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“... of the time he spent at Aldeburgh as a young man. It’s uncritical of the regime, adulatory of Britten and Imogen Holst, though more muted about Pears. The fact is Aldeburgh was a court, and whether the ruler is Henry VIII or Benjamin Britten all courts are the same, with the courtiers anxious to indulge and to ...”

“... for a while they lived in the Chelsea Hotel, and then in a shared house in Brooklyn with Auden and Benjamin Britten; from the late 1940s on, they spent a number of years in the international zone of Tangier, where other writers – the Beats especially – sought them out. But it was in the first decade of their marriage that Bowles wrote almost all the ...”

“... accepted a ‘birthday canon’ he had composed in her honour. In a book of birthday tributes – Benjamin Britten, Stravinsky and Mann’s brother Heinrich were also contributors – Mann called himself ‘an admirer, if you will, who found refreshment in every get-together with you’ and spoke of ‘the joyful stimulation that exudes from your ...”

“... of Frau Strauss are preserved in the concertante solo violin part of Heldenleben, just as Benjamin Britten’s dependence upon Peter Pears, the sharer of his bed, shines through most of his later music. Susana Gil alighted upon the gossip circuit of musical Europe as a living anachronism. ‘By God, William is going to marry a native,’ said one ...”

“... Ford’s method also, or explained in terms of Genettian homodiegetic analepsis. II. According to Benjamin Britten, Forster was ‘our most musical novelist’. It was by way of an article by Forster about Crabbe that Britten came upon the idea of Peter Grimes. He was so pleased that Forster liked his music that he ...”

“... snobisme were occasional glints of patronising enthusiasm. ‘If a person likes the Beatles,’ Benjamin Britten said in an interview for Radio Finland in 1965, ‘it doesn’t by any means preclude their love of Beethoven.’ The Sunday Times critic Richard ‘Dicky’ Buckle called them ‘the greatest composers since Beethoven’. (Why were they ...”

“... quirkiest testimony to its renown comes in The Habit of Art, Alan Bennett’s play about Auden and Benjamin Britten, when two of the wrinkles come alive and engage in a brief dialogue about themselves. As its furrows gradually deepened, the face was captured by some remarkable photographers, including Cecil Beaton, Richard Avedon and Jane Bown, and a ...”

“... The visionary magic that entranced Stefan George’s circle was denounced by Walter Benjamin and exploited by the Nazis for propaganda purposes. Hölderlin’s mental problems have attracted considerable attention in France, from Jean Laplanche’s psychoanalytical probings to Foucault’s refusal to reduce his alienation to a curable ...”

“... he saw the ménage that Auden had established in Brooklyn with Carson McCullers, Gypsy Rose Lee, Benjamin Britten, Peter Pears, Chester Kallman, Paul Bowles and Jane Bowles, among others, he wrote in his diary: ‘What an epic one could write about this!’ Soon Golo too moved in, having escaped from the Nazis by walking over the Pyrenees with his uncle ...”

“... by Brahms, but it looks forward as well as back: add a French horn and it could almost be part of Benjamin Britten’s Serenade (1943), his cycle on night and dreams.With Five Elizabethan Songs Gurney felt he was knocking on the door of mastery. ‘Blister my kidneys,’ he wrote to a friend, ‘if the music is not as English, as joyful, as tender as any ...”

“... Tippett himself has come close to this view – ever since the early Sixties, when he ‘joined Britten in a liking for clear, uncluttered textures’. Did he? And has he thus continued? On and off. His most recent, Fourth Quartet (1977-8) is a supreme test: string-quartet texture stands or falls with its clarity. Mr Matthews does not yet seem to know the ...”

“... Mahler are connected to the novella by the thinnest of threads. Remarkably, he spends less time on Benjamin Britten’s opera, where there is so much more worth noting and admiring. The composer and his librettist, Myfanwy Piper, faced an uphill task in creating a sung part for a silent protagonist, who has to make more things explicit to the audience ...”

“... shelf, sat down at the piano, opened it, and began to play. It was the ‘Good Night’ scene from Benjamin Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia ... Ten years after Lenny’s visit to our home West Side Story excited the musical world ... It is interesting to note that the instrumental introduction to the balcony scene in West Side Story is based on the same ...”

“... to poems and poem cycles within the anthology, an essay on the systems of Hebrew versification by Benjamin Hrushovsky, which is a model of its kind, a very useful bibliography, and, most interesting of all, a table of contents which is presented in the form of running comments on individual poets and poems. The book does not therefore fall into the usual two ...”

“... have unforehearable consequences until they reached their culmination in the extreme structure of Benjamin Britten’s Third Cello Suite, whose nine movements don’t disclose their four themes until the end. Dr Hopkins almost confines the relevance of our century to music hall and film; the end of the ‘metronome’ movement from the Eighth, for ...”