Verdi's influence on Britten's music is an important one, though recognizable in certain details of texture, accompanimental figures, and orchestration more than in any distinct similarities of melody and harmony. Not surprisingly it is especially prominent in Britten's full-scale operas, but it is in the likenesses between Verdi's Requiem and Britten's War Requiem that we find perhaps the most striking example of it. Both works were written for great public occasions, and in both a sense of public involvement is reflected in the sheer size of the works as well as in the large number of singers and players needed to perform them.

These Canticles (1965–1966) do not make up a liturgical Requiem and are not designed to be played and sung in the course of a funeral service. As Stravinsky himself has said, they form a ‘Monumentum Spirituale’ (to the memory of Helen Buchanan Seeger, according to its inscription; but perhaps, too, for another, for a different ritual of the imagination …)

• Birtwistle's Nomos (Roger Smalley)

• Williamson's The Growing Castle (Stephen Walsh)

• Smalley's The Song of the Highest Tower (Tim Souster)

• Goehr's Naboth's Vineyard (Michael Nyman)

• Cardew's The Great Digest and Gilbert's Missa Brevis (Justin Connolly)

• Bennett's Piano Concerto (Norman Kay)

• Tavener's In Alium and Gerhard's Epithalamion (Anthony Payne)

• Four Crosse premieres (Stephen Walsh)

Apropos of Birtwistle's Punch and Judy and its libretto, Gordon Crosse, in Tempo 85, submits that “an opera is a fusion of word, music and action in which, perhaps, only the music can bear separate scrutiny. W. H. Auden once described librettos as ‘private letters to the composers', and so they are”. On reflection and inspection, Gordon Crosse is much righter than Auden; as a matter of fact, he could hardly be righter. I'll take up the ‘hardly’ a little further down; for the moment, I want to rejoice that somebody has, at long last, said it. Crosse's may sound a slightly commonplace statement once it's out, but that is true of many propositions which hit the truth right at the centre.