Benjamin Britten (1913-1976)
The English composer and conductor hated the Romantic cliche of the creative artist waiting for inspiration to strike. He said in a 1967 television interview:
That isn’t the way I work. I like working to an exact timetable. I often thank my stars that I had a rather conventional upbringing, that I went to a rather strict school where one was made to work. And I can without much difficulty sit down at nine o’clock in the morning and work straight through the morning until lunchtime, then in the afternoon letters–or, rather more important, is that I go for a walk, where I plan out what I’m going to write in the next period at my desk. I then come back. After tea, up to my studio and work through until about eight o’clock. After dinner I usually find I’m too sleepy to do much more than read a little bit, and then go to bed rather early.
In the morning Britten had a cold bath; in the evening, a hot one. In the summer he liked to swim, and he would play tennis on the weekends when he could. Around the house, he was hopeless. Britten’s longtime partner and collaborator, Peter Pears, remembers, “He could make a cup of tea, boil an egg and wash up, but not much more. If he made his bed, he usually made a mess of it.” Britten’s life was his work–a fact that alienated some of his colleagues over the years. “Functioning as a compose was his whole world,” Donald Mitchell recalled. “The creativity had to come first… Everyone, including himself, had to be sacrificed to the creative act.”
* Source: Daily Rituals by Mason Currey