Benjamin was born in London and attended Westminster School. He studied piano privately with Marguerite Tury from 1967–1974. He wrote his first composition at the age of nine, and took piano and composition lessons with Peter Gellhorn until age 15,[2] after which Gellhorn arranged for Benjamin to continue his lessons in Paris with Olivier Messiaen, whom he had known for many years.[3] Messiaen was reported to have described Benjamin as his favourite pupil.[4] He then read music at King's College, Cambridge, studying under Alexander Goehr and Robin Holloway.
Benjamin's orchestral piece Ringed by the Flat Horizon (written for the Cambridge University Musical Society and premiered in Cambridge under the baton of Mark Elder on 5 March 1980) was performed at The Proms that August, while he was still a student, making him the then-youngest living composer to have had music performed at the Proms.[5] The London Sinfonietta and Sir Simon Rattle premiered At First Light two years later.[6]Antara was commissioned by IRCAM for the 10th anniversary of the Pompidou Centre in 1987[7] and Three Inventions for chamber orchestra were written for the 75th Salzburg Festival in 1995.[8] The London Symphony Orchestra under Pierre Boulez premiered Palimpsests in 2002 to mark the opening of ‘By George’, a season-long portrait which included the first performance of Shadowlines by Pierre-Laurent Aimard.[9] More recent celebrations of Benjamin's work have taken place at Southbank Centre in 2012 (as part of the UK's Cultural Olympiad) and at the Barbican in 2016.[10][11]
Benjamin has composed four operas, all with librettos by Martin Crimp. Their first operatic work was Into the Little Hill, commissioned in 2006 by the Festival d'Automne in Paris. It received its London premiere at the Royal Opera House in February 2009. Their second collaboration, Written on Skin, premiered at the Aix-en-Provence Festival in July 2012. Benjamin conducted the UK premiere at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, in March 2013.[12]Lessons in Love and Violence, their third collaboration over the period 2015–2017, premiered at the Royal Opera House in 2018.[13] Their fourth opera collaboration, Picture a Day like this,[14] was commissioned by and first produced at the Aix Festival at the Théâtre du Jeu de Paume in 2023; Benjamin conducted with Marianne Crebassa as the woman.[15]
In 2019, critics at The Guardian ranked Written on Skin as the second best work of the 21st-century.[30] In 2024, Picture a day like this received an Ivor Novello Award nomination for Best Stage Work Composition.[31]
Benjamin lives in northwest London with his partner, the filmmaker Michael Waldman, whose credits include The Day John Lennon Died, The Scandalous Adventures of Lord Byron, and the TV miniseries Musicality.
^George Benjamin,"My heroes and I", The Guardian (London), 20 September 2002: He was artistic consultant to the BBC's 3-year retrospective of 20th-century music for the Millennium, 'Sounding the Century'. There have been major retrospectives of his work in London, Pris, Tokyo, Brussels, Berlin, Strasbourg, San Francisco and Madrid.
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