Composers: In the Call of the Cuckoo

Benjamin Britten began the celebration of his 50th birthday by conducting the London Symphony last September in a concert dedicated to himself. He took the...

Music: Brilliant Britten

The opening of Benjamin Britten's latest opera, Death in Venice, poses the question of why no composer has previously tried to set Thomas Mann's writings to...

Composers: Britten-san

During a tour of Tokyo eight years ago, Composer Benjamin Britten was introduced to "a totally new operatic experience"—a Japanese No drama. Fascinated by the...

Music: Britten's Week

U.S. music lovers have tried hard to keep abreast of Britain's fast-moving young (35) Composer Benjamin Britten. They have seen and heard three of his operas...

Music: Modern Masterwork

I am the enemy you killed, my friend. I knew you in this dark; for so you frowned Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed. I parried; but my hands were...

Music: Boos for Benjy

The program notes read like a travel brochure: "Let us walk through Mozart's garden . . . We enter by an unassuming little gate: the Symphony in D [K.84] of...

Music: Rather Enthusiastic

In the past three years, Manhattan concert-and operagoers have heard plenty of English Composer Benjamin Britten's music (Peter Grimes, The Rape of Lucretia)...

Music: Shakespeare's Equal?

When British Composer Benjamin Britten decided last October to write an opera on Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream, he faced a prickly problem: how to...

Music: Britten's Seventh

"Last night a masterpiece was born, and it will outlive the lot of us," declared London's Sunday Graphic. Not all the critics were that ecstatic, but London...

Music: Opera's New Face

(See Cover) On stage, the beefy Wagnerian gods of Gotterdämmerung snorted and bellowed in their Valhalla. In the wings, a huge Siegfried, mounted on a ladder,...