The Puccini of Lowestoft

The classic themes of conscience and dissent breathe fresh life into Benjamin Britten's music
Benjamin Britten's reputation as a composer stands as high as it has ever done, 30 years after his death in December 1976. In his case there has been hardly any of the negative "re-evaluation" so many popular artists suffer. Part of the reason is the extraordinary range of Britten's musical styles, and that variety reflects the extensive influences on him. Purcell's cadences and the choral traditions of the English cathedral; the Elizabethan melancholy of John Dowland's compositions for the lute; the continental experimentalism of Stravinsky, Mahler and Berg; the sounds of Japanese No drama: all went into the Britten mix at some stage during almost half a century of creative composition.

His fluently confident technique, however, stands at the point where virtuosity turns into genius. He absorbed and transmuted these influences so that his own subsequent compositions were no mere pastiches: they were invariably fresh, original and authentically Britten. There are other composers who can do both the experimental and the traditional. Richard Strauss, for example, offered the boldly modernist dissonances of Salome in his early career and the lush harmonies of Der Rosenkavalier in his late maturity. But the ways of being Straussian seem to be a question of following the rules set by others - whether Schoenberg or Mozart - rather than setting his own stamp on his work. Britten's voice is always his own.

His eventual reputation as the patron saint of English music meant that Britten was garlanded with honours, including the Companion of Honour, the Order of Merit and, in his last months, a life peerage. But despite that establishment embrace, his career shows some of the difficulties of the artist in England.

Ralph Vaughan Williams, a professor at the Royal College of Music when Britten was a student there, was at the height of his influence during Britten's youth. The dead weight of Williams's ill-disciplined meanderings meant that a provincialising Victorian taste was having an artificially prolonged existence in English music. The early Britten, by contrast, was being influenced, through his teacher Frank Bridge, by Bela Bartok. But he was also quarrying deeper into his own national soil and reaching back beyond the 19th-century dead end of Charles Stamford, Hubert Parry and their complacent oratorios. The Hymn to Saint Cecilia (1942) recovered an English 17th-century sense of musical form while its libretto by Auden showed the same dazzling combination of a classical structure being interpreted by a modernist temperament.

Peter Grimes announced the arrival of a major Britten theme - that of the doomed and solitary outcast. The opera was first performed in 1945 and was part of the London cultural scene's postwar revival - showing Britten's ability to be part of a national consensus while standing aside from its triumphalism. This was, after all, an artist whose pacifism led him to leave England in 1939 as well as one whose ultimate loyalties impelled his return in 1942.

A dreary contemporary philistinism, wanting to reduce the works to the life, insists that Britten has to be considered first of all as a lover and idealiser of young boys and only subsequently as a major artist. A Boy Was Born (1933) was his first major choral work, and boyhood admittedly does rather recur in the oeuvre. "Ben's idea of a good opera," giggled a friend, "was one with boys in it. Ben's idea of a really good opera was one with lots and lots of boys in it."

Obsessing with the psychological origins of these crushes obscures what Britten did with the theme of boyhood. Most notably in Billy Budd (1951) and The Turn of the Screw (1954), he turned his affections, and his own uncertainty about them, to sublimely artistic use in his depiction of innocence and corruption, of love's dependence and its betrayal. In the history of opera he is only rivalled by Puccini in his treatment of those themes.

It is the works that matter and that survive the biographer's inquisitiveness. Which is just as well since the daily details of the life were pretty dull. A dentist's son from Lowestoft and a cricket fan, he was a self-disciplined, middle-class professional type. But those qualities of application were placed at the service of genius. The recordings of his conducting and piano performances show some of Britten's scrupulous intensity. His own music retains its power to affect the ear and the mind because its themes are the classic ones of conscience and the individual voice of protest. Britten's very English dissent is also a major chapter in the history of the English sublime.