Tag: Benjamin Britten

  • It is cruel that music should be so beautiful

    “It is cruel, you know, that music should be so beautiful.  It has the beauty of loneliness and of pain: of strength and freedom.  The beauty of disappointment and never-satisfied love.  The cruel beauty of nature, and everlasting beauty of monotony.” Benjamin Britten

  • Britten on composing

    “Composing is like driving down a foggy road toward a house.  Slowly you see more details of the house – the colour of the slates and bricks, the shape of the windows.  The notes are the bricks and mortar of the house.” – Benjamin Britten. Cited in: Jarski, Rosemarie (2005) Great British Wit.  London: Ebury…

  • Britten on The Rake’s Progress

    “I liked everything about the opera but the music.” – Benjamin Britten on Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress Cited in: Jarski, Rosemarie (2005) Great British Wit.  London: Ebury Press, p. 203.

  • Accessibility for kids

    Benjamin Britten wrote the score to Instruments of the Orchestra, which would become the concert work, Young Persons Guide to the Orchestra. The theme to the score was based on a hornpipe from Purcell’s Abdelzer. Britten commented to the producer, Basil Wright, that “I was never really worried that it was too sophisticated for kids…