This fifth volume of Britten's letters covers a period of intense activity in his life and works, culminating in his great pacifist choral masterpiece, War Requiem. The fifth volume of the annotated selected letters of Benjamin Britten - edited by Philip Reed and Mervyn Cooke - covers the years 1958-65, during which he wrote two major operatic works, A Midsummer Night's Dream and the ground-breaking Curlew River, and his pacifist choral masterpiece, War Requiem. Other significant compositions from the period include the orchestral song-cycle Nocturne, the first of the cello pieces for Rostropovich, and settings of poems by Blake and Pushkin. Correspondents include friends, fellow artists and collaborators such as William Plomer (librettist of Curlew River), Edith Sitwell, E. M. Forster, Christopher Isherwood, Robert Graves, the Earl of Harewood, Yehudi Menuhin, Mstislav Rostropovich, Galina Vishnevskaya, Dmitri Shostakovich, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Barbara Hepworth and Duncan Grant, as well as Britten's partner and principal interpreter, Peter Pears. The volume charts the peak of Britten's position as one of the leading figures of the international musical establishment as composer, conductor and pianist, and his continuing involvement with the Aldeburgh Festival and the English Opera Group. The deterioration in Britten's relationship with Boosey & Hawkes, his publishers since the mid-1930s, is closely documented, as is the founding, at the composer's instigation, of the new publishing house of Faber Music in 1964. Central to the period is the composer's warm friendship with musicians from the Soviet Union, and Britten and Pears's visits to Moscow, Leningrad and Armenia are charted in detail. Published in association with The Britten-Pears Foundation.

The fourth volume of this acclaimed edition of Britten's letters covers the composition of three key works and the world trip that was to radically inform the composer's style thereafter. One of the most illuminating biographical projects in recent years. PETER ACKROYD The fourth volume of the annotated selected letters of Benjamin Britten covers the years 1952-57, during which he wrote three major worksfor the stage - the Coronation opera Gloriana, the chamber opera The Turn of the Screw, and the full-length ballet The Prince of the Pagodas - as well as important vocal works such as Canticles II and III andthe Hardy song-cycle Winter Words. Correspondents include librettists William Plomer (Gloriana) and Myfanwy Piper (The Turn of the Screw), and friends and collaborators such as Edith Sitwell, E. M. Forster, Basil Coleman, Imogen Holst, Francis Poulenc, Lennox Berkeley, the Earl of Harewood and Britten's partner and principal interpreter, Peter Pears. The volume charts Britten's growing stature as a major figure of the Europeanmusical establishment as composer, conductor and pianist, and his continuing involvement with the Aldeburgh Festival, the English Opera Group, and Covent Garden. Central to the period is the world trip undertaken by Britten and Pears and the first-hand encounter with the music and cultures of Bali and Japan that were radically to inform Britten's compositional techniques from Pagodas onwards. The comprehensive and scholarly annotations vividly evoke a key period in twentieth-century musical and cultural history, and offer a wide range of detailed information fascinating for both the Britten specialist and the general reader. Published in association with The Britten-Pears Foundation.

The third volume of the annotated selected letters of composer Benjamin Britten covers the years 1946-51, during which he wrote many of his best-known works, founded and developed the English Opera Group and the Aldeburgh Festival, and toured widely in Europe and the United States as a pianist and conductor. Correspondents include librettists Ronald Duncan (The Rape of Lucretia), Eric Crozier (Albert Herring, Saint Nicolas, The Little Sweep) and E. M. Forster (Billy Budd); conductor Ernest Ansermet and composer Lennox Berkeley; publishers Ralph Hawkes and Erwin Stein of Boosey & Hawkes; and the celebrated tenor Peter Pears, Britten's partner. Among friends in the United States are Christopher Isherwood, Elizabeth Mayer and Aaron Copland, and there is a significant meeting with Igor Stravinsky. This often startling and innovative period is vividly evoked by the comprehensive and scholarly annotations, which offer a wide range of detailed information fascinating for both the Britten specialist and the general reader. Donald Mitchell contributes a challenging introduction exploring the interaction of life and work in Britten's creativity, and an essay examining for the first time, through their correspondence, the complex relationship between the composer and the writer Edward Sackville-West.

The composer's final decade sees a new outpouring of creativity. The sixth and final volume of the annotated selected letters of Benjamin Britten, edited by Philip Reed and Mervyn Cooke, covers the composer's last decade. The genesis, composition and premieres of major stage works such as Owen Wingrave, commissioned by BBC Television, and Death in Venice are fully documented, as are the church parables, The Burning Fiery Furnace and The Prodigal Son. Important concert works from this period include the powerful Brecht setting, Children's Crusade, the Third Cello Suite (for Rostropovich), Canticles IV and V (both settings of poetry by T. S. Eliot), Phaedra (for Janet Baker) and the Third String Quartet, with its haunting echoes of Death in Venice. As in previous volumes, Britten's letters to his life partner and principal interpreter, the tenor Peter Pears, remain central. Other significant correspondents include theQueen and Queen Mother; librettists William Plomer and Myfanwy Piper; artistic collaborators Frederick Ashton, Colin Graham and John Piper; musicians Janet Baker, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Mstislav Rostropovich; and composers Oliver Knussen, Dmitri Shostakovich and William Walton. The volume also traces the conversion of Snape Maltings into the Aldeburgh Festival's principal concert venue, its destruction by fire on the opening night of the 1969 Festival and its miraculous rebuilding in time for the following year's Festival, as well as major concert tours by Britten and Pears to New York, Canada, South America, Moscow and Leningrad, Australia, and New Zealand. Close attention is paid to Britten's final years, when his failed heart surgery left him a near invalid. Published in association with The Britten-Pears Foundation.

Billy Budd, based on Herman Melville's nautical allegory, is one of Britten's most challenging operas. This comprehensive guide considers the work from both literary and musical viewpoints. Melville's novella is discussed, as is the interpretation given to the novella by the librettists E. M. Forster and Eric Crozier. A detailed synopsis guides the reader through the musical and dramatic action of the opera and in a chapter devoted to the music, Britten's distinctive technique of tonal symbolism is analyzed to demonstrate the effectiveness of his musical response to the dramatic suggestions of Melville's story. The most important critical writings on Billy Budd are represented by an expanded version of Donald Mitchell's 1979 notebook on the opera. A final chapter charts the opera's stage history and fluctuating critical reception.

This second of two volumes of the letters and diaries of Benjamin Britten is supplemented by the editors' detailed commentary and extensive contemporary documentation. The aim is to present a portrait not only of the composer but of an age.

Volume One of these remarkable letters and diaries opens with a letter from Britten aged nine to his formidable mother, Edith. Music is already at the centre of his life, and it accompanies him through prep and public school and then to London to the Royal College of Music, where the phenomenally gifted but inexperienced young composer is plunged into metropolitan life and makes influential new friends, among them W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood. This was a time of prodigious musical creativity, a growing awareness of his sexuality, and the dawning of his political convictions. Most importantly, during this period Britten met Peter Pears and established the musical and personal relationship that was to last a lifetime. Volume One comes to a close in May 1939, when Britten, accompanied by Pears, departs for North America. The letters and diaries in this illuminating first volume and its successor are supplemented by the editors' detailed commentary and by exhaustive contemporary documentation. Together they constitute a comprehensive portrait not only of the composer but of an age.

Critical essays and studies reflecting the latest thinking on two major figures in 20c music. In this Festschrift for Donald Mitchell, the foremost authority on the life and works of Gustav Mahler and Benjamin Britten, distinguished composers, scholars, colleagues and friends from around the world have written on aspects of these two composers closest to Mitchell's heart, producing a volume which not only reflects some of the latest thinking on this pair of remarkable figures in the music of our century, but which also pays full tribute to the impact of Mitchell's own work on these composers over the last fifty years. The volume includes the fullest bibliography of Mitchell's writings yet compiled.

PETER PEARS's reputation as an outstanding and distinctive tenor is grounded in his interpretations of Benjamin Britten's works; their partnership of thirty years significantly shaped and defined musical developments not only in England but on a broader plane. Throughout their busy professional lives they travelled extensively, on concert tours and on holiday, finding fresh stimulus in change. Pear's twelve travel diaries, brought together in this volume, record much of that travel and provide valuable contextual material on the musical development of both Pears and Britten.

The first diary dates from 1936, the year before his friendship with Britten began, when he went on tour to North America with the New English Singers. Other diaries record the five-month tour to the Far East and the important encounters (especially for Britten) with the gamelan music of Bali and the Japanese Noh theatre; visits to Russia as guests of Mstislav Rostropovich and his wife Galina Vishnevskaya, where they met significant figures from Russian musical life; and attendance at the Ansbach Bach Festival when Pears was at the height of his career. Also recorded are holidays in the Caribbean and Italy, a concert tour through the north of England, and accounts of the rehearsals and performances of the New York premieres of Billy Budd and Death in Venice.