Benjamin Britten, the greatest twentieth-century English composer and one of the outstanding musicians of his age, was born in Lowestoft, Suffolk, in 1913. The East Anglian coast was to be a constant presence in his life and work - notably in his most famous opera, Peter Grimes - and it was there that he and his partner, the tenor Peter Pears, founded the Aldeburgh Festival in 1948. This insightful new biography follows Britten through school and college days, involvement with the Auden Generation in the 1930s and self-imposed wartime exile in America, to his emergence as a central yet paradoxical figure - both radical and ennobled - in his country's musical life. In Benjamin Britten: A Life for Music, Neil Powell has written the landmark biography for Britten's centenary year.

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