Word: brittens
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Vicious Society. Composer Britten regards this opera as "a subject very close to my heart-the struggle of the individual against the masses. The more vicious the society, the more vicious the individual." Actually, Grimes does not defy the masses, only their fury: he would like to be one of them...
Those who have seen Benjamin Britten find it hard to believe that he could conceive so violent a play as Peter Grimes: it is almost like Baby Snooks reading lines from Medea. He is the kind of person no one remembers meeting at a party. Usually to be seen in a loose tweed coat, slacks and sweater, his hands habitually stuffed into his pockets, he has a rather tight, lean, nosy face which wrinkles easily into a vinegarish smile under a widow's peak of crinkly hair. He has a very English embarrassment about expressing emotion about anything...
...Britten lived about six months in Brooklyn, and another three years in Amityville, Long Island. For a time Britten conducted an amateur orchestra in another Long Island town, just for the fun of it. The amateurs got so they could play a Mozart symphony creditably, then began thinking about a professional concert. Britten thought that amateurs should be content to stay amateurs...
Rosy Prospects. Britten regarded his visit to the U.S. as a vacation trip "rather from the general European atmosphere than from overwork." Though his knowledge of the U.S. is pretty well limited to New York City and suburbs, he found the U.S. "a very rosy prospect" for composers : "The American composer has little to grumble at; compared with English composers, nothing." In fact, he saw a danger of "excessive nationalism" in the way conductors indiscriminately played U.S. music, and in American composers' search for a style of their own. Says Britten: "No accident of nationality has ever excused...
...England was at war, and although he is a pacifist (his personal faith is something akin to the Quakers', though he is not much of a churchgoer), he thought he belonged there. But first he went to see Conductor Serge Koussevitzky, who had played some of Britten's music. Koussevitzky gave him $200 a month for five months to write an opera.* Says Koussevitzky: "If he had asked more we would have paid...