Philip Rupprecht is Associate Professor of Music at Duke University. He is the author of Britten's Musical Language (Cambridge) and co-editor of Tonality 1900-1950: Concept and Practice (Steiner, 2012).

• Contents ; Contributors ; Introduction: Britten's Music and its Audiences ; Philip Rupprecht ; I Public and Private ; 1 On Ambiguity in Britten ; Paul Kildea ; 2 "O Hurry to the Feted Spot of your Deliberate Fall": Death in Britten, 1936-1940 ; Stephen Arthur Allen ; 3 Love Knots: Britten, Pears, and the Sonnet ; Lloyd Whitesell ; II Opera ; 4 Britten, Grimes, and the "Tuneful Air" ; Arved Ashby ; 5 Post-War Women in Britten ; J.P.E. Harper-Scott ; 6 Be Flat or Be Natural? Pitch Symbolism in Britten's Operas ; Mervyn Cooke ; III Post-War Encounters ; 7 Britten and the Avant-Garde in the 1950s ; Philip Rupprecht ; 8 Curlew River and Cultural Encounter ; Heather Wiebe ; 9 Britten's Rhetoric of Resistance: the Works for Rostropovich ; Arnold Whittall ; IV Late Modern ; 10 An Excess of Less? Critiquing Britten's Late Song-Cycles ; Christopher Mark ; 11 Animating Owen Wingrave: Ghosts and Global Television ; Danielle Ward-Griffin ; 12 The Dye-line Rehearsal Scores for Death in Venice ; Christopher Wintle ; Works Cited ; Index

Masterfully blends multiple modes of inquiry and reestablishes Britten as a seminal composer of modernist and postmodern artistic accomplishment... Highly recommended.