In a well-known scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), the audience discovers that one of the main characters, Madeleine, closely resembles an imaginary character in a painting, allegedly portraying her maternal great-grandmother, Carlotta. Madeleine believes she is possessed by Carlotta, a conviction that arouses the curiosity of John – a former lawyer and police officer – hired by Madeleine’s husband to secretly follow her. Other than the portrait, Carlotta never appears physically on screen; her spectral presence is conveyed solely through composer Bernard Herrmann’s haunting musical theme. In other words, a non-diegetic element – the musical score – assumes an indirect diegetic function, as it emerges whenever Carlotta’s ‘presence’ is suggested in the scene. Herrmann’s music cannot be heard by the characters within the filmic world, but it exists in a liminal space: it translates into audible music for the audience the inevitable spectral energy felt by Madeleine and John. The painting of Carlotta functions as a gravitational centre around which multiple storylines unfold. It also offers the music an opportunity to play an active narrative role. Something similar happens in Lydia Goehr’s Red Sea, Red Square, Red Thread, which likewise takes a story about a painting as a starting point for intermedial narrative interplay. In the books under discussion here, the visual returns time and again as an anchor for the relationship between operatic fantasy and quotidian life.

The latest books by Martha Nussbaum and Peter Franklin, on the music and life of Benjamin Britten, both come from positions notionally outside music studies. Nussbaum – the liberal philosopher, as close to an academic celebrity as one can find nowadays – writes about the War Requiem (1962) as a (mostly) appreciative visitor to the discipline. Franklin, by contrast, is well known in nineteenth- and twentieth-century music studies. Britten Experienced nevertheless adopts the institutionally detached, less inhibited perspective of the emeritus. It would not be too far from the truth to call Franklin’s book a career retrospective. Crucially, though, it takes in not only the things that he has taught and published over the years, but also the personal encounters and enthusiasms that have (often invisibly) shaped this teaching and scholarship – the very things, in other words, that typically lie outside the professional purview of music studies.