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Racing Distance. What on earth leads a young man to write an opera these days? To Ernest Newman, who knows his composers well (his four-volume biography of Richard Wagner is a classic), Britten is a "thoroughbred"—the musical "combination of good pedigree, good build, and clean running and jumping." And Thoroughbred Benjamin Britten ("Benjy" to his friends) had simply found that opera is his best racing distance.
Britten's musical pedigree comes from his mother's side (his father was a dentist). At two, Benjy was calling himself
"Dear," demanding to be put at the piano by squawking "Dear pay pano." By the time he was a curly-haired five, like Mozart he was composing his own childish songs. His older brother and two sisters liked to play the piano, too, but the young composer managed to wrest it from them by announcing that he "had a thought," a line that soon became a household gag. At seven, he was taking scores instead of comics to bed to read. At nine, he had written his first string quartet.
School lessons came easy to him, especially mathematics. He was nimble at tennis and cricket; but his mother refused to let him play Rugby because she considered him too frail. She kept his mind on music, started him on the viola, an instrument he still plays well (and one which has given him a fine aptitude for writing for strings).
At 16, Benjy could have passed for one time Screen Moppet Freddie Bartholomew. With his first symphony, six string quartets, ten piano sonatas and dozens of songs under his belt, he won a scholarship to the Royal College of Music. He had already learned a great deal from the late Composer Frank Bridge, and later preserved his old teacher's name by writing Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge for orchestra. At the Royal College he flummoxed the professors by his musical knowledge. Said one to a London critic: "I've got a lad under me at the moment who has such an astonishing facility he makes me feel like an old duffer."
Impacts & Climaxes. Benjy's first professional job, a year after his father's death in 1933, was writing sound-track music for a government propaganda film called The King's Stamp, which Britten says "is about all I can remember about it." (He also wrote incidental music for Love from a Stranger, a movie starring Ann Harding.) What he did remember was how to apply movie technique to' opera—how to employ the quick dramatic climaxes and rapid impacts that make Peter Grimes a thriller.
At the movie studios, he met the friends who started him on the road to writing opera: Librettist Montagu Slater, and Poet Wystan Hugh Auden, who has taught Britten most of what he knows about fitting words & music. Some of Britten's best music is written to Auden texts: the Ballad of Heroes, the Hymn to St. Cecilia. Also some of the worst: Paul Bunyan, the first try at opera for both, flopped dismally when it was performed in 1941 at Columbia University. Auden introduced Britten into his circle of friends; until then, Britten says, he was "a rather dull, middle-class boy."