The communicative power of Britten's music rests in part on an aspect of his style rarely discussed in any depth: the rhythms. Britten was no radical, rhythmically. He did not – as his colleague Michael Tippett did – accommodate post-Stravinskian metric fragmentation to the “sprung” metric irregularities of the Elizabethan madrigal; nor did he – as his nearcontemporary Olivier Messiaen did – organize durations by numerical series, treating rhythm as a musical parameter to be structured separately from the pitch dimension. Britten's music, like Shostakovich's, arguably shows a more pronounced concern with the regular and symmetrical, though such affinities were not always stressed by early press critics: William Glock, in a 1943 Observer column, remarked on the Russian's “vigorous and pointed rhythms expressing the spirit of industrialism,” then turned to his countryman: “By comparison, Britten's world is accidental. His invention is poured into his melody, his long lines, his orchestral colour: the harmonies, which safeguard the first two, can be rather spidery and uncomforting.” The silence regarding Britten's rhythms is representative of a critical line already in place. Only when commentary alights upon one much-mentioned case – that of Purcell's music – does the topic of rhythm arise with any specificity, often amid claims of stylistic “influence.” Britten's operatic characters in Peter Grimes (1945), as Arved Ashby has recently observed, sing “tuneful airs” with lilting dance motions that define personality, bearing, and being: with Grimes himself, “sociopathology is manifest […] as ametricality, as removal from the communal dance,” while the laudanum-addled gossip Mrs. Sedley is all simple and obsessive repetitions.

Boldly stated rhythmic repetitions – for all the critical reticence – are an easily recognized aspect of Britten's rhetorically forthright musical style. The meanings of those repetitions, though, are not simple. In the Chacony of String Quartet No. 2 (completed in 1945 soon after Grimes), the influence of Purcell is again palpably a rhythmic affair. The theme's tensile kicking motions – notated as dotted rhythms – bind the first seven variations into a coherent paragraph, even as the textural interplay of parts shifts rapidly. One finds comparable rhythmic concentration in the scenic realm of Britten's operas, invariably linked to the physical reality of onstage action, or hinting at underlying enigma.

In his review of the 2012 Covent Garden production of Benjamin Britten's coronation opera Gloriana, Rupert Christiansen described the stunning “coup de théatre” that was the final scene of the production as such: “Elizabeth signs Essex's death warrant and then becomes mythically transfigured as reality melts into phantasmagoria. Charged with knowledge of her own imminent and ineluctable mortality, she passes through a parade of pivotal moments of her royal career, presented cinematically, like a newsreel.” Although this production famously foregrounded the historical process and multiple “levels” of pastness, the score itself stipulates that the Queen be visited by a phantom of herself at this moment, and that she be alone, with “time and place […] becoming less and less important to her.” Britten seems to have imagined the scene as one that depicts the act of remembering – the Queen's ghostly future self stepping outside her present self and effectively rendering what was the present past; to put it otherwise, we hear and see the passing of time in this moment. But while this final scene is powerful, it is not unique in the work: in fact, it confirms the trope of remembrance that structures the rest of the opera, rendering the work a unique site of memory where the individual and collective intersect. In this opera, Britten uses music not only to appeal to memory, but to construct it. Britten's score might thus be considered a simulacrum of memory, allowing for various facets of operatic subjectivity to manipulate both the characters in the work and those in the audience, thereby restructuring relationships and historical identities in the process. Indeed, in its recent performances and recordings, the opera has spoken quite powerfully to audiences in Britten's second century; Robert Hewison pointed out that “with the perspective of history, we can now see that Gloriana was a more prescient work than was realized on that terrible first night on the 8 June 1953.”

Gloriana is indeed regarded, generally, to be the least successful of Britten's operas.

Under Dahomian rule, Ouidah remained a major centre of the Atlantic slave trade, albeit at a lower level of exports than under the Hueda kings. In other respects, the town's commercial importance was enhanced by the Dahomian conquest; in particular, whereas earlier most of the actual business of trading had been transacted at the Hueda capital Savi, with Ouidah serving merely as a place of storage for slaves and goods in transit to and from the coast, the conduct of the trade was now concentrated wholly at Ouidah. One consequence of this is that the documentation of events and conditions in Ouidah from European records becomes much more substantial and detailed for the period of Dahomian rule, enabling a more solidly documented and rounded presentation of the life of the community. Moreover, although Ouidah remained subordinate, now to the kings of Dahomey at Abomey, its political importance was also greatly enhanced. With the appointment of a viceroy from 1733, it became the seat of Dahomian provincial administration and of the principal military garrison in the coastal area; in effect, it now replaced Savi as the political centre of its local region. Dahomian Ouidah was thus a much more important (and larger) town than it had been under Hueda rule.

The town and its inhabitants

Ouidah in the second half of the eighteenth century consisted of six quarters: the original Hueda settlement of Tove on the east; the three quarters linked with the European forts, Docome, Sogbadji and Ahouandjigo; the newly established Dahomian administrative quarter of Fonsarame, on the north; and the military garrison, commanded by the Caho, to the north-west. In this period, for the first time, we begin to get some detailed sense of the town's physical layout and size. Its layout is depicted in a map of 1776, which shows the French, English and Portuguese quarters as still distinct settlements around the periphery of the main conurbation, and the garrison under the Caho in a separate encampment in the countryside (see Map 4).