Benjamin Britten (1913–1976) first fell under the influence of Balinese music when he met the Canadian composer Colin McPhee (1900–1964) in New York in 1939. McPhee had just returned from 6 years in Bali and in 1940, wrote his highly

When a marital disagreement between the king and queen of fairies spills into the human realm, it creates a tangle of misdirected spells and misplaced love affairs. With the fairies spreading accidental chaos far and wide, nothing is what it

Benjamin Britten was admitted to the National Heart Hospital on 2 May 1973. Under the care of the cardiologist Graham Hayward, Britten’s medical history noted a heart murmur in infancy and an episode of pneumonia. Aortic regurgitation was detected in

The performing arts venue Saddler’s Wells Theater is located in Clerkenwell, London. The present-day theatre is the sixth on the site since 1683, and when the venue reopened after World War II, it did so with the premiere of Benjamin

Benjamin Britten (1913-1976) wrote very little for solo piano – a mere 6 pieces – but one of them was the delightful Holiday Diary, written in 1934, when he was 21, but creating a scene as for a child half

Benjamin Britten was working on the full-length ballet The Prince of the Pagodas when he wrote to Edith Sitwell that he was “on the threshold of a new musical world.” This project, slated for Covent Garden, was set aside for

Britten’s Spring Symphony, completed in 1949, is a unique song-symphony. Not with just one movement set to words, as in Beethoven’s Ninth, but with English texts throughout. Most of the sources are from the 16th and 17th century, but a