Contents

pp v-vi

List of Illustrations

pp vii-viii

List of Music Examples

pp ix-xii

List of Contributors

pp xiii-xx

Introduction

pp 1-8

Part I - Perspectives

pp 9-9

1 - Britten and His Librettists: The Composer as Auteur

pp 10-30

2 - Britten, Auden and the 1930s

pp 31-48

3 - James, Britten, Piper and the Literary Supernatural: The Changing ‘vision of evil’ in The Turn of the Screw and Owen Wingrave

pp 49-76

4 - ‘Thought's Wildernesses’: The Development of Britten's Nocturne from Library to Score

pp 77-99

5 - ‘Reading at Intervals’: Britten's Romantic Poetry

pp 100-123

6 - Britten's Drops: The Lyric into Song

pp 124-143

7 - ‘Without any tune’: The Role of the Discursive Shift in Britten's Interpretation of Poetry

pp 144-170

8 - Britten and Modern Tragedy

pp 171-184

Part II - Studies

pp 185-185

9 - Settings from Boyhood

pp 186-205

10 - ‘Practical Jokes’: Britten and Auden's Our Hunting Fathers Revisited

pp 206-222

11 - Choice and Inevitability: The Moral Economy of Peter Grimes

pp 223-242

12 - Sin, Death and Love: Britten's The Holy Sonnets of John Donne

pp 243-255

13 - Britten's Donne Meditation

pp 256-273

14 - Scenes from Britten's Spring Symphony

pp 274-295

15 - ‘I have read Billy Budd’: The Forster–Britten Reading(s) of Melville

pp 296-317

16 - Miles Must Die: Ideological Uses of ‘Innocence’ in Britten's The Turn of the Screw

pp 318-339

17 - Benjamin Britten and Medieval Drama at Chester: From Abraham and Isaac to ‘The Nativity’

pp 340-355

18 - Ambiguous Venice

pp 356-384

Bibliography

pp 385-397

Index

pp 398-405