Sylvia Townsend Warner and Peter Pears: Loss and Friendship

This article describes the friendship between Sylvia Townsend Warner, Peter Pears and Benjamin Britten in the 1970s. It draws on previously unpublished correspondence held at the Britten-Pears Archive and the Sylvia Townsend Warner and Valentine Ackland Archive. It describes the role that John Craske’s paintings played in establishing the connection between Warner and Pears, details some visits and covers Britten’s illness and death. The article also describes the concert in Warner’s honour planned by Pears and given in Aldeburgh in July 1977.

Lawrence Set to Music

This chapter considers a number of ways in which musical composers have engaged with and assimilated Lawrence’s poetry (as well as some of his other works and, indeed, his life story), over a 100-year period. Foregrounding texts selected for musical setting, the chapter begins with an analysis of sound, silence, rhythm, repetition and movement in Lawrence’s verse. Subsequently, it explores the various strategies adopted by composers when setting these poems to music. Some create a song from a single poem; some compose song-cycles by combining poems from within a single collection, such as Birds, Beasts and Flowers. Others juxtapose poems from across a range of Lawrence’s verse-books – or combine Lawrence poems with those of other poets. This chapter explores the implications of such choices, offering analyses of musical compositions in which words and sounds have been creatively combined. Composers discussed include Peter Warlock, Benjamin Britten and Arnold Cooke, alongside a number of lesser-known contemporary figures, whose works (spanning a number of genres) bring Lawrence to a new generation.

The Song Inside Your Mind

Adès’s second opera, The Tempest (2003), has been celebrated for many reasons. In the public imagination it has solidified comparisons between Adès and Benjamin Britten (the composer of one of the other most well-known Shakespeare operas of the last hundred years, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 1960). The Tempest also established Adès as a leading presence in contemporary opera. My goal in this essay is to explore how two interrelated concerns—the expressive possibilities of moving from one medium to another and the interpenetration of different subjectivities with one another—show one way of thinking about The Tempest which is emblematic of several recurrent aspects Adès’s sensibility. The Tempest, as the largest work he completed in the decade after his initial flush of success in the 1990s, demonstrates the longevity of his quest for what he calls “new objects” which transcend their medium and engender singular subjective experiences.

Musical Abjects: Sounds and Objectionable Sexualities

This discussion examines two musical situations involving sexual impulses and behaviors that are widely deemed unacceptable: the pedophilia of composer Benjamin Britten and the sexual abuse of choirboys at the Columbus Boychoir School in the 1970s. The aim is to consider whether an examination of the music created within these contexts might contribute to a more nuanced understanding of trauma, sexual abuse, and dangerous forms of desire; and whether a queer theory-inspired approach to these “abject” musical objects might encourage the development of more substantive and meaningful ethical positions toward people currently labeled as sexual deviants or perpetrators of sexual violence.

‘Liberty, I Write Your Name’ 1944–1952

This chapter looks into Francis Poulenc's performance of the Figure humaine after the liberation of France from the Second World War. It talks about Poulenc's Les Mamelles in which the BBC Director of Music, Victor Hely-Hutchinson, expressed gratitude for the chance to peruse the score and agreed enthusiastically to recordand perform it. It also recounts Poulenc's visit to London in 1945, where he gave recitals with Pierre Bernac at the Wigmore Hall and the National Gallery. The chapter looks into the event of Poulenc joining Benjamin Britten in a performance of the Two-Piano Concerto with the London Philharmonic Orchestra under Basil Cameron. It also describes the triumphant premier of Poulenc's concert called Un Soir de neige, which happened at the same time as Olivier Messiaen's Trois petites Liturgies de la Présence divine.