Introduction

In Benjamin Britten's student years, the director of the Royal College of Music has vetoed a plan for the young composer to study with Alban Berg, and since then Vienna had been a city where he had registered more as a song accompanist than as an opera composer. A number of fine younger British composers have emerged since 1976, but not even the prodigiously gifted Thomas Ades, now a director of the Aldeburgh Festival, can rival Britten in terms of productivity and fame at a similar age. Home-grown Britten enthusiasts of the author's generation were often scorned by their avant garde contemporaries for their admiration for this music which was so accessible that it had to be worthless. The penultimate lecture is Britten and Russia, which is almost inevitably centred on two great Russian artists who did much to inspire the music of Britten in the 1960s and 1970s – the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich and his wife, the soprano Galina Vishnevskaya.