Word: britten
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...première of Benjamin Britten's War Requiem, Coventry, England...
...located there. Like most major German cities, Stuttgart (pop. 650,000) had long maintained an opera house, with a resident but minimal ballet company to help out where needed. In 1960 John Cranko, then a 33-year-old South Africa-born staff choreographer of the Royal Ballet, staged Benjamin Britten's The Prince of the Pagodas in Stuttgart. He was immediately engaged as ballet director, with a mandate to build a company of international quality...
Under the threat of a strike by Radcliffe employees, the Radcliffe College Council pondered possible action. Claiming that it was not the proper body to weigh specific labor grievances, the Council delegated its negotiating power to administrative vice president J. Boyd Britten. Most of the workers' complaints centered on low wages...
THIS SORT of good-humored piece is almost beyond criticism. Yet I feel that its simplicity, facility, and accessibility collapsed into a mere smile of irritating urbanity. Nearly every one of Britten's works is charming; in fact, so is nearly every British and American work that is ever performed. Billy the Kid, Rodeo, Red Pony, Appalachian Spring, The Incredible Flutist, and Tender Land are all charming. The Tallis and Greensleeves fantasias, Young Person's Guide, Ceremony of Carols, and Spring Symphony are all exquisitely charming, irresistibly delicious. But I, for one, am slowly drowning in this unendurably "childlike" floodtide...
...delight in gratuitous perfumes cannot be disciplined by more profferments of dusty oleander. This never-ending recovery of "adolescence" and "national roots" on the part of Anglo-Saxon composers, their incessant celebration of the precious and popular, reaches an apotheosis of sorts when a British commentator asserts that Benjamen Britten's personality "does not show Stravinsky's uncomplicated sadomasochism, Schönberg's desexualization of music, or the naive barbarism of Bartok." There is really no answer to this kind of a chocolate-cream musicologist except to suggest that he write his glutinous panegyrics on the backs of sugar packets...