Presents a first analytical study that looks at the overarching designs of Benjamin Britten's John Donne, Thomas Hardy and William Blake solo song cycles.

An essay collection which examines Britten's juvenilia, influences such as Shostakovich and Verdi, his opera Owen Wingrave and a libretto written by Australian novelist Patrick White with the hope of a future collaboration.

Leading composers, producers and writers consider the role of the composer in the community in Britain today and over the last fifty years.

By common consent the leading British composer of the twentieth-century's middle decades, Britten continues to create significant contexts for the work of those who survived and succeeded him.

Britten is the most literary British composer of the twentieth century. His relationship to the many and varied texts that he set was deeply committed and sensitive. As a result, both his responses to poetry and his collaborations with his librettists tell us a great deal about his music, and often, about the man himself.

Benjamin Britten Studies brings together established authorities and new voices to offer a fresh perspective on previous scholarship models and a re-contextualization of previously held beliefs about Britten. Using the most recent and innovative historical, musicological, sociological, psychological, and theoretical methodologies, the authors take off the 'protective arm' around Britten and disclose an unprecedented amount of previously unpublished and disregarded primary source materials. The collection considers difficult questions of identity such as Britten's retreat to America, his re-entry into the British musical scene, and late-life revisions of his American works; scrutinizes the fraught establishing of the English Opera Group contemporaneous with the founding of the Aldeburgh Festival of Music and the Arts; explores his break with Boosey & Hawkes and inspects international copyright concerns in the Soviet Union' investigates sensitive issues of intimacy and Britten's relationships; and combines closer analysis of Britten's musico-rhythmic, harmonic, and compositional practices with a description of the more overtly political context within which he found himself. Benjamin Britten Studies ends by asking what we can actually know about the composer in a reconsideration of the materials he left behind. All of this coalesces into a volume that not only serves as a model of on-going and future Britten research but which generates a greater understanding of the overall trends within the ever-synthesizing and interdisciplinary musicological field of the twenty-first century.VICKI P. STROEHER is Professor of Music History at Marshall University.JUSTIN VICKERS is Assistant Professor of Voice at Illinois State University.Contributors: Byron Adams, Nicholas Clark, Jenny Doctor, Paul Kildea, Christopher Mark, Thornton Miller, Louis Niebur, Philip Reed, Colleen Renihan, Philip Rupprecht, Kevin Salfen, Vicki P. Stroeher, Justin Vickers, Lucy Walker, Danielle Ward-Griffin, Lloyd Whitesell

This book explores Benjamin Britten's creative relationship with Russia throughout his life by examining his engagement with Russian composers, musicians and writers in the context of twentieth-century politics. The remarkable relationship between Britten and Shostakovich is a central theme, but it also evaluates other key influences, particularly Britten's passion for Tchaikovsky, his more elusive fascination with Prokofiev, and his ambiguous attitude towards Stravinsky; and it places Britten's enduring friendships with Rostropovich, Vishnevskaya and Richter in the context of his musical output. The book also analyses Britten's responses to various Russian composers and musicians - why, for example, did he dislike Musorgsky? - and considers personal and political perceptions of Britten inthe Soviet Union. Finally, it assesses the wider question of Russian influence on Britten's works and in turn whether Britten's music had any influence on the younger generation of Russian composers,such as Alfred Schnittke. This study draws on Foreign Office and British Council files at the National Archives, published and unpublished material from the former Soviet Union, including the Shostakovich Family Archive, and oral history, in addition to the Britten-related archives. Benjamin Britten and Russia will appeal not only to Britten scholars and students but also to those interested in twentieth-century culture, history and politics more widely.

CAMERON PYKE is Deputy Master (External) at Dulwich College and part-time lecturer at the Centre of Russian Music, Goldsmiths, University of London.

'It's a life of the two of us.'

This volume comprises the complete surviving correspondence between Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears. The 365 letters written throughout their 39-year relationship are here brought together and published, as Pears intended, for the first time. While the correspondence provides valuable evidence of the development of Britten's works, more significant is theinsight into his relationship with Pears and their day-to-day life together. Entertaining to read, domestic and intimate, the letters provide glimpses of cultural and artistic life in the twentieth century, including pacifism and conscientious objection, critical assessments of music and other artists, transport and communications development in the twentieth century, the 'Aldeburgh corpses', artcollecting, gossip, everyday life in an English country house, the development of the Aldeburgh Festival, performance practice in early music, looking after dachshunds, travel, and a host of other topics. Above all, when read together, Britten and Pears's letters allow the clearest possible look 'behind the scenes' of one of the most productive creative partnerships of the twentieth century.

VICKI P. STROEHER is Professor of Music History at Marshall University where she is also Coordinator of the Music History & Literature area.

NICHOLAS CLARK is the Librarian at the Britten-Pears Foundation at The Red House, Britten and Pears's home in Aldeburgh, Suffolk.

JUDE BRIMMER is an Archivist at the Britten-Pears Foundation.