Music And Sexuality in Britten

by Brett, Philip; Haggerty, George E.; McClary, Susan; Doctor, Jenny (AFT)

• ISBN13: 9780520246102
• ISBN10: 0520246101
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2006-11-01
• Publisher: Univ of California Pr

Summary

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.

Table of Contents

Preface
George E. Haggerty	xi
Introduction Remembering Philip Brett	1	(171)
Susan McClary
1. Britten and Grimes	11	(23)
2. "Grimes Is at His Exercise"	34	(20)
Sex, Politics, and Violence in the Librettos of Peter Grimes
3. Grimes and Lucretia	54	(16)
4. Salvation at Sea	70	(11)
Britten's Billy Budd
5. Character and Caricature in Albert Herring	81	(7)
6. Britten's Bad Boys	88	(18)
Male Relations in The Turn of the Screw
7. Britten's Dream	106	(23)
8. Eros and Orientalism in Britten's Operas	129	(25)
9. Keeping the Straight Line Intact?	154	(18)
Britten's Relation to Folksong, Purcell, and His English Predecessors
10. Pacifism, Political Action, and Artistic Endeavor	172	(14)
11. Auden's Britten	186	(18)
12. The Britten Era	204	(21)
Afterword
Jenny Doctor	225	(22)
Appendix Philip Brett's Britten Scholarship	247	(8)
Works Cited	255	(12)
Index	267