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Frank Bridge (1879-1941) was an English composer, conductor and viola player, from a Sussex family (he was born in Brighton and lived for years in Friston, at TV5598 : Friston Field, Old Willingdon Road, Friston).
Today Bridge is probably most familiar through his work as a tutor: one of his pupils was the teenage Benjamin Britten, whose "Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge" is frequently performed. Bridge's own music, however, is well worth exploration in its own right. 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".