Leonard Bernstein

American composer Leonard Bernstein (1918–1990) both changed and embodied his country’s understanding of what passion about music can be. Born in Lawrence, Massachusetts to shtetl immigrants from the Ukraine, Leonard Bernstein displayed his musical talent very early. He listened omnivorously to any and all music in any and all genres; long before he reached adolescence, he could outshine his local piano teacher. At Harvard, joining apparently limitless flamboyant energy with prodigious discipline, Bernstein surrounded himself with scholarly and intellectual excellence, with deep, exuberant friendships and with endless creative inspiration. Bernstein studied composition with Walter Piston (1894–1976) and wrote his senior thesis on the identification, recurrence and significance of African American elements in classical music. In his junior year, Bernstein met Aaron Copland (1900–1990) who became a life-long friend. Older conductors Dmitri Mitropoulos (1896–1960) and Serge Koussevitzky (1874–1951) became both mentors and friends.

When he was twenty-four, Bernstein moved to New York City. Here, his career began a meteoric rise to professional and popular esteem and fame. He rose to national notice when he stepped in to conduct a stupendous concert of the New York Philharmonic, replacing the ill Bruno Walter (1876–1962). His first symphony, Jeremiah, won enthusiastic praise from critics and the public alike in 1942. Two years later, Bernstein’s first Broadway musical, On the Town, was an immediate hit. By the end of World War II, Bernstein was one of the best-known artists in the United States, and the life-long pattern of intense activity and accomplishment in complementary and sometimes competing musical endeavors was set.

Benjamin Britten

Benjamin Britten was born on St. Cecilia's Day, November 22, 1913. He considered that day to have a special significance for him - that, because Saint Cecilia was the patron saint of music, he then owed it to himself to compose his music in her honor, as a tribute to her inspiration. The Hymn to St. Cecilia was composed by Britten during his return voyage to England in March, 1942, when he and Peter Pears sailed home from Canada after a six-months' wait there for passage; A Ceremony of Carols was also written on this trip .

Throughout his life, Britten was strongly influenced by the sea. He was born within the sound of it - on the stormy North Sea coast of East Anglia; while on Long Island he was near it; and he returned to the same wild, turbulent, bleak land/seascape of his early years, to die within the sound of it. The winds and the waves permeate his music: Aphrodite rose from the sea in the St. Cecilia; the sea predominates in Noye's Fludde, Death in Venice, Peter Grimes, Billy Budd, and others. It is indeed appropriate that the Aldeburgh Festival and its affiliates, the Britten-Pears School for Advanced Musical Studies and the Britten-Pears Library, are close to the sea he loved so well.

His colleague, Peter Pears, was on the faculty of the School, and continued to further Britten's legacy of a vision for the advanced training of string players and the voice. Their fruitful artistic partnership testified to their influence upon each other, particularly as seen in the succession of Britten's lovely canticles and song cycles. Pears was his foremost interpreter. They shared a love of language, of poetry, of music itself that was stimulated by the skills of others, both vocal and instrumental. Britten's talent was inspired by the association of his colleagues, whose artistic co-operation enabled him to maintain his purity of vision and avoidance of egotism.

Britten's sacred works may be divided into five groups: carols and anthems, which in-clude many Christmas pieces, some set to folksongs and old carols: liturgical music of five items only, including Psalm 150; four cantatas, of which the best known are the Hymn to St. Cecilia and Rejoice in the Lamb, followed by St. Nicolas and Cantata Misericordium, a tale of the Good Samaritan; the sacred songs, of which five Canticles are the most import-ant, some on themes of scripture. The three Church Parables, Curlew River, the Burning Fiery Furnace, and The Prodigal Son, are the summit of Britten's sacred music, a trinity of parables of outstanding power. He also composed the miracle play, Nave's Fludde, com-bining words and music from many sources.

Benjamin Britten's religious convictions prompted him to plan many of his compositions within the framework of the Church of England, according to the occasion; his overriding desire was that his music should be a means of communication with his fellow human beings. He was more than musician, composer, conductor, pianist, educator-he was a great humanitarian also. His own words should speak for him, on receiving the First Aspen Award: "I offer to my fellow men music which may inspire them or comfort them, which may touch them or entertain them, even educate them-directly and with intention. . . it is the composer's duty, as a member of society, to speak to or for his fellow human beings."

Francis Poulenc

Born into considerable wealth to a Southern French businessman and a Parisian socialite, Poulenc showed an early enthusiastic affinity for music, enjoying informal piano lessons from his mother. His father, however, considered his son's musical interests frivolous, and in his late adolescence, Poulenc suffered additional disappointment when the Paris Conservatoire rejected his application for admission, deeming his talent immature and inadequate. Following his mother's death in 1915 and his father's in 1917, Poulenc inherited his portion of the large family fortune, money on which he was able to depend for the rest of his life.

With his wealth and ebullient, gregarious charm, Poulenc gained easy access to the fashionable social world of Paris both before and after World War I; he moved freely in the overlapping worlds of elegant high society, the cafe demimonde and various informal networks of rebellious intellectuals and non- conformist artists. Poulenc pursued serious music studies in private and began to experience some musical successes with irreverent and jazzy occasional compositions. He became associated with a loose confederation of contemporary musicians – Arthur Honegger, Louis Durey, Georges Auric, Darius Milhaud and Germaine Tailleferre – called by one cultural critic “Les Six,” and formed enduring friendships and professional connections with artists, intellectuals and writers as varied as Paul Éluard, André Breton, André Gide, Paul Valéry, Paul Claudel and Colette.

In his personal life, Poulenc lived in a perpetual high-wire swing between frantic activity and despairing paralysis of spirit. Poulenc's own description of himself as “Janus-Poulenc” captures his psychological polarity. Close friendsdescribed Poulenc as a man in whom opposites coexisted: He was “part monk, part dirty gutter-snipe,” and “both bohemian …. and bourgeois.” One friend said he was constantly “wracked by the contradictions that struggled within him.” Poulenc was also perpetually restless: He traveled widely throughout Europe and the United States, alternately shamelessly self-promoting and desperately insecure.

 From the beginning, Poulenc worked in a wide variety of musical genres, developing a distinctive style that combined unexpectedness, simplicity, sensuousness, and sophistication. He created a frothy ballet score for Serge Diaghilev's innovative Ballets Russes, Les Biches, in 1924 and a harpsichord concerto for Wanda Landowska, the great Bach interpreter, in 1928. During World War II, he set Jean de Brunoff's children's story, The History of Babar, the Little Elephant, to music after a niece sulked that all the books she was reading were dull and boring.

Radical inventiveness informed both his secular and his sacred works. Poulenc's ability to adapt traditional genres to his purposes, whether profane or religious, is particularly clear in the case of opera. Poulenc turned the conventions of nineteenth century grand opera inside out in his 1943 comic opera of gender mix, sexual confusion and epic multiple births, Les Mamelles de Tiresias, based on Guillaume Apollinaire's satirical 1917 text. Exactly a decade later, Poulenc turned again to opera to display his most deeply felt religious convictions: The 1956 Dialogue of the Carmelites, loosely based on a screenplay by Georges Bernanos (1888-1948) concerns the torture, persecution and execution of nuns during the post-Revolutionary Reign of Terror in France.

At the end of his life, Poulenc was equally admired in France and the United States; he became particularly associated with clarinetist and big-band leader Benny Goodman and composer-conductor Leonard Bernstein. In 1963, after Poulenc's sudden death of a heart attack, Goodman and Bernstein premiered Poulenc's Sonata for Clarinet and Piano at Carnegie Hall.