This year marks the 50th anniversary of the death of Benjamin Britten, regarded today as probably the UK’s greatest composer, and commemorations are well under way. It’s a well-deserved celebration: Britten’s music is the heartland of 20th-century British classical composition. His opera Peter Grimes has been packing the Royal Opera House, while Glyndebourne is reviving Billy Budd; the Proms has programmed some of his finest orchestral works; and the London Philharmonic Orchestra launches its autumn season with the War Requiem. The Aldeburgh Festival, founded in 1948 by Britten himself, opens today and offers a veritable feast of his music.
Such anniversaries are always a chance to reassess a composer’s works, life and significance. In Britten’s case, the significance is generally unquestioned. The life, and its relation to his music, is another matter. The facts have not changed. What is different is the wider cultural climate from which it is viewed. Beyond the protective dome of the music world, it has grown considerably colder.
It is no secret that Britten liked young boys. He had a series of friendships with lads that typically began when they were 13; once they grew up, he would lose interest and move on. Periodically, this issue makes the headlines, before vanishing again behind the shield of his “greatness”. This is not news, but it has become more and more uncomfortable that classical music’s local hero displayed such tendencies.
He was born in 1913, the son of a dentist in Lowestoft, Suffolk; his chief mentor was the composer Frank Bridge, with whom he took private lessons, besides his studies at the Royal College of Music. Britten’s language, introverted and spare, virtually encapsulates the mystery, darkness, dreams and repressive constrictions of the mid-century. With Britten, less is always more; he lets you see his music’s fine bone structure delineated under its polished skin.
Left to right: EM Forster, Benjamin Britten and co-writer Eric Crozier at work on the opera ‘Billy Budd’ at Britten’s home in Aldeburgh, Suffolk, in 1949 (Photo: Kurt Hutton/Picture Post/Hulton Archive/Getty)
He was a practical, collaborative musician – conductor, pianist, accompanist to his partner, the tenor Peter Pears, and a team player with his librettists when writing operas. He was also ahead of his time on several counts. In private, he and Pears were a quietly known couple long before homosexuality was legalised, while in music, he pioneered community and youth opera with Noye’s Fludde and The Little Sweep – in the latter, the audience becomes the chorus. I fell in love with opera largely thanks to it; my parents gave me the LP when I was about seven and I nearly wore it out.
Few other composers have written so much music for children and young people, and with such a degree of sympathy, understanding and identification. The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra is another example (it is at the Proms on 6 September); I don’t know a single musician who doesn’t love it.
Over the years the film-maker John Bridcut has delved into Britten’s depths in two nuanced documentaries. Britten’s Endgame (2013), about his battle with ill health while writing his last opera Death in Venice, is being screened at the upcoming Aldeburgh Festival. Before that, in 2004, there was Britten’s Children; his book of the same title was published two years later. Here, some of the former boys talked about the composer with great affection and admiration. The only hurtful element, they recalled, was when their brilliant adult friend replaced them with a younger model.
“I was conscious when making the film that there was a risk that somebody was going to come out of the woodwork and say he was a paedophile,” Bridcut remembers now, “but nobody ever did.” Even if Britten felt something, he suggests, that didn’t mean he would do anything about it: “Some people were suspicious at the time, but he strikes me as someone of iron discipline.”
None of this is straightforward. “He wrote so much for children, was clearly really motivated by that, and that’s been a huge benefit to 20th-century music in this country and to amateur music-making,” Bridcut says. “If he’d been writing 30 years later, could he have done that in the same way? To have the courage to write Death in Venice at the end of his life is extraordinary. I don’t know if someone could do that now.” That opera is based on Thomas Mann’s novel about an ageing composer’s obsession with a beautiful young boy.
Britten in 1960 during rehearsals with the boys who were to play fairies in his latest opera, a version of ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ (Photo: Keystone Features/Getty)
Bridcut’s book detailed the composer’s enchantment with a schoolboy world of Molesworth quotes, nursery food, the Erich Kästner children’s novel Emil and the Detectives (and the film adaptation), and more. That fixation with innocence and childlike things, a seemingly idealised child alter-ego, almost calls to mind more recent reports of a very different musician: Michael Jackson.
Britten’s first love was Karl Hermann (“Wulff”) Scherchen, son of the German conductor Hermann Scherchen. They met, very briefly, in March 1934, when Scherchen was 13; Britten was about seven years his senior. The relationship deepened in 1938. This striking youth inspired some of Britten’s finest early works, including the Rimbaud settings Les illuminations as well as Young Apollo.
Everything changed in April 1939. Ahead of the Second World War, Britten and Peter Pears – who were musical partners but not yet romantic partners – left for the US where they stayed for three years. Scherchen, who lived in Cambridge, was later judged an “enemy alien” and shipped to an internment camp in Canada. He got out in 1942 by joining the Auxiliary Military Pioneer Corps and training as a bomb disposal expert. He and Britten met only once more, by which time the long break had done its work. Bridcut’s theory is that Britten’s US sojourn was probably engineered by Pears primarily to extricate the composer from Scherchen.
Bridcut traced Scherchen to Australia, where he lived under the name he adopted during the war, John Woolford. He had been happily married since 1943 and had a large family. He died aged 96 in 2016; his biography has since been written by Tony Scotland. Bridcut’s film showed him revisiting Britten’s house for the first time, visibly touched by his memories.
He claimed he’d had no physical relationship with Britten, yet Bridcut says that after several long interviews with Scherchen, he suspected otherwise. “I’m quite sure in my own mind that it was a sexual relationship,” he says. “I think he told me the truth, but not necessarily the whole truth… I think people watching the film can draw their own conclusions.”
Britten in 1964 in Aldeburgh, where he founded the Aldeburgh Festival in 1948 (Photo: Brian Seed/Getty)
In Britten’s opera The Turn of the Screw, based on the Henry James story about a governess trying to save two children from the ghosts of their abusers, the most famous line is from a poem by WB Yeats: “The ceremony of innocence is drowned.” Several of his other operas are also about innocence, corruption and society’s cruelty towards outsiders and misfits. Peter Grimes (1945), after a poem by George Crabbe, The Borough, depicts a Suffolk fisherman destroyed by his neighbours after successive boy apprentices die working for him. Billy Budd concerns the execution of an attractive young sailor who has accidentally killed a superior officer. Finally there is Death in Venice.
All are modern classics: powerful, edgy dramas set to magnificently constructed and often deeply moving music. Still, the recurring topics are obvious. “It’s the age-old thing,” Bridcut says. “How much do you separate the personal life from the art? That’s a big conundrum. I’m suspicious of the wish to make the personal life infect the way we view the art.
“The thing is,” he continues, “that artists of all sorts are extraordinary people, and in many cases it’s like having a bit of a screw loose. Their talent is so consuming that other parts of their life suffer, and it’s part of the curse, in a way, of being a very talented artist.”
There are other ways to look at Britten, however. In 2024, the Guardian swapped its sports and arts reviewers for a day and sent a football reviewer, an opera novice, to cover The Turn of the Screw. Viewing it with a fresh eye, he termed it “Jimmy Savile with songs” and queried why such a work was even being performed.
Britten died on 4 December 1976, aged 63, having been bestowed with a life peerage and the Order of Merit. He was fortunate to live when he did; today he might well have been faced with “cancellation”.
In 2026 we have had to learn to face complex truths in geopolitical spheres, but also in culture. Britten presents many. He may have had paedophilic inclinations, but he may not have acted on them. Some of his music might reflect his preoccupations, but it would be no less worthwhile for that. The whole thing feels disturbing; yet simultaneously, Peter Grimes remains, according to Bridcut, “one of the great operas of our time and of history”. In the end, we can only listen, then choose our responses for ourselves.
The Aldeburgh Festival runs from 12-28 June. Programme and tickets here