This chapter examines Britten’s recording and television activities in the 1950s and 1960s and considers how they track the rise of — and the anxiety surrounding — recording technology in mid-century British musical life. In particular, this chapter explores his collaboration with John Culshaw, who served as the producer for Britten’s Decca records and operas on BBC television. I argue that he and Britten sought to tap into elements of the live performance to fashion new musical experiences via technology. To illustrate this point, I focus primarily on their audio recording of the War Requiem, as well as three operas put on BBC television: The Burning Fiery Furnace, Peter Grimes, and Owen Wingrave. Ultimately, I show that, instead of treating technological reproduction as a substitute for live performance, Culshaw and Britten saw the relationship between technology and live performance as a symbiotic one, each helping to reinforce the other.

Britten’s relationship to his predecessors and contemporaries in the ‘English Musical Renaissance’ was complicated. He found the Royal College of Music parochial and amateurish, and was frustrated by composition lessons there with John Ireland, not least in comparison to his private study with Frank Bridge. He largely rejected the influence of English folk traditions and Tudor music important to the ‘pastoral school’, favoring the more cosmopolitan example of Bridge, and his own exploration of continental European modernism. Britten’s view of composers such as Vaughan Williams as insular and regressive has shaped the historiography of British music in ways that still reverberate today. Scholars have typically taken such attitudes at face value; but this obscures a more complex reality, in which the composer attempted to annex and reimagine, rather than simply reject, core achievements of his predecessors, incurring conceptual if not direct stylistic debts to them. In the case of Holst in particular, whom Britten came to embrace in later life, insufficient attention has been paid to this legacy.