Darkness Audible: Benjamin Britten at 100 - Early, 1913-1945

On the day Penguin publishes Benjamin Britten: A Life in the Twentieth Century, the first major biography of Britten in twenty years, author Paul Kildea traces the emergence of the greatest English musician of the last century.
In this illustrated lecture Kildea explores the influences on Britten in his first decades – conservative and progressive, social and musical, political and sexual – and how this middle-class boy, who grew up writing music in an early-nineteenth-century manner and playing Beethoven sonatas and works by Wagner and Brahms, became the composer of Peter Grimes, a work that changed the face of English music.

This is the first in a series of three lectures in which conductor Paul Kildea, author of a major new biography of composer Benjamin Britten, explores the life and music of this colossal twentieth-century artist.

The other events are as follows:
   Darkness Audible - Middle, 1945-1970, 14th February 2013
   Darkness Audible - Late, 1971-1976, 21st February 2013