Colloquy Downeast – Benjamin Britten: His Life and Music

Tina Spencer Dreisbach, PhD will facilitate the Colloquy, in which we’ll listen to excerpts from various Britten musical works and watch scenes from the operas. Our text for this Colloquy will be Benjamin Britten: A Life for Music, by poet and author Neil Powell. While researching Britten, Powell lived in the coastal town of Aldeburgh, Suffolk, where the composer spent his last thirty years, and the book examines how the proximity of the sea found its way into the music. A particular emphasis will be how Britten and his partner, the great tenor Peter Pears, survived as gay artists and conscientious objectors in the social fabric of wartime and postwar England.