The Rest Is Noise Series: “Grimes! Grimes!”: The Passion of Benjamin Britten

This is a chapter from Alex Ross’s groundbreaking history of twentieth-century classical music, ‘The Rest is Noise’. Further extracts are available as digital shorts, accompanying the London Southbank festival programme.Benjamin Britten lived for most of his life around the Suffolk coast, and is buried in the Aldeburgh churchyard. He once stated that all his music came from there. ‘Peter Grimes’ is an opera of staggering force that is soaked in Aldeburgh to its bones.Now a major festival running throughout 2013 at London’s Southbank, The Rest is Noise is an intricate commentary not just on the sounds that defined the century, but on art’s troublesome dance with politics, …