BBC Music Magazine

Benjamin Britten

Composer of the Week is broadcast on Radio 3 at 12pm, Monday to Friday. Programmes in September are:

29 August – 2 September Buxtehude

5-9 September Schubert

12-16 September Bruckner

19-23 September Emilie Mayer (rpt)

26-30 September Weber

Britten is widely celebrated for his profound connection with Suffolk’s flat, open landscapes, its coast and its rich birdlife of waders and waterfowl, one of which is celebrated in his opera (or ‘Church Parable’) Curlew River. It’s a curious paradox, then, that much of his music, even some that is most apparently rooted in that East Anglian region – including in his great ‘home coming’ opera of 1945, Peter Grimes – was profoundly inspired by music from even further East, virtually the other side of the world.

It was not through travelling East, but westwards across the Atlantic that Britten had his first encounter with Balinese music. In 1939, despondent about the rise of fascism, Europe’s fate and that of his own country, Britten left for the US just months before the outbreak of

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