It is clear that Benjamin Britten's official legacy remains in good hands with the publication of the latest volume of Letters from a Life: the Selected Letters of Benjamin Britten, even though one suspects there may be much more nuance to the story in the editorial silences. Althoughco-editor Donald Mitchell was to have been Britten's official biographer, that task was handed over to the late Humphrey Carpenter, whose 1992 book on the composer caused something of a stir with its emphasis on the sexual and secretive aspects of Britten's life.Footnote ¹ Mitchell's production of the first volumes of Britten's letters and diaries in 1991 seemed almost timed to correct the perceived imbalances of Carpenter's work. Ostensibly Mitchell would never produce his own Britten biography, but rather the volumes of letters and abundant footnotes would constitute a kind of ‘autobiography’ in Britten's own words. That the names of his much younger co-editors, Philip Reed and Mervyn Cooke, appear before Mitchell's own on the cover of Volume 4 might indicate to a degree the passing of the mantle to a younger generation, but equally Mitchell's ongoing presence suggests the continuity of a legacy. This volume sustains the interest value of the series to date for both the specialist and the general reader. Pertinently, it quotes the comments Britten made to Eric Walter White concerning his Benjamin Britten: a Sketch of His Life and Works:Footnote ² ‘I always feel that in writing about such as I, the background is more important than the foreground, & should be dwelt on & emphasized as much as poss. (Why who became what & how.)’ (82). There are some Britten scholars who have resisted this approach. But it is increasingly clear that the connection between life and work, while notably strong in Britten's case, has to be treated with equanimity. This series does much to rectify this balance.

The first three volumes were published by Faber: Volumes 1 (1929–39)Footnote ³ and 2 (1939–45)Footnote ⁴, both of letters and diaries, appeared simultaneously in 1991; Volume 3 (1946–51),Footnote ⁵ consisting of letters only (as the diaries were discontinued in 1939) in 2004. The letters of Volume 4 (1952–7) are published by the Boydell Press and, given that Britten lived almost a furthertwenty years, we can expect further tomes to follow.Footnote ⁶ The quality and sheer range of information in this volume makes for favourable comparison with the previous instalments and arguably surpasses the third in that respect. The six-part structure of Volume 4 – with sections on Gloriana, The Turn of the Screw, The Prince of the Pagodas, Britten and Pears's tour of the Far East (1955–6), the completion and première of Pagodas, and Noye's Fludde – is a satisfying design, though there is, of course, considerable overlap of material between sections. For instance, there is some useful material on Gloriana in the section on The Turn of the Screw, Eric Blom's comparison of Britten's use of bells in both operas being just one example of many excellent cross-insights (281). These volumes act as a veritable repository of the reception – both positive and negative – with which Britten's works were greeted, with the inclusion of many original reviews. Colin Mason's exquisite identification (186) of Ellen Orford's aria in Act I of Peter Grimes (‘Let her among you without fault cast the first stone’) with the final setting ‘Before Life and After’ from the Hardy song-cycle Winter Words – a song widely considered paradigmatic of Britten's entire artistic enterprise – is but one example of the fund of nuanced commentary that alone makes this book well worth the investment.

Volume 4 is dedicated to the memory of Imogen Holst, Britten's indefatigable amanuensis (and many things besides) during this period. The Holst connection points to the fact that, as the series of volumes continues to appear, each benefits from greater potential interaction with the growing body of recent scholarship on this period in British musical life, in this particular case Christopher Grogan's exemplary book on Imogen Holst, whose information aptly complements that here.Footnote ⁷ Likewise the materials related to the Far East tour and the impact of Asian music and culture on the composer's work dovetail effectively with co-editor Mervyn Cooke's own Britten and the Far East Footnote ⁸ and the still widely unavailable Ausflug Ost 1956 and Dear Friends by the Prince and Princess Hesse respectively.Footnote ⁹ (The Travel Diaries of Peter Pears, edited by Philip Reed, are similarly indispensable in this regard.)Footnote ¹⁰ John Bridcut's Britten's Children (both the book and the earlier BBC film)Footnote ¹¹ might be used to elaborate and contextualize the section devoted to Britten's extensive correspondence with Roger Duncan (son of Ronald, librettist for The Rape of Lucretia and other works) – letters which, like so many throughout Britten's career, may have been written with a more general eye to posterity, as the editors indicate. Indeed, Bridcut and Volume 4 together offer something of a corrective to Carpenter's biography, for it is increasingly clear that while the sexual aspect was certainly there for Britten, he managed to sublimate those desires in order to provide a genuinely meaningful mentoring relationship with many of his young charges and friends. There can be little doubt that such sublimated aspects were channelled into the works, as an opera like The Turn of the Screw, prominent among the subjects of this volume, amply demonstrates. The Roger Duncan correspondence also illustrates, once again, Britten's understanding of the nature of childhood and his ability to communicate notions of innocence or nescience via the written word, as well as in his music. These were issues highlighted in the work of Hans Keller, whose psychoanalytical insights into Britten's music from Peter Grimes in 1945 onwards made him one ‘of the few intellectuals to whose views Britten was prepared to give serious consideration’ (116, n. 8), a fact that surely merits a reconsideration of Keller's work and the relevance of the Freudian approach. A letter to Elizabeth Mayer dated 13 January 1957 makes clear the formative importance to Britten of his acceptance by the Mayer family after the death of his own parents, who would have had profound difficulty in accepting their son as a gay man in a stable relationship (495, though, as Bridcut points out, Elizabeth never acknowledged Britten's homosexuality, believing he would end up marrying her daughter Beata).Footnote ¹²

A major issue that is underlined in Volume 4 is Britten's cast-iron control over the content of his librettos and the fact that, in the final analysis, the texts of his operas say precisely what he wanted them to say – some of the best passages he wrote himself, either unaided or in collaboration with Pears (see 2 and 217, n. 2). That his librettos were not fashioned in creative isolation from his music links him to a venerable tradition stretching back through Strauss and Verdi to Mozart, though the degree of Britten's control may have exceeded even theirs. In this sense Britten's operas embody the Greek ideal of defining ‘music’ as words and sound together, even when the music takes issue with the words it is supporting. (Britten's work exemplifies his ability to see, and often empathize with, many sides of an argument simultaneously, a point that also comes across in the correspondence.) However, it should also be said that librettists could cannily manipulate a composer whose recurring preoccupations were well known, though Britten may have been aware, even passively encouraging, of such strategies. For example, Ronald Duncan writes of his libretto for the aborted Saint Peter oratorio project of 1955:

In terms of rehabilitating aspects of Britten's output Volume 4 should make abundantly clear, if proof is still required, the true stature of Gloriana (1953). Gloriana is often viewed as somehow inferior to Britten's other operas, perhaps on account of its less ‘symphonic’ and more straightforwardly melodic conception, and its public nature as a Coronation commission, compared to the more ‘credible’ and personal nature of the operas that flank it, Billy Budd and The Turn of the Screw. However, the letters testify to Britten's pragmatic understanding of the compositional style required for Gloriana, one that involved a greater condensation than in some of the more densely motivic operas of the recent past, but not a poverty of musical ideas:

Britten added a further qualification: ‘I think it was Mitchell who made the observation that the easier my music gets the more difficult it is to understand it! I feel both Gloriana and Winter Words bear this out’ (204, n. 12). The letters show that the overall popularity of Gloriana in its first production (excepting the cool responses to the première, with its disproportionately aristocratic and upper-class audience) was matched by ‘sensational’ and ‘knockout’ success in the USA (449 and 455), a reception repeated with the revivals of recent years. The editors point out that producers who seek to tighten the drama by cutting the Norwich scene risk rupturing the scheme of alternating public and private scenes across the opera (218). The argument swings both ways, as Britten stated of the 1954 Covent Garden production: ‘Everyone missed “Norwich”, but many agreed the work gained in dramatic intensity, if it lost in open-airness or splendour’ (217). Britten emphatically rejected any notion of the opera as a ‘hotch-potch’ (122) and he insisted on neither making Essex into a traditional hero nor simplifying his relationship with the Queen, admitting that their relationship in the story ‘must always remain elusive, but to me always fascinating’ (197). He was not, however, above finding fault with the work, identifying evidence of haste in parts of Act 2 scene 1 – the Norwich scene itself – and ‘my old enemy’ Act 3 scene 2 (200). On a different note, as a striking example of mismatch between musical character and compositional circumstances, we learn that Britten composed the transcendently beautiful choral Concord Song from the Norwich Scene after a stiff drink in the midst of rescuing his house from a devastating East Coast flood.

Where The Turn of the Screw is concerned, it becomes clear that for Britten the purpose of recreating in opera a work from another (literary) genre is precisely not to mimic the original. In this respect his decision to make the ghosts sing and, therefore, become real both to the audience and the characters on stage takes the drama in a quite different direction from James's novella. As he commented to Desmond Shawe-Taylor: ‘The trouble is, if you admire the H. James story (which I do), one is inclined to condemn any divergence from it. But it must be an opera in its own right, & must stand or fall by that.’ (300 and 301, n. 2) This tends to confirm the point that while ambiguity may be retained in the words of the libretto and the action on stage, it is not retained in Britten's music. This creative and somewhat paradoxical tension – the ambiguity of drama and the clarity of music – is an essential aspect of Britten's art, especially when the music is pushing in a completely different direction from the drama, as at the end of Billy Budd, in Vere's mistaken belief that Billy has saved him. Britten's frequent identification elsewhere with the idea of music as ‘thought’, not just ‘emotion’, and his stated goal of musical clarification at all costs, reinforces this position. Such a belief in the clarity and objectivity of intentions extended also to the performance of his music: as he informed Charles Mackerras, ‘I don't wish to be interpreted, because I want you to do precisely what I have written.’Footnote ¹³ The editors also discuss the question of whether Britten intentionally sanctioned, or was even aware of, the graphic sexual innuendo of the Latin used by the children in Act 1 scene 6 (revealed relatively recently by an Oxford English professor)Footnote ¹⁴ – something that adds a further, unexpected dimension to the questioning of innocence and knowledge with which the opera is engaged (206–9, n. 4).

Insights into the personal aspects of Britten's life and work abound. We learn that Pears's antipathy to Britten's work on music that did not involve him extended to a complete removal of support to the point of cutting him off ‘at the main’ (Holst), and Pears abandoning Britten for a haircut at a moment of dire need during a rehearsal (477). Britten's self-repression is suggested by Imogen Holst, who comments on his explosion at her for criticizing John Pritchard's conducting of Gloriana: ‘I realized that he’d been angry because I'd said what was in his own mind, which he didn't want to think' (140). While a great deal has been made in the past about Britten's apparent cruelty in dropping people he no longer needed, the letters to Basil Douglas (568–9) and Olive Zorian (572) do a great deal to correct this image. Given his multi-faceted activity and the consequent demands on his time, one is struck by the tact and strenuous efforts he makes with those whose presence or services are, for whatever reason, no longer required. They may still have been ‘Britten's corpses’, but at least they received a decent burial.

Britten faced frequent criticism for having withdrawn into an Aldeburgh cult or clique: as Auden had warned in a famous letter in Volume 2, ‘You see, Bengy dear, you are always tempted […] to build yourself a warm nest of love (of course when you get it, you will find it a little stifling) by playing the lovable talented little boy’.Footnote ¹⁵ Imogen Holst reports Britten's ‘furious’ response to David Webster, the General Administrator at Covent Garden, who had described the English Opera Group as a ‘clique’: Britten ‘said that everything that ever got done in music was done by a clique – that that was the word that was used when people disapproved, and that when they approved they called it a “group” or something else’ (98).

On the level of sheer curiosity and eccentricity Volume 4 provides some interesting moments of near-comic relief, from Britten's desire to get Marilyn Monroe to open an Aldeburgh fundraising event (468) and co-editor Mervyn Cooke's mother's appearance as a stand-in pianist in The Little Sweep (33) to the strange and sad lady who stalked Britten and whom he referred to as his ‘wife’ (39, 439, 440, n. 5) – hardly stranger, though, than the man described in Volume 1 who introduced himself to Britten as ‘Benjamin Britten’! Information is provided even on the health and blood-lines of his dogs, including the pedigree certificate for Clytie II (462–3, 467, 476). In short, Volume 4 is to be welcomed as a fine addition to the series. It does much to rehabilitate interest in Gloriana and the ballet The Prince of the Pagodas (which space has not allowed me to expand upon here) and continues to restore a more balanced view of Britten's character and interests.