Brighton: plaque marking birthplace of Frank Bridge, North Road

Image: © Christopher Hilton Taken: 26 Mar 2019

Frank Bridge (1879-1941) was a composer, violist and conductor. He is perhaps best known as the teacher and mentor of Benjamin Britten (the latter's 1938 work "Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge" pays tribute to his teacher) but his own work repays investigation and after a period of obscurity is now receiving the attention it deserves. From him Britten will have learned to be uncompromising both artistically and politically. Bridge's work, unusually, demonstrates a steady movement away from public taste: his early works in a late-Romantic vein, such as the tone-poem "The Sea", were popular, but in the interwar years he became more and more harmonically radical under the influence of the Viennese composers of the time. Politically he was a committed pacifist, a strand seen in his work from "Lament" (an elegy for a child drowned in the sinking of the "Lusitania") to his late major work, "Oration", a "concerto elegaico" for cello. (Bridge's younger brother William was a professional cellist.) His influence will certainly be heard, both musically and politically, in Britten's "War Requiem". More details about Bridge can be found at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Bridge . This blue plaque on the side of the building can be seen in context at Image

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