Although Arthur Benjamin was born in Sydney, he spent only the first three years of his life in that city. In 1896 he and his parents moved to Brisbane where he was educated at Bowen House School and Brisbane Grammar School. His father Abraham was a commission agent, and his mother Amelia was a competent amateur pianist whose playing was often enjoyed from under the piano by the infant composer.
At the age of six he made his first public appearance as a pianist and his formal musical training began three years later with George Sampson, the Brisbane city organist. In 1907 he accompanied his parents on a tour of the Continent, taking several lessons with Frederic Cliffe in London. In 1911, at the age of eighteen, he returned to England to begin his training at the Royal College of Music.
In 1912 he won an open scholarship to continue his studies. Benjamin's was one of three scholarships awarded, and he was sent to Stanford for composition and Sir Frederick Bridge for fugue. He attended the Diaghilev ballets and operas at His Majesty's and Drury Lane, drinking the many new sounds and sights. The greatest impact came with their attendance in 1911 at the Diaghilev-Ballet Russe performance of Stravinsky's The Firebird at Covent Garden.
In his student days he was much impressed by the music of Johannes Brahms, César Franck and Richard Strauss, although Brahms was frowned upon by some. He was also greatly taken with the early works of Igor Stravinsky and had a lasting admiration for Maurice Ravel, whose influence is most obvious in the Suite of 1926 for piano solo and the much later Tombeau de Ravel of 1958 for clarinet and piano.
Benjamin was swept along with the upheaval and tragedy of the Great War. In 1914 he joined the Officer Training Corps, receiving a temporary commission on the 29th of April 1915. Benjamin enlisted in the infantry but later transferred to the air corps, becoming a gunner with the Royal Flying Corps. His plane was shot down over Germany on the 31st of July 1918 and Benjamin was taken to Rühleben camp in Germany where he was interned until his repatriation on the 29th of November that year.
Soon after the armistice Benjamin returned to Sydney to take up an invitation to become Professor of Piano at the Conservatorium. It was during this period that Benjamin began his first mature works which began to be published soon after his permanent return to London in 1921.
In 1924, his Pastoral Fantasy for string quartet had won the Carnegie Award and in 1926, he became a teacher of piano at the RCM, where his students included Benjamin Britten, and fellow Australians Peggy Glanville-Hicks and Miriam Hyde. He came into prominence as a composer in 1932 with his concerto for violin and comic opera The Devil Take Her. The inter-war years were a very productive, maturing and defining time for Benjamin.
Another of Benjamin's interests became apparent during this period. From 1934 onwards he began writing musical scores for major feature films and documentaries. Lastly, most of Benjamin's solo piano music was produced during these years, both for concert purposes and for teaching.
Benjamin at this time was very active and gave a number of important premieres. In 1938, on his last examining tour to the West Indies for the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music, that he brought back the folk tune that he was to transform into the famous Jamaican Rumba. After a series of radio talks and concerts in addition to music teaching, conducting and composing, he became an outstanding figure in Canadian musical life. He frequently visited the United States, broadcasting and arranging many performances of contemporary British music.
After World War II broke out in Europe, Benjamin, a non-practicing Jew, decided to remain in Canada and sent for his elderly mother to join him. In 1941 he was appointed Conductor of the newly-formed CBC Symphony Orchestra, holding the post until 1946. He was also Resident Lecturer at Reed College, Portland, Oregon between 1944 and 1945.
The small amount of Benjamin's music for children published at the time - Burmas Tunes (1945), Forest Peace (1945) and Haunted House (1945) - was intended for very young players. The Elegiac Mazurka (1941) was commissioned as part of the memorial volume "Homage to Paderewski" in honour of the great Polish pianist who had died that year.
Returning to England in 1946 at the request of his publishers, he quickly became an integral part of the British musical scene and resumed teaching at the RCM. A number of film scores were written during the late 1940s, including The Cumberland Story (1947), Steps of the Ballet (1948) and The Crowthers of Bankdam (1947).
As he said himself, the main reason for returning to London was to write music for the stage, and it was to the field of opera that Benjamin now devoted most of his energy. His second opera, the one-act comedy Prima Donna, received its première at the Fortune Theatre in London in 1949, the same year Benjamin wrote his piano concerto Concerto quasi una Fantasia.
Provided with a libretto by his friend Cedric Cliffe, Benjamin set to work on his first full-length opera on the story by Charles Dickens A Tale of Two Cities. First produced during the Festival of Britain in 1951, it won a gold medal and was later broadcast in a live performance by BBC Radio. After this performance, Benjamin revised the piece into its final version. The opera was successfully produced in this form in San Francisco in April 1960, days before Benjamin's death on the 10th of that month.
Arthur Benjamin died at the age of 66 at the Middlesex Hospital from a re-occurence of the cancer that had first attacked him three years earlier.
