Music and Sexuality in Britten: Selected EssaysPhilip 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 |
255 | |
267 | |
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Albert Aldeburgh ambiguous aria artists B-flat Benjamin Britten Billy Budd Billy’s Borough Brit British Britten and Grimes Britten and Pears Britten’s music Britten’s operas Carpenter century character chords chorus composer composer’s context course Crabbe’s critics Crozier Death in Venice dramatic E. M. Forster earlier effect Ellen English essay example feeling figure final folksong gamelan George Crabbe ghosts Governess Governess’s Grimes’s hero homosexual Humphrey Carpenter innocence Isherwood issues James’s later letter librettist libretto Lucretia male McPhee melody Midsummer Night’s Dream Miles Mitchell and Reed modern musicology notes Oberon oppression orientalism Owen Wingrave Pears’s performance perhaps Peter Grimes Peter Pears Philip Brett play political queer question Quint relation represented Requiem scene score Screw seems sexual singing social society society’s song stage story suggests theme tion tonal tragedy Turn Vaughan Williams Vere victim W. H. Auden War Requiem words write wrote