Oboe Works of Benjamin Britten

Benjamin Britten is regarded as one of the most prominent British composers of the Twentieth Century. His music covers nearly all genres and can routinely be heard in many different types of performances. Britten worked diligently throughout his life to produce a large body of works that are in most cases accessible to the listener, yet highly detailed in their construction. For a large part of his life Britten enjoyed celebrity as a composer, having had his works performed in the world's most prestigious musical venues by many of the most renowned virtuosi. Through his work as a composer, Britten worked to revive English opera. He also increased outreach to schoolchildren in an effort to boost national musical awareness and musical literacy throughout the population. Britten wrote four pieces for the oboe, each of which is now a standard in the Twentieth Century repertoire for the instrument. All four of these pieces feature the use of harmonies that are very characteristic of the composer's writing—tonal, yet tinted with slight ambiguity and/or dissonance. In addition, all of Britten's oboe pieces represent the high level of detail for which he was known. This treatise chronologically depicts the life and career of Benjamin Britten as a whole. For each of the four oboe pieces in question, historical elements such as time, place, reasons for composition, similarities with other pieces by the composer, relationships to musical trends of the respective period, as well as British and/or world issues of the time are examined. Harmonic and formal analysis is also provided for each piece. Several commercial recordings of today's most famous oboists playing the pieces in question are examined and evaluated in this document. Particular attention is paid to performance practice and the adherence, or lack thereof, to Britten's intentions for each piece.