Music and Sexuality in Britten: Selected Essays

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University of California Press, Nov 17, 2006 - Biography & Autobiography - 280 pages
Philip Brett’s groundbreaking writing on Benjamin Britten altered the course of music scholarship in the later twentieth century. This volume is the first to gather in one collection Brett’s searching and provocative work on the great British composer. Some of the early essays opened the door to gay studies in music, while the discussions that Brett initiated reinvigorated the study of Britten’s work and inspired a generation of scholars to imagine “the new musicology.” Addressing urgent questions of how an artist’s sexual, cultural, and personal identity feeds into specific musical texts, Brett examines most of Britten’s operas as well as his role in the British cultural establishment of the mid-twentieth century. With some of the essays appearing here for the first time, this volume develops a complex understanding of Britten’s musical achievement and highlights the many ways that Brett expanded the borders of his field.
 

Contents

Rembering Philip Brett
1
1 Britten and Grimes
11
Sex Politics and Violence in the Librettos of Peter Grimes
34
3 Grimes and Lucretia
54
Brittens Billy Budd
70
5 Character and Caricature in Albert Herring
81
Male Relations in The Turn of the Screw
88
7 Brittens Dream
106
9 Keeping the Straight Line Intact? Brittens Relation to Folksong Purcell and His English Predecessors
154
10 Pacifism Political Action and Artistic Endeavor
172
11 Audens Britten
186
12 The Britten Era
204
AFTERWORD
225
PHILIP BRETTSBRITTEN SCHOLARSHIP
247
WORKS CITED
255
INDEX
267

8 Eros and Orientalism in Brittens Operas
129

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