Faber & Faber

Journeying Boy: Selected and Edited by John Evans

Synopsis:

Following the premiere of his first operatic masterpiece, Peter Grimes, Benjamin Britten was hailed as the greatest arrival in English music since Purcell. But how did this man from a modest, middle-class Suffolk family, the son of a rural dentist and an amateur musician, acquire a reputation as one of the most significant artists of his generation?

The answers are to be found in his childhood and adolescence, as documented by Britten himself in the daily journal he kept for a decade. From his arrival as a boarder at Gresham’s School and his private lessons in London with Frank Bridge, to his student days at the Royal College of Music and subsequent apprenticeship in London with the GPO Film Unit, the Group Theatre and at the BBC, we trace the progress of this journeying boy through the turbulent 1930s.

Collaborations with Auden, Isherwood, MacNeice and Grierson helped define Britten as an artist, and international acclaim at home and abroad soon followed. But these were difficult times, not least for Britten, who lost both parents within three years, and began to feel an outsider: a young man struggling with his homosexuality and with being a pacifist at a time of imminent war.

This intimate self-portrait of a young boy’s journey to adulthood, and the growth of his creative genius, offers us a fuller understanding of the man and the artist Britten was to become, and of the age in which he lived.

Tags:

Categorised as:

Music, Stage & Screen

Sub-categories:

Biography & Memoir; Classical Music

People & Characters:

Benjamin Britten

Genres & Themes:

Composers; Musicians; Musicology