“It” Benjamin Britten was born in 1913, on November 22: the feast day of St. Cecelia, Patron Saint of Music.  Britten’s birth date pleased his mother Edith no end.  Britten’s childhood friend Basil Reed recalled that: “[Britten’s mother was] determined that he should be a great musician.  Quite often we would talk about the three B’s – Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms – and the fourth “B” was [to be] Britten.” His mother’s ambitions aside, Britten grew up in what he called “a very ordinary middle-class family” in Lowestoft, an East Anglian town on the North Sea 110 miles north east of London. Britten began piano lessons at seven. At the age of eight, he was enrolled in South Lodge Preparatory School just down the hill from his family home. The headmaster of the South Lodge School was a math teacher named Thomas Sewell, a Cambridge graduate and World War One veteran then in his mid-thirties.  If you were good at math – as was Britten – you had no problems with Sewell.  But if your math skills were not up to snuff, well, Sewell spared not the rod.  In a 1971 interview, Britten recalled: “I can remember – I think […]

Bartók’s String Quartet No. 6 was written in early 1939, at a very dark time in his personal life and in history. Some background. Adolf Hitler came to power when he was appointed German Chancellor – the head of the government – on January 30, 1933.  The fools that arranged Hitler’s appointment did so because they thought he could be controlled.  Things didn’t work out that way.  By August of 1934, Hitler had outlawed all opposition political parties and assumed the mantle of the German presidency and Supreme Commander of the armed forces.  There would be no stopping him and his twisted regime until his death eleven years later, in April of 1945. Béla Bartók – pianist, composer, Hungarian patriot and a resident of the Hungarian capitol of Budapest – observed the rise of Nazism with undisguised revulsion.  When the Nazi’s marched into and occupied Austria in March of 1938, Bartók suspected that it was only a matter of time before Hungary was occupied as well.  He wrote to his friend and patron, Paul Sacher: “There is the imminent danger that Hungary will also surrender to this system of robbery and murder.  How I could then continue to live or […]

In March of 1936, Nazi Germany reoccupied the demilitarized Rhineland and by doing so abrogated the Treaty of Versailles and the Locarno Pact.  The remilitarization of the Rhineland was driven by domestic politics, not unlike our own invasion of Iraq: Hitler needed to shore up his relationship with the army leadership and his right-wing power base.  Painfully, we now know that if France and Britain had acted in defense of the treaties, Germany’s generals were prepared to toss Hitler and his thugs out on their ears.  But France and Britain did not act; their populations were still traumatized by the First World War – the “war-to-end-all-wars” – a war they presumably “won” in 1918. Emboldened by international acquiescence, Hitler marched his army into Austria on March 12, 1938, the day after a well-planned coup d’état removed the legally elected Austrian government.  Germany immediately annexed Austria, calling the whole shebang “Anschluss”, meaning the “link-up”.  A plebiscite was held the following month, in which the Austrian people were asked to ratify the Anschluss.  The Nazis claimed 99.7% of the electorate voted in favor of the Anschluss. Sure they did. If England and France were going to stop Hitler, now was their best […]