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“... The list includes Mozart and Mendelssohn; and, despite all the limiting judgments, it includes Benjamin Britten. At a time when there was more interest than there is now in deciding what genius was, and what a genius was, Fichte argued that ‘where genius is really present, there industry is found spontaneously, and develops with a steady growth ...”

“... to appear in this biography, the least important (he only gets two sentences) is a manservant whom Britten employed early in 1950, just before starting work on his opera Billy Budd. The man, who is not named, went mad. He believed he was a great composer and that Britten was his servant. In the middle of the night, he would ...”

“... For someone growing up with the music of Benjamin Britten, it was sometimes hard to recall that his last name was not ‘Britain’. The race that Nietzsche had deemed heavy-hoofed and unmusical, whose last truly great composer had been Purcell, a nation that had been doing nothing very much, musically, but warbling in cathedrals for a couple of centuries, had somehow managed to produce a 20th-century composer of international stature, whose last name was that of the nation itself ...”

“... Donald Mitchell recalls that Benjamin Britten had a low opinion of music critics in newspapers. Alan Blyth’s compilation Remembering Britten would have done little to make him change his mind: it is a book fundamentally misconceived and often grotesque in execution. The tributary volume of memoirs, such as the one Stephen Spender compiled after Auden’s death, has the value not only of illuminating its subject but of providing a complex shading of reaction and relation through the personalities of the contributors ...”

“... A two-volume collection of Britten’s letters and diaries, entitled Letters from a Life and edited by Donald Mitchell and Philip Reed, appeared in 1991, and its first volume covers the same period as this new collection; but there was plenty of work for the new editor, John Evans. The diaries were begun when Britten was 15 and ended, rather abruptly, when he was 25 ...”

“... with sensational success. That test was the effect the break-up of his marriage had on his friend, Benjamin Britten, and the effect Benjamin Britten’s reaction had on him. It is, in fact, Britten’s reaction which, in my own view now, makes me a desirable reviewer of the ...”

“... from Ronald Blythe’s The Time by the Sea: Aldeburgh 1955-58, an account of years spent with Benjamin Britten, Peter Pears and E.M. Forster on the east coast.) ‘I see by a handbill in the grocer’s shop that a man is going to lecture on the Gorilla in a few weeks,’ said Edward FitzGerald, who lived near Woodbridge. ‘So there is something to ...”

“... Coal Face, made for the GPO film unit in 1935, with a script by W.H. Auden and a score by Benjamin Britten. The film, Cavalcanti said, was ‘an experiment in sound’. Western Deep has a similarly unpredictable soundtrack, shifting abruptly from deafening loudness to silence. The miners at TauTona, however, are accorded far less humanity than ...”

“... the painter William Coldstream describes in his diary as a ‘slightly sticky’ party given by Benjamin Britten in Hallam Street. Present as well as the Coldstreams, and Spender and his then wife Inez, were Auden and Isherwood, their new boyfriends, and Peter Pears as co-host with Britten. The stickiness – clearly ...”

“... never did have friendly contacts with a foreigner, with the possible exception of the composer Benjamin Britten.’ With the possible exception? At about the time Shostakovich dedicated his Fourteenth Symphony to Britten, Britten decided to dedicate his Third String Quartet to ...”

“... artistic couple of any sexual stripe), as celebrated as the earlier musical duo Peter Pears and Benjamin Britten, though they rigorously resist all efforts by the gay community to assimilate them. When Farson asked them for details of their sex life, George became vehement: ‘That’s part of a different story. Not part of the G–G story!’ And ...”

“... rhythmic loops of Indian music kickstarted his first pieces of minimalism. A generation earlier, Benjamin Britten had been entranced by Shankar’s first British performances. Yehudi Menuhin’s reputation as a child prodigy was built on the recording he made of Elgar’s Violin Concerto in 1932, but he too was steered onto a different path by ...”

“... were appreciative. In the early 1950s, as the new Elizabethan age dawned, the Pipers worked with Benjamin Britten. Piper’s designs played up to the ivied pageantry and cod madrigality of Gloriana in 1953 and dominated the look of Britten’s operas, from The Rape of Lucretia to Death in Venice. Myfanwy Piper wrote ...”

“... There’s a gauntness to his long, oval face, with its high forehead and downward-turned Walter Benjamin moustache, a settled sadness in his eyes; and though he is not tall, he is thin, and the overall impression is of the concentrated narrowness of a figure by Giacometti. He would look this way for the rest of his life.In a talk on Radio 4 called ‘The ...”

“... to be discussed – and not infrequently duplicitous. Writing a self-confessed ‘fan letter’ to Britten about the premiere of Peter Grimes, he is also shooting off a note to the copyist Roy Douglas asking: ‘Did you see or hear “Grimy Peter”?’ Asperities about fellow composers are in plentiful supply. Tippett was another admired colleague/bugbear. To ...”