The fifth volume of the annotated selected letters of
Benjamin Britten - edited by Philip Reed and Mervyn
Cooke - covers the years 1958-65, during which he wrote
two major operatic works, A Midsummer Night's Dream and
the ground-breaking Curlew River, and his pacifist
choral masterpiece, War Requiem. Other significant
compositions from the period include the orchestral
song-cycle Nocturne, the first of the cello pieces for
Rostropovich, and settings of poems by Blake and
Pushkin. Correspondents include friends, fellow artists
and collaborators such as William Plomer (librettist of
Curlew River), Edith Sitwell, E. M. Forster, Christopher
Isherwood, Robert Graves, the Earl of Harewood, Yehudi
Menuhin, Mstislav Rostropovich, Galina Vishnevskaya,
Dmitri Shostakovich, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Barbara
Hepworth and Duncan Grant, as well as Britten's partner
and principal interpreter, Peter Pears. The volume
charts the peak of Britten's position as one of the
leading figures of the international musical
establishment as composer, conductor and pianist, and
his continuing involvement with the Aldeburgh Festival
and the English Opera Group.The deterioration in
Britten's relationship with Boosey & Hawkes, his
publishers since the mid-1930s, is closely documented,
as is the founding, at the composer's instigation, of
the new publishing house of Faber Music in 1964. Central
to the period is the composer's warm friendship with
musicians from the Soviet Union, and Britten and Pears's
visits to Moscow, Leningrad and Armenia are charted in
detail. Published in association with The Britten-Pears
Foundation. |
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