Chapters in this book

1. Frontmatter i
2. Contents v
3. List of Illustrations vii
4. List of Music Examples ix
5. List of Contributors xiii
6. Introduction 1
7. Part i Perspectives
8. 1 Britten and His Librettists: The Composer as Auteur 9
9. 2 Britten, Auden and the 1930s 31
10. 3 James, Britten, Piper and the Literary Supernatural: The Changing ‘vision of evil’ in The Turn of the Screw and Owen Wingrave 49
11. 4 ‘Thought’s Wildernesses’: The Development of Britten’s Nocturne from Library to Score 77
12. 5 ‘Reading at Intervals’: Britten’s Romantic Poetry 100
13. 6 Britten’s Drops: The Lyric into Song 124
14. 7 ‘Without any tune’: The Role of the Discursive Shift in Britten’s Interpretation of Poetry 144
15. 8 Britten and Modern Tragedy 171
16. Part ii Studies
17. 9 Settings from Boyhood 185
18. 10 ‘Practical Jokes’: Britten and Auden’s Our Hunting Fathers Revisited 206
19. 11 Choice and Inevitability: The Moral Economy of Peter Grimes 223
20. 12 Sin, Death and Love: Britten’s The Holy Sonnets of John Donne 243
21. 13 Britten’s Donne Meditation 256
22. 14 Scenes from Britten’s Spring Symphony 274
23. 15 ‘I have read Billy Budd’: The Forster–Britten Reading(s) of Melville 296
24. 16 Miles Must Die: Ideological Uses of ‘Innocence’ in Britten’s The Turn of the Screw 318
25. 17 Benjamin Britten and Medieval Drama at Chester: From Abraham and Isaac to ‘The Nativity’ 340
26. 18 Ambiguous Venice 356
27. Bibliography 385
28. Index 398