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The Study of Britten: Triadic Harmony and Tonal Structure
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 1979
Extract
In 1946, the critic Scott Goddard ended an enthusiastic and judicious discussion of Britten's achievement with this comment: ‘Whoever tries to discover the intrinsic quality of the music of Britten and his generation must take courage from what they possess in only a small degree, sufficient knowledge to form a judgment.’ Things ought to be very different today. We are able to consider Britten's life and work as a complete whole. We are able, and possibly even willing, to read the millions of words which have been written about him. If anything, the problem is not that we have too little knowledge to form a judgment, but too much; with so much material, so much information, so many opinions, to make any kind of decision about it all can seem, to the late twentieth-century mind, faintly improper. Worse still, I can state with some confidence that our knowledge of Britten and his music is still far from complete: the archive in the Britten-Pears Library at Aldeburgh contains a wealth of unpublished material of all kinds, from the diaries and letters which will no doubt be extensively quoted in Donald Mitchell's official biography, to sketches and drafts which will eventually enable authoritative discussion about Britten's working methods to take place.
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- Research Article
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- Copyright © 1981 The Royal Musical Association and the Authors
References
NOTES
1 A. L. Bacharach (ed.). British Music of Our Time (London, 1951; reprint of the 1946 edition), 211.Google Scholar
2 For a survey of the range of current projects, see Ward, Colin, The Great Britten Industry', New Society, 29 November 1979, 499f.Google Scholar
3 Keller's study was first published in Music and Letters, xxix (1948), and reprinted with a few minor revisions in Benjamin Britten. A Commentary on His Works from a Group of Specialists, ed. D. Mitchell and H. Keller (London, 195s), 319–51.Google Scholar
4 Musical Trends in the Twentieth Century (London, 1952), 324.Google Scholar
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6 The Musical Times, cxx (1979), 421f.Google Scholar
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