ABSTRACT
The Australian-English composer Arthur Benjamin possessed an adventurous and generous spirit that enabled him to assimilate influences as disparate as Brahms, Gershwin, and Jamaican popular music. Benjamin’s love of popular culture, while admirable and foresighted, did his career considerable harm during his lifetime and has muted his posthumous reputation. He was further damaged by courageously rejecting modernist fashions and by composing a piece of genuine popular music, the Jamaican Rhumba (1938). His ambitions as an opera composer were thwarted in part by the operatic successes of his erstwhile piano student Benjamin Britten, but Vaughan Williams had warm praise for Benjamin’s grand opera, A Tale of Two Cities (1950).
