Britten, Benjamin, Baron Britten of Aldeburgh definition of Britten, Benjamin, Baron Britten of Aldeburgh in the Free Online Encyclopedia.

Britten, Benjamin, Baron Britten of Aldeburgh, 1913–76, English composer. Britten is considered the most significant British composer since Purcell Purcell, Henry (pûr`səl), c.1659–1695, English composer and organist.
..... Click the link for more information. . As a youth he composed instrumental works, displaying technical brilliance and colorful orchestration. One example, The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra (1946), written for a film, is based on a theme by Purcell. His most characteristic expression is achieved in vocal music. His many song cycles and choral works include A Boy Was Born (1933) and A Ceremony of Carols (1942). Britten's great War Requiem (1962), based on the bitter war poems of Wilfred Owen Owen, Wilfred, 1893–1918, English poet, b. Oswestry, Shropshire. He served as a company commander in the Artist's Rifles during World War I and was killed in France on Nov. 4, 1918, one week before the armistice.
..... Click the link for more information. , was sung at the dedication in England of the reconstructed Coventry Cathedral, destroyed during World War II. In his operas, which include Paul Bunyan (1941), Peter Grimes (1945), The Rape of Lucretia (1946), The Turn of the Screw (1954), A Midsummer Night's Dream (1960), and Death in Venice (1973), he displayed a sensitivity to text and a fondness for variation technique, dynamic dissonance, and the use of ground basses. In 1976 Queen Elizabeth II named him a life peer.

Bibliography

See biographies by I. Holst (2d ed. 1970), E. W. White (new ed. 1970), and H. Carpenter (1992); study by P. Evans (1979).