English National Opera Guide 24: Peter Grimes/Gloriana - Benjamin Britten

English National Opera Guide 24: Peter Grimes/Gloriana - Benjamin Britten

English National Opera Guides are ideal companions to the opera. They provide stimulating introductory articles together with the complete text of each opera in English and the original. This is a double volume dedicated to two masterpieces by Benjamin Britten. While Peter Grimes established Britten as a composer of international standing, Gloriana, composed for the coronation of Elizabeth II, has never enjoyed a comparable fame. The variety of mood, characterization and pace, in each, illustrates Britten’s exceptional gift for theatre. Commentaries on the scores reveal, for instance, how much the popular concert extracts gain from their context in the dramas. The essay by E.M. Forster – the inspiration for Peter Grimes – is reprinted here, and Michael Holroyd discusses Lytton Strachey’s controversial Elizabeth and Essex – the source for Gloriana.

English National Opera Guide 24: - About the Author:

Benjamin Britten (1913–76) was an English composer, conductor and pianist. He showed prodigious talent from an early age and first came to public attention with the a cappella choral work A Boy Was Born. He leapt to international fame with his opera Peter Grimes in 1945. This was followed by eight other major operas, including Billy Budd (1951), A Mid- summer’s Night Dream (1960) and Death in Venice (1973), as well as other orchestral, choral and chamber works, which established his reputation as one of the greatest composers of the twentieth century.