked urgently to complete it before going into hospital for surgery. His long-term colleague Colin Graham wrote:


title: Benjamin Britten

text: After the completion of the opera Britten went into the National Heart Hospital and was operated on in May 1973 to replace a failing heart valve. The replacement was successful, but he suffered a slight stroke, affecting his right hand. This brought his career as a performer to an end. While in hospital Britten became friendly with a senior nursing sister, Rita Thomson; she moved to Aldeburgh in 1974 and looked after him until his death.


title: Benjamin Britten

text: Britten's last works include the "Suite on English Folk Tunes "A Time There Was"" (1974); the Third String Quartet (1975), which drew on material from "Death in Venice"; and the dramatic cantata "Phaedra" (1975), written for Janet Baker.


title: Benjamin Britten

text: In June 1976, the last year of his life, Britten accepted a life peerage – the first composer so honoured – becoming Baron Britten, of Aldeburgh in the County of Suffolk. After the 1976 Aldeburgh Festival, Britten and Pears travelled to Norway, where Britten began writing "Praise We Great Men", for voices and orchestra based on a poem by Edith Sitwell. He returned to Aldeburgh in August, and wrote "Welcome Ode" for children's choir and orchestra. In November, Britten realised that he could no longer compose. On his 63rd birthday, 22 November, at his request Rita Thomson organised a champagne party and invited his friends and his sisters Barbara and Beth, to say their goodbyes to the dying composer. When Rostropovich made his farewell visit a few days later, Britten gave him what he had written of "Praise We Great Men".


title: Benjamin Britten

text: Britten died of congestive heart failure on 4 December 1976. His funeral service was held at Aldeburgh Parish Church three days later, and he was buried in its churchyard, with a gravestone carved by Reynolds Stone. The authorities at Westminster Abbey had offered burial there, but Britten had made it clear that he wished his grave to be side by side with that, in due course, of Pears. A memorial service was held at the Abbey on 10 March 1977, at which the congregation was headed by Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother.


title: Benjamin Britten

text: Despite his large number of works on Christian themes, Britten has sometimes been thought of as agnostic. Pears said that when they met in 1937 he was not sure whether or not Britten would have described himself as a Christian. In the 1960s Britten called himself a dedicated Christian, though sympathetic to the radical views propounded by the Bishop of Woolwich in "Honest to God". Politically, Britten was on the left. He told Pears that he always voted either Liberal or Labour and could not imagine ever voting Conservative, but he was never a member of any party, except the Peace Pledge Union.


title: Benjamin Britten

text: Physically, Britten was never robust. He walked and swam regularly and kept himself as fit as he could, but Carpenter in his 1992 biography mentions 20 illnesses, a few of them minor but most fairly serious, suffered over the years by Britten before his final heart complaint developed. Emotionally, according to some commentators, Britten never completely grew up, retaining in his outlook something of a child's view of the world. He was not always confident that he was the genius others declared him to be, and though he was hypercritical of his own works, he was acutely, even aggressively sensitive to criticism from anybody else.


title: Benjamin Britten

text: Britten was, as he acknowledged, notorious for dumping friends and colleagues who either offended him or ceased to be of use – his "corpses". The conductor Sir Charles Mackerras believed that the term was invented by Lord Harewood. Both Mackerras and Harewood joined the list of corpses, the former for joking that the number of boys in "Noye's Fludde" must have been a delight to the composer, and the latter for an extramarital affair and subsequent divorce from Lady Harewood, which shocked the puritanical Britten. Among other corpses were his librettists Montagu Slater and Eric Crozier. The latter said in 1949, "He has sometimes told me, jokingly, that one day I would join the ranks of his 'corpses' and I have always recognized that any ordinary person must soon outlive his usefulness to such a great creative artist as Ben." Dame Janet Baker said in 1981, "I think he was quite entitled to take what he wanted from others ... He did not want to hurt anyone, but the task in hand was more important than anything or anybody." Matthews feels that this aspect of Britten has been exaggerated, and he observes that the composer sustained many deep friendships to the end of his life.


title: Benjamin Britten

text: Throughout his adult life, Britten had a particular rapport with children and enjoyed close friendships with several boys, particularly those in their early teens. The first such friendship was with Piers Dunkerley, 13 years old in 1934 when Britten was aged 20. Other boys Britten befriended were the young David Hemmings and Michael Crawford, both of whom sang treble roles in his works in the 1950s. Hemmings later said, "In all of the time that I spent with him he never abused that trust", and Crawford wrote "I cannot say enough about the kindness of that great man ... he had a wonderful patience and affinity with young people. He loved music, and loved youngsters caring about music."


title: Benjamin Britten

text: It was long suspected by several of Britten's close associates that there was something exceptional about his attraction to teenage boys: Auden referred to Britten's "attraction to thin-as-a-board juveniles ... to the sexless and innocent", and Pears once wrote to Britten: "remember there are lovely things in the world still – children, boys, sunshine, the sea, Mozart, you and me." In public, the matter was little discussed during Britten's lifetime and much discussed after it. Carpenter's 1992 biography closely examined the evidence, as do later studies of Britten, most particularly John Bridcut's "Britten's Children" (2006), which concentrates on Britten's friendships and relationships with various children and adolescents. Some commentators have continued to question Britten's conduct, sometimes very sharply. Carpenter and Bridcut conclude that he held any sexual impulses under firm control and kept the relationships affectionate – including bed-sharing, kissing and nude bathing – but strictly platonic.


title: Benjamin Britten

text: A more recent controversy was the statement in a 2013 biography of Britten by Paul Kildea that the composer's heart failure was due to undetected syphilis, which Kildea speculates was a result of Pears's promiscuity while the two were living in New York. In response, Britten's consultant cardiologist said that, like all the hospital's similar cases, Britten was routinely screened for syphilis before the operation, with negative results. He described as "complete rubbish" Kildea's allegation that the surgeon who operated on Britten in 1973 would or even could have covered up a syphilitic condition. Kildea continued to maintain, "When all the composer's symptoms are considered there can be only one cause." In "The Times", Richard Morrison praised the rest of Kildea's book, and hoped that its reputation would not be "tarnished by one sensational speculation ... some second-hand hearsay ... presenting unsubstantiated gossip as fact."


title: Benjamin Britten

text: Britten's early musical life was dominated by the classical masters; his mother's ambition was for him to become the "Fourth B" – after Bach, Beethoven and Brahms. Britten was later to assert that his initial development as a composer was stifled by reverence for these masters: "Between the ages of thirteen and sixteen I knew every note of Beethoven and Brahms. I remember receiving the full score of "Fidelio" for my fourteenth birthday ... But I think in a sense I never forgave them for having led me astray in my own particular thinking and natural inclinations." He developed a particular animosity towards Brahms, whose piano music he had once held in great esteem; in 1952 he confided that he played through all Brahms's music from time to time, "to see if I am right about him; I usually find that I underestimated last time how bad it was!"


title: Benjamin Britten

text: Through his association with Frank Bridge, Britten's musical horizons expanded. He discovered the music of Debussy and Ravel which, Matthews writes, "gave him a model for an orchestral sound". Bridge also led Britten to the music of Schoenberg and Berg; the latter's death in 1935 affected Britten deeply. A letter at that time reveals his thoughts on the contemporary music scene: "The real musicians are so few & far between, aren't they? Apart from the Bergs, Stravinskys, Schoenbergs & Bridges one is a bit stumped for names, isn't one?" – adding, as an afterthought: "Shostakovitch – perhaps – possibly". By this time Britten had developed a lasting hostility towards the English Pastoral School represented by Vaughan Williams and Ireland, whose work he compared unfavourably with the "brilliant folk-song arrangements of Percy Grainger"; Grainger became the inspiration of many of Britten's later folk arrangements. Britten was also impressed by Delius, and thought "Brigg Fair" "delicious" when he heard it in 1931. Also in that year he heard Stravinsky's "The Rite of Spring", which he found "bewildering and terrifying", yet at the same time "incredibly marvellous and arresting". The same composer's "Symphony of Psalms", and "Petrushka" were lauded in similar terms. He and Stravinsky later developed a mutual antipathy informed by jealousy and mistrust.


title: Benjamin Britten

text: Besides his growing attachments to the works of 20th century masters, Britten – along with his contemporary Michael Tippett – was devoted to the English music of the late 17th and early 18th centuries, in particular the work of Purcell. In defining his mission as a composer of opera, Britten wrote: "One of my chief aims is to try to restore to the musical setting of the English Language a brilliance, freedom and vitality that have been curiously rare since the death of Purcell." Among the closest of Britten's kindred composer spirits – even more so than Purcell – was Mahler, whose Fourth Symphony Britten heard in September 1930. At that time Mahler's music was little regarded and rarely played in English concert halls. Britten later wrote of how the scoring of this work impressed him: "... entirely clean and transparent ... the material was remarkable, and the melodic shapes highly original, with such rhythmic and harmonic tension from beginning to end." He soon discovered other Mahler works, in particular "Das Lied von der Erde"; he wrote to a friend about the concluding "Abschied" of "Das Lied": "It is cruel, you know, that music should be so beautiful." Apart from Mahler's general influence on Britten's compositional style, the incorporation by Britten of popular tunes (as, for example, in "Death in Venice") is a direct inheritance from the older composer.


title: Benjamin Britten

text: The Britten-Pears Foundation considers the composer's operas "perhaps the most substantial and important part of his compositional legacy." Britten's operas are firmly established in the international repertoire: according to Operabase, they are performed worldwide more than those of any other composer born in the 20th century, and only Puccini and Richard Strauss come ahead of him if the list is extended to all operas composed after 1900.


title: Benjamin Britten

text: The early operetta "Paul Bunyan" stands apart from Britten's later operatic works. Philip Brett calls it "a patronizing attempt to evoke the spirit of a nation not his own by W. H. Auden in which Britten was a somewhat dazzled accomplice." The American public liked it, but the critics did not, and it fell into neglect until interest revived near the end of the composer's life.


title: Benjamin Britten

text: Britten's subsequent operas range from large-scale works written for full-strength opera companies, to chamber operas for performance by small touring opera ensembles or in churches and schools. In the large-scale category are "Peter Grimes" (1945), "Billy Budd" (1951), "Gloriana" (1953), "A Midsummer Night's Dream" (1960) and "Death in Venice" (1973). Of the remaining operas, "The Rape of Lucretia" (1946), "Albert Herring" (1947), "The Little Sweep" (1949) and "The Turn of the Screw" (1954) were written for small opera companies. "Noye's Fludde" (1958), "Curlew River" (1964), "The Burning Fiery Furnace" (1966) and "The Prodigal Son" (1968) were for church performance, and had their premieres at St Bartholomew's Church, Orford. The secular "The Golden Vanity" was intended to be performed in schools. "Owen Wingrave", written for television, was first presented live by the Royal Opera at Covent Garden in 1973, two years after its broadcast premiere.


title: Benjamin Britten

text: Music critics have frequently commented on the recurring theme in Britten's operas from "Peter Grimes" onward of the isolated individual at odds with a hostile society. The extent to which this reflected Britten's perception of himself, pacifist and homosexual, in the England of the 1930s, 40s and 50s is debated. Another recurrent theme is the corruption of innocence, most sharply seen in "The Turn of the Screw".


title: Benjamin Britten

text: Over the 28 years between "Peter Grimes" and "Death in Venice" Britten's musical style changed, as he introduced elements of atonalism – though remaining essentially a tonal composer – and of eastern music, particularly gamelan sounds but also eastern harmonies. In "A Midsummer Night's Dream" the orchestral scoring varies to fit the nature of each set of characters: "the bright, percussive sounds of harps, keyboards and percussion for the fairy world, warm strings and wind for the pairs of lovers, and lower woodwind and brass for the mechanicals." In "Death in Venice" Britten turns Tadzio and his family into silent dancers, "accompanied by the colourful, glittering sounds of tuned percussion to emphasize their remoteness."


title: Benjamin Britten

text: As early as 1948 the music analyst Hans Keller, summarising Britten's impact on 20th-century opera to that date, compared his contribution to that of Mozart in the 18th century: "Mozart may in some respects be regarded as a founder (a 'second founder') of opera. The same can already be said today, as far as the modern British – perhaps not only British – field goes, of Britten." In addition to his own original operas, Britten, together with Imogen Holst, extensively revised Purcell's "Dido and Aeneas" (1951) and "The Fairy-Queen" (1967). Britten's Purcell Realizations brought Purcell, who was then neglected, to a wider public, but have themselves been neglected since the dominance of the trend to authentic performance practice. His 1948 revision of "The Beggar's Opera" amounts to a wholesale recomposition, retaining the original melodies but giving them new, highly sophisticated orchestral accompaniments.


title: Benjamin Britten

text: Throughout his career Britten was drawn to the song cycle form. In 1928, when he was 14, he composed an orchestral cycle, "Quatre chansons françaises", setting words by Victor Hugo and Paul Verlaine. Brett comments that though the work is much influenced by Wagner on the one hand and French mannerisms on the other, "the diatonic nursery-like tune for the sad boy with the consumptive mother in 'L'enfance' is entirely characteristic." After he came under Auden's influence Britten composed "Our Hunting Fathers" (1936), ostensibly a protest against fox-hunting but which also alludes allegorically to the contemporary political state of Europe. The work has never been popular; in 1948 the critic Colin Mason lamented its neglect and called it one of Britten's greatest works. In Mason's view the cycle is "as exciting as "Les Illuminations", and offers many interesting and enjoyable foretastes of the best moments of his later works."


title: Benjamin Britten

text: The first of Britten's song cycles to gain widespread popularity was "Les Illuminations" (1940), for high voice (originally soprano, later more often sung by tenors) with string orchestra accompaniment, setting words by Arthur Rimbaud. Britten's music reflects the eroticism in Rimbaud's poems; Copland commented of the section "Antique" that he did not know how Britten dared to write the melody. "Antique" was dedicated to "K.H.W.S.", or Wulff Scherchen, Britten's first romantic interest. Matthews judges the piece the crowning masterpiece of Britten's early years. By the time of Britten's next cycle, "Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo" (1942) for tenor and piano, Pears had become his partner and muse; in Matthews's phrase, Britten wrote the cycle as "his declaration of love for Peter". It too finds the sensuality of the verses it sets, though in its structure it resembles a conventional 19th-century song cycle. Mason draws a distinction between this and Britten's earlier cycles, because here each song is self-contained, and has no thematic connection with any of the others.


title: Benjamin Britten

text: The "Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings" (1943) sets verses by a variety of poets, all on the theme of night-time. Though Britten described the cycle as "not important stuff, but quite pleasant, I think", it was immediately greeted as a masterpiece, and together with "Peter Grimes" it established him as one of the leading composers of his day. Mason calls it "a beautifully unified work on utterly dissimilar poems, held together by the most superficial but most effective, and therefore most suitable symphonic method. Some of the music is pure word-painting, some of it mood-painting, of the subtlest kind." Two years later, after witnessing the horrors of Belsen, Britten composed "The Holy Sonnets of John Donne", a work whose bleakness was not matched until his final tenor and piano cycle a quarter of a century later. Britten's technique in this cycle ranges from atonality in the first song to firm tonality later, with a resolute B major chord at the climax of "Death, be not proud".


title: Benjamin Britten

text: "Nocturne" (1958) is the last of the orchestral cycles. As in the "Serenade", Britten set words by a range of poets, who here include Shakespeare, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Tennyson and Wilfred Owen. The whole cycle is darker in tone than the "Serenade", with pre-echoes of the "War Requiem". All the songs have subtly different orchestrations, with a prominent obbligato part for a different instrument in each.


title: Benjamin Britten

text: Among Britten's later song cycles with piano accompaniment is the "Songs and Proverbs of William Blake", composed for the baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. This presents all its poems in a continuous stream of music; Brett writes that it "interleaves a ritornello-like setting of the seven proverbs with seven songs that paint an increasingly sombre picture of human existence." A Pushkin cycle, "The Poet's Echo" (1965), was written for Galina Vishnevskaya, and shows a more robust and extrovert side of the composer. Though written ostensibly in the tradition of European song cycles, it draws atmospherically on the polyphony of south-east Asian music. "Who Are These Children?" (1969), setting 12 verses by William Soutar, is among the grimmest of Britten's cycles. After he could no longer play the piano, Britten composed a cycle of Robert Burns settings, "A Birthday Hansel" (1976), for voice and harp.


title: Benjamin Britten

text: Nicholas Maw said of Britten's vocal music: "His feeling for poetry (not only English) and the inflexions of language make him, I think, the greatest musical realizer of English." One of the best-known works in which Britten set poetry was the "War Requiem" (1962). It intersperses the Latin requiem mass, sung by soprano and chorus, with settings of works by the First World War poet Wilfred Owen, sung by tenor and baritone. At the end the two elements are combined, as the last line of Owen's "Strange meeting" mingles with the "In paradisum" of the mass. Matthews describes the conclusion of the work as "a great wave of benediction [which] recalls the end of the "Sinfonia da Requiem", and its similar ebbing away into the sea that symbolises both reconciliation and death." The same year, he composed "A Hymn of St Columba" for choir and organ, setting a poem by the 6th-century saint. Other works for voices and orchestra include the "Missa Brevis" and the "Cantata academica" (both 1959) on religious themes, "Children's Crusade" to a text by Bertolt Brecht about a group of children in wartime Poland, to be performed by children (1969), and the late cantata "Phaedra" (1975), a story of fated love and death modelled on Handel's Italian cantatas.


title: Benjamin Britten

text: Smaller-scale works for accompanied voice include the five "Canticles", composed between 1947 and 1974. They are written for a variety of voices (tenor in all five; counter-tenor or alto in II and IV and baritone in IV) and accompaniments (piano in I to IV, horn in III and harp in V). The first is a setting of Francis Quarles's 17th-century poem "A Divine Rapture", and according to Britten was modelled on Purcell's "Divine Hymns". Matthews describes it as one of the composer's most serene works, which "ends in a mood of untroubled happiness that would soon become rare in Britten's music." The was written in 1952, between "Billy Budd" and "Gloriana", on the theme of Abraham's obedience to Divine Authority in the proffered sacrifice of his son Isaac. from 1954 is a setting of Edith Sitwell's wartime poem "Still Falls the Rain", composed just after "The Turn of the Screw" with which it is structurally and stylistically associated. The twelve-note cycle in the first five bars of the piano part of the Canticle introduced a feature that became thereafter a regular part of Britten's compositional technique. "", premiered in 1971, is based on T. S. Eliot's poem "Journey of the Magi". It is musically close to "The Burning Fiery Furnace" of 1966; Matthews refers to it as a "companion piece" to the earlier work. The final Canticle was another Eliot setting, his juvenile poem "Death of Saint Narcissus". Although Britten had little idea of what the poem was about, the musicologist Arnold Whittall finds the text "almost frighteningly apt ... for a composer conscious of his own sickness." Matthews sees Narcissus as "another figure from [Britten's] magic world of dreams and ideal beauty."


title: Benjamin Britten

text: The Britten scholar Donald Mitchell has written, "It is easy, because of the scope, stature, and sheer volume of the operas, and the wealth of vocal music of all kinds, to pay insufficient attention to the many works Britten wrote in other, specifically non-vocal genres." Maw said of Britten, "He is one of the 20th century's great orchestral composers ... His orchestration has an individuality, incisiveness and integration with the musical material only achieved by the greatest composers." Among Britten's best-known orchestral works are the "Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge" (1937), the "Sinfonia da Requiem" (1940), the "Four Sea Interludes" (1945) and "The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra" (1945). The Variations, an affectionate tribute to Britten's teacher, range from comic parodies of Italian operatic clichés and Viennese waltzes to a strutting march, reflecting the rise of militarism in Europe, and a Mahlerian funeral march; the piece ends with an exuberant fugal finale. The Sinfonia moves from an opening "Lacrymosa" filled with fear and lamentation to a fierce Dies irae and then to a final "Requiem aeternam", described by the critic Herbert Glass as "the most uneasy 'eternal rest' possible". Mason considers the Sinfonia a failure: "less entertaining than usual, because its object is not principally to entertain but to express symphonically. It fails because it is neither picturesquely nor formally symphonic." The "Sea Interludes", adapted by Britten from the full score of "Peter Grimes", make a concert suite depicting the sea and the Borough in which the opera is set; the character of the music is strongly contrasted between "Dawn", "Sunday Morning", "Moonlight" and "Storm". The commentator Howard Posner observes that there is not a bar in the interludes, no matter how beautiful, that is free of foreboding. "The Young Person's Guide", based on a theme by Purcell, showcases the orchestra's individual sections and groups, and gained widespread popularity from the outset. Christopher Headington calls the work "exuberant and uncomplicated music, scored with clarity and vigour [that] fits well into Britten's "oeuvre"." David Matthews calls it "a brilliant educational exercise."


title: Benjamin Britten

text: Unlike his English predecessors such as Elgar and Vaughan Williams, and composers from mainland Europe whom he admired, including Mahler and Shostakovich, Britten was not a classical symphonist. His youthful "jeux d'esprit" the "Simple Symphony" (1934) is in conventional symphonic structure, observing sonata form and the traditional four-movement pattern, but of his mature works his "Spring Symphony" (1949) is more a song cycle than a true symphony, and the concertante Cello Symphony (1963) is an attempt to balance the traditional concerto and symphony. During its four movements the Cello Symphony moves from a deeply pessimistic opening to a finale of radiant happiness rare for Britten by this point. The composer considered it "the finest thing I've written."


title: Benjamin Britten

text: The Piano Concerto (1938) was at first criticised for being too light-hearted and virtuoso. In 1945 Britten revised it, replacing a skittish third movement with a more sombre passacaglia that, in Matthews's view, gives the work more depth, and makes the apparent triumph of the finale more ambivalent. The Violin Concerto (1939), finished in the first weeks of the World War, has virtuoso elements, but they are balanced by lyrical and elegiac passages, "undoubtedly reflecting Britten's growing concern with the escalation of world hostilities." Neither concerto is among Britten's most popular works, but in the 21st century the Violin Concerto, which is technically difficult, has been performed more frequently than before, both in the concert hall and on record, and has enthusiastic performers and advocates, notably violinist Janine Jansen.


title: Benjamin Britten

text: Britten's incidental music for theatre, film and radio, much of it unpublished, was the subject of an essay by William Mann, published in 1952 in the first detailed critical assessment of Britten's music to that date. Of these pieces the music for a radio play, "The Rescue", by Edward Sackville-West, is praised by the musicologist Lewis Foreman as "of such stature and individual character as to be worth a regular place alongside [Britten's] other dramatic scores." Mann finds in this score pre-echoes of the second act of "Billy Budd", while Foreman observes that Britten "appears to have made passing allusions to "The Rescue" in his final opera, "Death in Venice".


title: Benjamin Britten

text: Britten's close friendship with Rostropovich inspired the Cello Sonata (1961) and three suites for solo cello (1964–71). String quartets featured throughout Britten's composing career, from a student work in 1928 to his Third String Quartet (1975). The Second Quartet, from 1945, was written in homage to Purcell; Mason considered it Britten's most important instrumental work to that date. Referring to this work, Keller writes of the ease with which Britten, relatively early in his compositional career, solves "the modern sonata problem – the achievement of symmetry and unity within an extended ternary circle based on more than one subject." Keller likens the innovatory skill of the Quartet to that of Walton's Viola Concerto. The third Quartet was Britten's last major work; the critic Colin Anderson said of it in 2007, "one of Britten's greatest achievements, one with interesting allusions to Bartók and Shostakovich, and written with an economy that opens out a depth of emotion that can be quite chilling. The "Gemini Variations" (1965), for flute, violin and piano duet, were based on a theme of Zoltán Kodály and written as a virtuoso piece for the 13-year-old Jeney twins, musical prodigies whom Britten had met in Budapest in the previous year. For Osian Ellis, Britten wrote the Suite for Harp (1969), which Joan Chissell in "The Times" described as "a little masterpiece of concentrated fancy". "Nocturnal after John Dowland" (1963) for solo guitar was written for Julian Bream and has been praised by Benjamin Dwyer for its "semantic complexity, prolonged musical argument, and philosophical depth".


title: Benjamin Britten

text: Britten's fellow-composers had divided views about him. To Tippett he was "simply the most musical person I have ever met", with an "incredible" technical mastery; some contemporaries, however, were less effusive. In Tippett's view, Walton and others were convinced that Britten and Pears were leaders of a homosexual conspiracy in music, a belief Tippett dismisses as ridiculous, inspired by jealousy of Britten's postwar successes. Leonard Bernstein considered Britten "a man at odds with the world", and said of his music: "[I]f you hear it, not just listen to it superficially, you become aware of something very dark." The tenor Robert Tear, who was closely associated with Britten in the latter part of the composer's career, made a similar point: "There was a great, huge abyss in his soul ... He got into the valley of the shadow of death and couldn't get out."


title: Benjamin Britten

text: In the decade after Britten's death, his standing as a composer in Britain was to some extent overshadowed by that of the still-living Tippett. The film-maker Tony Palmer thought that Tippett's temporary ascendancy might have been a question of the two composers' contrasting personalities: Tippett had more warmth and had made fewer enemies. In any event this was a short-lived phenomenon; Tippett adherents such as the composer Robert Saxton soon rediscovered their enthusiasm for Britten, whose audience steadily increased during the final years of the 20th century. Britten has had few imitators; Brett describes him as "inimitable, possessed of ... a voice and sound too dangerous to imitate." Nevertheless, after his death Britten was lauded by the younger generation of English composers to whom, in the words of Oliver Knussen, he became "a phenomenal father-figure". Brett believes that he affected every subsequent British composer to some extent: "He is a key figure in the growth of British musical culture in the second half of the 20th century, and his effect on everything from opera to the revitalization of music education is hard to overestimate."


title: Benjamin Britten

text: Whittall believes that one reason for Britten's enduring popularity is the "progressive conservatism" of his music. He generally avoided the avant-garde, and did not challenge the conventions in the way that contemporaries such as Tippett did. Perhaps, says Brett, "the tide that swept away serialism, atonality and most forms of musical modernism and brought in neo-Romanticism, minimalism and other modes of expression involved with tonality carried with it renewed interest in composers who had been out of step with the times." Britten defined his mission as a composer in very simple terms: composers should aim at "pleasing people today as seriously as we can".


title: Benjamin Britten

text: Britten, though a reluctant conductor and a nervous pianist, was greatly sought after in both capacities. The piano accompanist Gerald Moore wrote in his memoirs about playing at all the main music festivals except for Aldeburgh, because "as the presiding genius there is the greatest accompanist in the world, my services are not needed." Britten's recital partnership with Pears was his best-known collaboration, but he also accompanied Kathleen Ferrier, Rostropovich, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, James Bowman and John Shirley-Quirk, among others. Though usually too nervous to play piano solos, Britten often performed piano duets with Clifford Curzon or Richter, and chamber music with the Amadeus Quartet. The composers whose works, other than his own, he most often played were Mozart and Schubert; the latter, in Murray Perahia's view, was Britten's greatest idol. As a boy and young man, Britten had intensely admired Brahms, but his admiration waned to nothing, and Brahms seldom featured in his repertory.


title: Benjamin Britten

text: Singers and players admired Britten's conducting, and David Webster rated it highly enough to offer him the musical directorship of the Covent Garden Opera in 1952. Britten declined; he was not confident of his ability as a conductor and was reluctant to spend too much time performing rather than composing. As a conductor, Britten's repertory included Purcell, Bach, Haydn, Mozart and Schubert, and occasional less characteristic choices including Schumann's "Scenes from Goethe's Faust"; Elgar's "The Dream of Gerontius" and "Introduction and Allegro"; Holst's "Egdon Heath" and short pieces by Percy Grainger.


title: Benjamin Britten

text: Britten, like Elgar and Walton before him, was signed up by a major British recording company, and performed a considerable proportion of his output on disc. For the Decca Record Company he made some monaural records in the 1940s and 1950s, followed, with the enthusiastic support of the Decca producer John Culshaw, by numerous stereophonic versions of his works. Culshaw wrote, "The happiest hours I have spent in any studio were with Ben, for the basic reason that it did not seem that we were trying to make records or video tapes; we were just trying to make music."


title: Benjamin Britten

text: In May 1943 Britten made his debut in the Decca studios, accompanying Sophie Wyss in five of his arrangements of French folk songs. The following January he and Pears recorded together, in Britten's arrangements of British folk songs, and the following day, in duet with Curzon he recorded his "Introduction and Rondo alla burlesca" and "Mazurka elegiaca". In May 1944 he conducted the Boyd Neel string orchestra, Dennis Brain and Pears in the first recording of the "Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings", which has frequently been reissued, most recently on CD.


title: Benjamin Britten

text: Britten's first operatic recording was "The Turn of the Screw", made in January 1955 with the original English Opera Group forces. In 1957 he conducted "The Prince of the Pagodas" in an early stereo recording, supervised by Culshaw. Decca's first major commercial success with Britten came the following year, with "Peter Grimes", which has, at 2013, never been out of the catalogues since its first release. From 1958 Britten conducted Decca recordings of many of his operas and vocal and orchestral works, including the "Nocturne" (1959), the "Spring Symphony" (1960) and the "War Requiem" (1963). The last sold in unexpectedly large numbers for a classical set, and thereafter Decca unstintingly made resources available to Culshaw and his successors for Britten recordings. Sets followed of "Albert Herring" (1964), the "Sinfonia da Requiem" (1964), "Curlew River" (1965), "A Midsummer Night's Dream" (1966), "The Burning Fiery Furnace" (1967), "Billy Budd" (1967) and many of the other major works. In 2013, to mark the anniversary of Britten's birth, Decca released a set of 65 CDs and one DVD, "Benjamin Britten – Complete Works". Most of the recordings were from Decca's back catalogue, but in the interests of comprehensiveness a substantial number of tracks were licensed from 20 other companies including EMI, Virgin Classics, Naxos, Warner and NMC.


title: Benjamin Britten

text: As a pianist and conductor in other composers' music, Britten made many recordings for Decca. Among his studio collaborations with Pears are sets of Schubert's "Winterreise" and "Die schöne Müllerin", Schumann's "Dichterliebe", and songs by Haydn, Mozart, Bridge, Ireland, Holst, Tippett and Richard Rodney Bennett. Other soloists whom Britten accompanied on record were Ferrier, Rostropovich and Vishnevskaya. As a conductor he recorded a wide range of composers, from Purcell to Grainger. Among his best-known Decca recordings are Purcell's "The Fairy-Queen", Bach's "Brandenburg Concertos", Cantata 151, Cantata 102 and "St John Passion", Elgar's "The Dream of Gerontius" and Mozart's last two symphonies.


title: Benjamin Britten

text: State honours awarded to Britten included Companion of Honour (Britain) in 1953; Commander of the Royal Order of the Polar Star (Sweden) in 1962; the Order of Merit (Britain) in 1965; and a life peerage (Britain) in July 1976, as "Baron Britten, of Aldeburgh in the County of Suffolk". He received honorary degrees and fellowships from 19 conservatories 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 Wihuri Sibelius Prize (1965); the Mahler Medal (Bruckner and Mahler Society of America, 1967); the Léonie Sonning Music Prize (Denmark, 1968); the Ernst von Siemens Music 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 Grammy Awards in 1963 and 1977 for the "War Requiem".


title: Benjamin Britten

text: The Red House, 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. The Benjamin Britten Music Academy in Lowestoft, founded in the composer's honour, was completed in 1979; it is an 11–18 co-educational day school, with ties to the Britten-Pears Foundation.


title: Benjamin Britten

text: A memorial stone to Britten was unveiled in the north choir aisle of Westminster Abbey in 1978. There are memorial plaques to him at three of his London homes: 173 Cromwell Road, 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.


title: Benjamin Britten

text: 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.


title: Benjamin Britten

text: Tony Palmer made three documentary films about Britten: "Benjamin Britten & his Festival" (1967); "A Time There Was" (1979); and "Nocturne" (2013).


title: Benjamin Britten

text: In 2019, Britten's "War Requiem" was selected by the U.S. Library of Congress for preservation in the National Recording Registry for being "culturally, historically, and aesthetically significant".


title: Benjamin Britten

text: In April 2022 a community project was launched, with a special fundraising event, when Lowestoft-born broadcaster and children's author Zeb Soanes and a team of local people in Lowestoft, unveiled a maquette of a statue of Britten as a boy, by sculptor Ian Rank-Broadley, to be installed on the sea-front.


title: Benjamin Britten

text: In September 2012, to mark the composer's forthcoming centenary, the Britten-Pears Foundation launched "Britten 100", a collaboration of leading organisations in the performing arts, publishing, broadcasting, film, academia and heritage. Among the events were the release of a feature film "Benjamin Britten – Peace and Conflict", and a centenary exhibition at the British Library. The Royal Mint issued a 50-pence piece, to mark the centenary – the first time a composer has featured on a British coin.


title: Benjamin Britten

text: Centenary performances of the "War Requiem" were given at eighteen locations in Britain. Opera productions included "Owen Wingrave" at Aldeburgh, "Billy Budd" at Glyndebourne, "Death in Venice" by English National Opera, "Gloriana" by The Royal Opera, and "Peter Grimes", "Death in Venice" and "A Midsummer Night's Dream" by Opera North. "Peter Grimes" was performed on the beach at Aldeburgh, opening the 2013 Aldeburgh Festival in June 2013, with Steuart Bedford conducting and singers from the Chorus of Opera North and the Chorus of the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, described by "The Guardian" as "a remarkable, and surely unrepeatable achievement."


title: Benjamin Britten

text: Internationally, the anniversary was marked by performances of the "War Requiem", "Peter Grimes" and other works in four continents. In the US the centennial events were described as "coast to coast", with a Britten festival at Carnegie Hall, and performances at the New York Philharmonic, the Metropolitan Opera and Los Angeles Opera.


title: Curitiba

text: Curitiba () is the capital and largest city in the state of Paraná in Brazil. The city's population was 1,948,626 , making it the eighth most populous city in Brazil and the largest in Brazil's South Region. The Curitiba Metropolitan area comprises 26 municipalities with a total population of over 3.2 million (IBGE estimate in 2010), making it the seventh most populous metropolitan area in the country.


title: Curitiba

text: The city sits on a plateau at above sea level. It is located west of the seaport of Paranaguá and is served by the Afonso Pena International and Bacacheri airports. Curitiba is an important cultural, political, and economic center in Latin America and hosts the Federal University of Paraná, established in 1912.


title: Curitiba

text: In the 1700s, Curitiba's favorable location between cattle-breeding countryside and marketplaces led to a successful cattle trade and the city's first major expansion. Later, between 1850 and 1950, it grew due to logging and agricultural expansion in Paraná State (first Araucaria angustifolia logging, later mate and coffee cultivation and in the 1970s wheat, corn and soybean cultivation). In the 1850s, waves of European immigrants arrived in Curitiba, mainly Germans, Italians, Poles and Ukrainians, contributing to the city's economic and cultural development. Nowadays, only small numbers of immigrants arrive, primarily from Middle Eastern and other South American countries.


title: Curitiba

text: Curitiba's biggest expansion occurred after the 1960s, with innovative urban planning that allowed the population to grow from some hundreds of thousands to more than a million people. Curitiba's economy is based on industry and services and is the fourth largest in Brazil. Economic growth occurred in parallel to a substantial inward flow of Brazilians from other parts of the country, as approximately half of the city's population was not born in Curitiba.


title: Curitiba

text: Curitiba is one of the few Brazilian cities with a very high Human Development Index (0.856) and in 2010 it was awarded the Global Sustainable City Award, given to cities and municipalities that excel in sustainable urban development. According to US magazine "Reader's Digest", Curitiba is the best "Brazilian Big City" in which to live. Curitiba's crime rate is considered low by Brazilian standards and the city is considered one of the safest cities in Brazil for youth. The city is also regarded as the best in which to invest in Brazil. Curitiba was one of the host cities of the 1950 FIFA World Cup, and again for the 2014 FIFA World Cup. Despite its good social indicators, the city has a higher unemployment rate than other cities in the state.


title: Curitiba

text: One theory is that the name "Curitiba" comes from the Tupi words "kurí tyba", "many araucária seeds" due to the large number of Paraná pines pinecones in the region prior to its founding.


title: Curitiba

text: Another version, also using words from the Tupi language, is that it originates in the combination of "kurit" (pine tree) and "yba" (large amount).


title: Curitiba

text: The Portuguese, who founded a settlement on the site in 1693, named it "Vila da Nossa Senhora da Luz dos Pinhais" (Village of "Our Lady of the Light" of the Pines).


title: Curitiba

text: The name was changed to "Curitiba" in 1721. Curitiba officially became a town in 1812, spelling its name as "Curityba."


title: Curitiba

text: An alternative spelling was "Coritiba." This was used in press and state documents. A state decree in 1919 settled the dispute by adopting "Curitiba."


title: Curitiba

text: At the end of the 17th century, Curitiba's agriculture was only for subsistence and its main economic activities were mineral extraction. Waves of European immigrants arrived after 1850, mainly Poles, Italians, Germans (mostly Volga Germans from Russia) and Ukrainians.


title: Curitiba

text: Cattlemen drove their herds from Rio Grande do Sul to the state of São Paulo, turning Curitiba into an important intermediate trading post.


title: Curitiba

text: Around the beginning of the 20th century, Curitiba benefited from the wealth of the yerba mate mills. The owners (known as ""barões da erva-mate"") built mansions in the capital. These have mostly been preserved in the districts of Batel and Alto da Glória.


title: Curitiba

text: In the 1940s and 1950s, Alfred Agache, co-founder of the French Society for Urban Studies, was hired to produce its first city plan. It emphasized a "star" of boulevards, with public amenities downtown, an industrial district and sanitation. It was followed in part, but the plan was too expensive to complete.


title: Curitiba

text: Curitiba has a typically humid subtropical highland climate (Köppen: "Cfb)," with some characteristics of the oceanic climate due to its abundant precipitation all year round and the relatively warm, but not hot, summer. The city's mild winters, due to its low latitude, differentiate its climate from typically temperate ones. It is located on a plateau and the flat terrain with flooded areas contribute to its mild and damp winter, with an average minimum temperature of in July. Temperatures can drop below on the coldest days. Daytime temperatures in winter are usually pleasant, around . However, during cold snaps, daytime temperatures might not rise above , and on rare occasions, above . During summertime, the average temperature is around at daytime, but it can get above on the hottest days. However, temperatures above at night are rare. Snowfall was experienced in 1889, 1892, 1912, 1928 (two days), 1942, 1955, 1957, 1962, 1975, 1988, 2013 and 2020. Accumulation, however, is much rarer. It was last recorded in 1975.


title: Curitiba

text: The terrain's flatness hinders water drainage after rain, therefore providing water vapor for the atmosphere. Cold fronts come year round, often from Antarctica and Argentina, bringing tropical storms in summer and cold winds and frost in the winter. They can move very quickly, with no more than one day between the start of the southern winds and the start of rain. Curitiba's weather is also influenced by the dry air masses that dominate Brazil's midwest most of the year, bringing hot and dry weather, sometimes even in winter.


title: Curitiba

text: Curitiba is located in the area of the Ombrophilous Mixed Forest (also known as Araucaria moist forests), a sub-type of the Atlantic Forest. In Curitiba it is possible to find steppes, forests and other formations. The local vegetation consists of remnants of the Paraná (or Brazilian) pine ("Araucaria angustifolia"), which resisted the efforts of settlers. The Paraná pines are in private and public areas and are protected from logging. The Municipal Secretariat of the Environment maintains a botanical garden and three greenhouses that produce 150,000 native and exotic seedlings: 16,000 fruit trees, 260,000 flowers, foliage and underbrush specimens and the maintenance of another 350,000 seedlings.


title: Curitiba

text: Curitiba's green area itself matches the size of other large Brazilian cities. The vegetation of Curitiba encompasses a large population of purple and yellow "ipês" (tabebuias), who flower at the end of winter. The yellow ipê is one of the city's most common tree.


title: Curitiba

text: The catchment area of Curitiba consists of rivers and streams that cross the city in different directions, grouped in six river basins. The main rivers that form the city's watershed are: Atuba River, Belém River, Barigüi River, Passaúna River, Ribeirão dos Padilhas and the Iguaçu River, all with characteristics of dendritic drainage. Curitiba has been working since the 1970s on alternatives to minimize the negative impacts of urbanization on rivers. An example is the construction of parks along the rivers with artificial lakes, which absorb and retain water for longer periods of time, minimizing floods.


title: Curitiba

text: After many studies of local water flows, most rivers were found to be subject to a canalization process. Other alternatives developed to minimize the negative effects of urbanization are the implementation of programs for environmental education, inspection and monitoring, elaboration and application of legislation and infrastructure works.


title: Curitiba

text: The city covers on the First Plateau of Paraná. Curitiba has a topography of smooth, rounded hills, giving it a relatively regular shape. The city has an average altitude of above sea level. The highest point is to the north at , and with lower altitudes at to the south.


title: Curitiba

text: Mountain ranges and sets of rocky hills surround parts of the city, including the "Serra do Mar", a hill range between the shore of the Atlantic Ocean and the First Plateau in Paraná.


title: Curitiba

text: , the mayor is Rafael Greca, who replaced Gustavo Fruet. The City Council of Curitiba has 38 councillors elected since 2004. Curitiba is divided into nine regional governments (equivalent to subprefecture), who manage the municipality's 75 districts. The "Rua da Cidadania" ("Street of Citizenship") is the symbol of administrative decentralization; it is a reference point and a meeting place. Several units are annexed to public transport terminals. Their nuclei offer services in the local, state and federal areas.


title: Curitiba

text: Jaime Lerner is perhaps Curitiba's best-known mayor. He was the mayor three times, the first time in the early 1970s. His leadership was crucial to some major changes in the city. Curitiba has built parks instead of canals to reduce flooding; used parks to make the city more liveable; pedestrianised the downtown area; built a Bus Rapid Transit (BRT), a bus system that works similarly to a light rail system; and started a massive recycling scheme that included giving people bus tokens in return for waste.


title: Curitiba

text: According to the 2010 IBGE Census, 1,678,965 people resided in the city of Curitiba. The census revealed 1,381,938 White people (78.9%), 294,127 Pardo (Multiracial) people (16.8%), 49,978 Afro-Brazilian people (2.9%), 23,138 Asian people (1.4%), 2,693 Amerindian people (0.2%).


title: Curitiba

text: In 2010, the city had 359,201 opposite-sex couples and 974 same-sex couples. The population of Curitiba was 52.3% female and 47.7% male.


title: Curitiba

text: As with most of Southern Brazil's population, Curitiba is mostly inhabited by European descendants. The first Europeans to arrive were of Portuguese origin, during the 17th century. They intermarried with the native people and with the African slaves.


title: Curitiba

text: Up until the 19th century, the inhabitants of the city of Curitiba were natives and mixed-race, Portuguese and Spanish immigrants. In 1808 foreigners were granted the right to ownership of land, and in 1853 Parana became an independent province, and these events resulted in a substantial number of immigrants from Europe.


title: Curitiba

text: The Memorial of Polish Immigration was inaugurated on 13 December 1980, after the visit of Pope John Paul II in June. Its area is and was part of the former Candles plant. The seven wooden log houses are parts of this memorial area, as a memento of the Polish immigrants' struggles and faith. Objects like an old wagon, pipe of cabbage and a print of the Black Madonna of Częstochowa (patron saint of the Polish people), form parts of the memorial. The first group of Poles arrived in Curitiba around 1871. Curitiba has the biggest colony of Polish immigrants in Brazil.


title: Curitiba

text: Italian immigrants started arriving in Brazil in 1875 and in Curitiba in 1878, coming mainly from the Veneto and Trento regions of Northern Italy. They settled mostly in the Santa Felicidade neighborhood, still a centre of the Italian community.


title: Curitiba

text: Nearly 20,000 Ukrainian immigrants settled there between 1895 and 1897, consisting mostly of peasants from Galicia who immigrated to Brazil to become farmers. Around 300,000 Ukrainian-Brazilians live in Paraná. The State of Paraná has the largest Ukrainian community and Slavic community.