Editing Benjamin Britten (section)

==Education==

===Lowestoft===
When he was seven Britten was sent to a [[dame school]], run by the Misses Astle. The younger sister, Ethel, gave him piano lessons; in later life he said that he remained grateful for the excellence of her teaching.{{Sfn|Powell|2013|p=5}} The following year he moved on to a [[Preparatory school (United Kingdom)|prep school]], [[Old Buckenham Hall|South Lodge]], Lowestoft, as a [[Day pupil|day boy]].{{Sfn|Carpenter|1992|pp=8–9}} The headmaster, Thomas Sewell, was an old-fashioned disciplinarian; the young Britten was outraged at the severe [[corporal punishment|corporal punishments]] frequently handed out, and later he said that his lifelong [[pacifism]] probably had its roots in his reaction to the regime at the school.{{Sfn|Carpenter|1992|p=10}} He himself rarely fell foul of Sewell, a mathematician, in which subject Britten was a star pupil. The school had no musical tradition, and Britten continued to study the piano with Ethel Astle. From the age of ten he took viola lessons from a friend of his mother, Audrey Alston, who had been a professional player before her marriage.{{Sfn|Carpenter|1992|p=13}} In his spare time he composed prolifically. When his ''[[Simple Symphony]]'', based on these juvenilia, was recorded in 1956, Britten wrote this pen-portrait of his young self for the sleeve note:
{{Blockquote|Once upon a time there was a prep-school boy.&nbsp;... He was quite an ordinary little boy&nbsp;... he loved cricket, only quite liked football (although he kicked a pretty "corner"); he adored mathematics, got on all right with history, was scared by Latin Unseen; he behaved fairly well, only ragged the recognised amount, so that his contacts with the cane or the slipper were happily rare (although one nocturnal expedition to stalk ghosts left its marks behind); he worked his way up the school slowly and steadily, until at the age of thirteen he reached that pinnacle of importance and grandeur, never to be quite equalled in later days: the head of the Sixth, head-prefect, and [[Victor Ludorum]]. But – there was one curious thing about this boy: he wrote music. His friends bore with it, his enemies kicked a bit but not for long (he was quite tough), the staff couldn't object if his work and games didn't suffer. He wrote lots of it, reams and reams of it.<ref>Britten, Benjamin. Notes to Decca LP LW 5162 (1956), reproduced in {{Harvnb|Britten|1991|p=9}}.</ref>|}}
[[File:Frank-bridge-1921.jpg|thumb|upright|left|Frank Bridge, Britten's teacher (photographed in 1921)]]
Audrey Alston encouraged Britten to go to symphony concerts in [[Norwich]]. At one of these, during the triennial [[Norfolk and Norwich Festival]] in October 1924, he heard [[Frank Bridge]]'s orchestral poem ''[[The Sea (Bridge)|The Sea]]'', conducted by the composer. It was the first substantial piece of modern music he had ever encountered, and he was, in his own phrase, "knocked sideways" by it.{{Sfn|Carpenter|1992|pp=13–14}}<ref name="modern">Feigel, L., & A. Harris, eds., [https://books.google.com/books?id=y2e7SMzssGAC&pg=PA215&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false ''Modernism on Sea: Art and Culture at the British Seaside''], accessed 3 September 2013.</ref> Audrey Alston was a friend of Bridge; when he returned to Norwich for the next festival in 1927 she brought her not quite 14-year-old pupil to meet him. Bridge was impressed with the boy, and after they had gone through some of Britten's compositions together he invited him to come to London to take lessons from him.<ref name="M8">{{Harvnb|Matthews|2003|p=8}}.</ref> Robert Britten, supported by Thomas Sewell, doubted the wisdom of pursuing a composing career; a compromise was agreed by which Britten would, as planned, go on to his [[Public school (United Kingdom)|public school]] the following year but would make regular day-trips to London to study composition with Bridge and piano with his colleague [[Harold Samuel]].{{Sfn|Carpenter|1992|p=16}}

Bridge impressed on Britten the importance of scrupulous attention to the technical craft of composing{{Efn|Britten later gave an example of the detailed skill instilled in him by Bridge: "I came up with a series of [[major seventh]]s on the violin. Bridge was against this, saying that the instrument didn't vibrate properly with this interval: it should be divided between two instruments."<ref>''Quoted'' in {{Harvnb|Carpenter|1992|p=17}}.</ref>}} and the maxim that "you should find yourself and be true to what you found."<ref name="dnb">{{Harvnb|Mitchell|2011}}.</ref> The earliest substantial works Britten composed while studying with Bridge are the String Quartet in F, completed in April 1928, and the ''Quatre Chansons Françaises'', a song-cycle for high voice and orchestra. Authorities differ on the extent of Bridge's influence on his pupil's technique. [[Humphrey Carpenter]] and [[Michael Oliver (writer, broadcaster)|Michael Oliver]] judge that Britten's abilities as an orchestrator were essentially self-taught;<ref>{{Harvnb|Carpenter|1992|p=18}} and {{Harvnb|Oliver|1996|p=23}}.</ref> [[Donald Mitchell (writer)|Donald Mitchell]] considers that Bridge had an important influence on the cycle.<ref name=dnb/>

===Public school and Royal College of Music===
[[File:Mahler-Ireland-Stravinsky-Shostakovich.jpg|thumb|upright=0.9|Early influences, clockwise from top left: [[Gustav Mahler|Mahler]], [[John Ireland (composer)|Ireland]], [[Dmitri Shostakovich|Shostakovich]], [[Igor Stravinsky|Stravinsky]]]]
In September 1928 Britten went as a [[Boarding school|boarder]] to [[Gresham's School, Holt|Gresham's School]], in [[Holt, Norfolk]]. At the time he felt unhappy there, even writing in his diary of contemplating suicide or running away:{{Sfn|Bridcut|2006|p=16}} he hated being separated from his family, most particularly from his mother; he despised the music master; and he was shocked at the prevalence of bullying, though he was not the target of it.{{Sfn|Matthews|2003|p=11}}{{Efn|When it came to leaving Gresham's, Britten found it a wrench, confessing: "I am terribly sorry to leave such boys as these. [...] I didn't think I should be so sorry to leave."<ref name="bridcut17">{{Harvnb|Bridcut|2006|p=17}}.</ref> In his later years, Britten helped secure a place at the school for [[David Hemmings]],<ref name=bridcut17/>}} He remained there for two years and in 1930 he won a composition scholarship at the [[Royal College of Music]] (RCM) in London; his examiners were the composers [[John Ireland (composer)|John Ireland]] and [[Ralph Vaughan Williams]] and the college's harmony and counterpoint teacher, S. P. Waddington.{{Sfn|Matthews|2003|p=14}}

Britten was at the RCM from 1930 to 1933, studying composition with Ireland and piano with [[Arthur Benjamin]]. He won the [[Arthur Sullivan|Sullivan]] Prize for composition, the [[Cobbett Competition]] for chamber music, and was twice winner of the [[Ernest Farrar]] Prize for composition.{{Sfn|Craggs|2002|p=4}} Despite these honours, he was not greatly impressed by the establishment: he found his fellow-students "amateurish and folksy" and the staff "inclined to suspect technical brilliance of being superficial and insincere."{{Sfn|Carpenter|1992|p=35}}{{Efn|This academic mistrust of Britten's technical skills persisted. In 1994 the critic Derrick Puffett wrote that in the 1960s Britten was still regarded with suspicion on account of his technical expertise; Puffett quoted remarks by the Professor of Music at Oxford in the 1960s, [[Jack Westrup|Sir Jack Westrup]], to the effect that Britten was to be distrusted for his "superficial effects", whereas Tippett was considered "awkward and technically unskilled but somehow authentic."<ref>Puffett, Derrick. "Benjamin Britten: A Biography by Humphrey Carpenter", ''[[Albion (journal)|Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies]]'', Volume 26, No 2, Summer 1994, pp. 395–396 {{JSTOR|4052369}} {{Subscription}}.</ref>}} Another Ireland pupil, the composer [[Humphrey Searle]], said that Ireland could be "an inspiring teacher to those on his own wavelength"; Britten was not, and learned little from him.<ref>Cole, Hugo. [https://www.jstor.org/stable/942508 "Review – Britten"], ''[[Tempo (journal)|Tempo]]'', New Series, No 78, Autumn 1966, pp. 31–32 {{Subscription}}.</ref> He continued to study privately with Bridge, although he later praised Ireland for "nurs[ing] me very gently through a very, very difficult musical adolescence."<ref name="c40">{{Harvnb|Carpenter|1992|p=40}}.</ref>

Britten also used his time in London to attend concerts and become better acquainted with the music of [[Igor Stravinsky|Stravinsky]], [[Dmitri Shostakovich|Shostakovich]] and, most particularly, [[Gustav Mahler|Mahler]].{{Efn|Britten later wrote about his youthful discovery of Mahler that he had been told that the composer was "long-winded and formless&nbsp;... a romantic self-indulgent, who was so infatuated with his ideas that he could never stop. Either he couldn't score at all, or he could only score like Wagner, using enormous orchestras with so much going on that you couldn't hear anything clearly. Above all, he was not original. In other words, nothing for a young student!" Britten judged, on the contrary, "His influence on contemporary writing&nbsp;... could only be beneficial. His style is free from excessive personal mannerisms, and his scores are models of how the modern virtuoso orchestra should be used, nothing being left to chance and every note sounding."<ref name="mahler">{{Harvnb|Britten|1977}}.</ref>}} He intended postgraduate study in Vienna with [[Alban Berg]], [[Arnold Schoenberg]]'s student, but was eventually dissuaded by his parents, on the advice of the RCM staff.<ref name="White1516">{{Harvnb|White|1954|pp=15–16}}.</ref>

The first of Britten's compositions to attract wide attention were composed while at the RCM: the [[Sinfonietta (Britten)|Sinfonietta]], Op. 1 (1932), the oboe quartet ''[[Phantasy Quartet|Phantasy]]'', Op. 2, dedicated to [[Léon Goossens]] who played the first performance in a [[BBC]] broadcast on 6 August 1933, and a set of choral variations ''[[A Boy was Born]]'', written in 1933 for the [[BBC Singers]], who first performed it the following year.{{Sfn|Carpenter|1992|pp=48, 53}} In this same period he wrote ''Friday Afternoons'', a collection of 12 songs for the pupils of Clive House School, [[Prestatyn]], where his brother was headmaster.{{Sfn|Oliver|1996|p=217}}