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  • Chapter 8 - Britten and Film

  • from Part II - British Musical Life
  • Edited by Vicki P Stroeher, Marshall University, West Virginia, Justin Vickers, Illinois State University
  • Book:
    Benjamin Britten in Context
    Published online:
    31 March 2022
    Print publication:
    21 April 2022, pp 71-77

  • Summary

    Britten’s early love for the cinema - when he was spellbound in particular by the work of Charlie Chaplin and the Marx Brothers - and his later apprenticeship as a composer for documentary films in the 1930s are both charted in this chapter, which analyses his comments on the medium in his youthful letters and diaries and goes on to consider the impact film music had on his later stylistic development as a composer of works for the stage. High points of his own work in film include his scores for the General Post Office (GPO) Film Unit, including two celebrated collaborations with the poet W. H. Auden (Coal Face, 1935; Night Mail, 1936), his score for the feature film Love from a Stranger (1937), and his virtuosic orchestral music for Muir Mathieson’s educational film Instruments of the Orchestra (1946). The chapter concludes with an account of Britten’s close involvement with his own local cinema in Aldeburgh during the late 1960s.