Literary Britten

Justin Vickers is Distinguished Professor of Music at Illinois State University. He is presently completing The Aldeburgh Festival: A History of the Britten and Pears Era, 1948-1986, and with Philip Reed he is editing Britten's Sketchbooks, a forthcoming collection of essays. Vickers co-edited Childhood and the Operatic Imaginary since 1900 with Joy H. Calico, and Elizabeth Maconchy in Context with Lucy Walker. He is also co-editor of Benjamin Britten in Context and Benjamin Britten Studies: Essays on An Inexplicit Art, both with Vicki P. Stroeher. Lucy Walker is a freelance writer, researcher and public speaker on classical music, specialising in music of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. PHILIP ROSS BULLOCK is Professor of Russian and Music at the University of Oxford, and Fellow and Tutor in Russian at Wadham College, Oxford. Previously for Boydell,he has published a translation of the correspondencence between Rosa Newmarch and Jean Sibelius, and in 2016, his biography of Tchaikovsky was published in the Critical Lives series by Reaktion.

• Introduction - Kate KennedyBritten and His Librettists: The Composer as Auteur - Mervyn CookeBritten, Auden and the 1930s - John FullerJames, Britten, Piper and the Literary Supernatural: The Changing 'vision of evil' in The Turn of the Screw and Owen Wingrave - Nick Clark'Thought's Wildernesses': The Development of Britten's Nocturne from Library to Score - Kate Kennedy'Reading at Intervals': Britten's Romantic Poetry - Brian YoungBritten's Drops: The Lyric into Song - Rebekah Scott'Without any tune': The Role of the Discursive Shift in Britten's Interpretation of Poetry - Vicki P. StroeherBritten and Modern Tragedy - Adrian PooleSettings from Boyhood - Lucy Walker'Practical Jokes': Britten and Auden's Our Hunting Fathers Revisited - Joanna BullivantChoice and Inevitability: The Moral Economy of Peter Grimes - Philip Ross BullockSin, Death, and Love: Britten's Holy Sonnets of John Donne - David FullerBritten's Donne Meditation - Justin VickersScenes from Britten's Spring Symphony - Philip Rupprecht'I have read Billy Budd': The Forster-Britten reading(s) of Melville - Hanna RochlitzMiles Must Die: Ideological Uses of 'innocence' in Britten's The Turn of the Screw - Benjamin Britten and Medieval Drama at Chester: From Abraham and Isaac to 'The Nativity' - Peter HappeAmbiguous Venice - John HopkinsBibliography

This authoritative collection of studies on a composer steeped in literature ancient and modern should engage the interest not just of Britten specialists but of all those fascinated by the theory and practice of setting words to music.