Known But Not Loved

No one can resist a centennial. Benjamin Britten, England's foremost classical composer, was born on Nov. 22, 1913, and the world of music has already started to mark the occasion. Go to and you'll find a list of more than 1,500 world-wide Britten-related events. That's a lot of performances—but, then, Britten wrote a lot of music. He was the 20th century's most successful opera composer, and most of his operas, including such masterpieces as "Peter Grimes" (1945) and "The Turn of the Screw" (1954), continue to be staged regularly. He also wrote vast amounts of vocal and instrumental music. And in addition to being a composer, he was a supremely gifted conductor and pianist who left behind dozens of remarkable recordings, not just of his own music but also of the works of Bach,Elgar,Mahler,Mozart,Purcell,Schubert,Schumann,Shostakovich and Tchaikovsky.

Benjamin Britten in 1946 ENLARGE
Benjamin Britten in 1946 Condé Nast Archive/Corbis

Yet critics as a group have been slow to admit Britten to the pantheon of top-tier composers. His unfailingly accessible, straightforwardly beautiful music, like that of Aaron Copland, his opposite number in America, is widely—if by no means universally—thought to be too "easy" to be great. But there's more to it than that. Throughout his life and to this day, Britten's reputation has risen and fallen for reasons that have at least as much to do with his complex personality.

For openers, he was a pacifist who refused to serve in World War II, instead registering in 1942 as a conscientious objector. Not surprisingly, Britten was angrily criticized by his contemporaries for refusing to fight the Nazis. Though he was granted an unconditional exemption from military service, his pacifism was viewed with contempt by many Britons, some of whom later found it hard to take his music seriously.

In addition, Britten was homosexual at a time when "gross indecency" between consenting adults was a criminal offense in England (it remained so until 1967). While his sexuality was never mentioned publicly, it was known to everyone in the world of music and fairly well known outside it. Britten never pretended to be heterosexual—he lived with a male partner, the tenor Peter Pears—and while homosexuality was no less common then than it is today, antigay attitudes were far more widespread in artistic circles. Well into the 1960s, you could still get a laugh by referring to Britten's 1951 all-male operatic version of Herman Melville's "Billy Budd" as "The Bugger's Opera."

By the time of Britten's death in 1976, the mere fact of his homosexuality was no longer controversial. But his own sexual attitudes have lately generated a different kind of controversy, for he never managed to come fully to terms with the fact that he was gay. Inhibited by his middle-class background, he led what appeared from the outside to be an impeccably "respectable" life, and his music leaves no doubt that he had equivocal feelings not just about his own attraction to men but about all forms of sexuality. Time and again he returns in his operas and other vocal music to the theme of childhood as an Eden-like idyll of innocence that is disrupted by the intrusion of sexually knowing adults.

Needless to say, it is no longer fashionable for artists to portray sex as anything other than a source of unshadowed pleasure, and Britten's longing to return to the innocence of his youth has led many present-day commentators to take an increasingly sniffish view of his work—especially in light of the fact that he himself was strongly attracted to pubescent boys. While it is not known for sure whether Britten ever became sexually involved with any of the boys whom he befriended throughout his adult life, his final opera, a stage version of Thomas Mann's "Death in Venice" (1973), has been interpreted as a not-so-veiled apologia for those who feel similar desires.

Given all this, it's not surprising that so many critics have had such sharply mixed feelings about Britten's music. What is more surprising is that it became popular anyway. According to Boosey & Hawkes, the publisher of many of his major works, he now brings in more royalties than any other Boosey-published composer save for Igor Stravinsky. Amazingly enough, he even ranks ahead of Rachmaninoff,Prokofiev and Richard Strauss.

To those who know and love Britten's emotionally direct, exquisitely well-crafted music, the reasons for its popularity need no explaining. I can't imagine how anyone could fail to be touched to the heart by such works as "Peter Grimes," the haunting Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings (1943), and "A Ceremony of Carols" (1942), a glittering Yuletide celebration scored for boys' voices and harp. But to delve into the particulars of his life is to know that he was no less closely acquainted with the deepest, darkest secrets of the human soul. Whatever else he was, Britten wasn't simple—and that is part of what makes him so enduringly fascinating.

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