War Requiem in the context of Baritone

Edward Benjamin Britten, Baron Britten OM CH (22 November 1913 – 4 December 1976) was an English composer, conductor, and pianist. He was a central figure of 20th-century British music, with a range of works including opera, other vocal music, orchestral and chamber pieces. His best-known works include the opera Peter Grimes (1945), the War Requiem (1962) and the orchestral showpiece The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra (1945).

Britten was born in Lowestoft, Suffolk, the son of a dentist. He showed talent from an early age. He studied at the Royal College of Music in London and privately with the composer Frank Bridge. Britten first came to public attention with the a cappella choral work A Boy Was Born in 1934. With the premiere of Peter Grimes in 1945, he leapt to international fame. Over the next 28 years, he wrote 14 more operas, establishing himself as one of the leading 20th-century composers in the genre. In addition to large-scale operas for Sadler's Wells and Covent Garden, he wrote chamber operas for small forces, suitable for performance in venues of modest size. Among the best known of these is The Turn of the Screw (1954). Recurring themes in his operas include the struggle of an outsider against a hostile society and the corruption of innocence.

Music for the Requiem Mass is any music that accompanies the Requiem, or Mass for the Dead, in the Catholic Church. This church service has inspired hundreds of compositions, including settings by Victoria, Mozart, Berlioz, Verdi, Fauré, Dvořák, Duruflé and Britten. For centuries settings of the Mass for the Dead were to be chanted in liturgical service monophonically. Later the settings became polyphonic, Victoria's famous 1605 a cappella work being an example. By Mozart's time (1791) it was standard to embed the dramatic and long Dies irae (Day of Wrath) sequence, and to score with orchestra. Eventually many settings of the Requiem, not least Verdi's (1874), were essentially concert pieces unsuitable for church service.