Britten when young
Frank Kermode
- Letters from a Life: The Selected Letters and Diaries of Benjamin Britten Vol. I 1923-39, Vol. II 1939-45 edited by Donald Mitchell and Philip Reed
Faber, 1403 pp, £75.00, June 1991, ISBN 0 571 15221 X
We may nowadays he chary about using the word ‘genius’, but we still have a good idea what is meant by it. For example, there are great numbers of very gifted musicians who are admired but not called geniuses. But there are others manifestly prodigious, performing, often at extraordinarily early ages, a variety of feats so complex that the musical layman could hardly imagine, even with the most desperate labour, accomplishing any one of them, while even musicians are astonished: and we then reach for the good, handy, vague Enlightenment word and call them geniuses. The list includes Mozart and Mendelssohn; and, despite all the limiting judgments, it includes Benjamin Britten.
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Vol. 13 No. 16 · 29 August 1991 » Frank Kermode » Britten when young (print version)
pages 3-5 | 3546 words