Britten originally thought of using the designation ‘First Symphony’ for his first large-scale, purely orchestral score – the composition, sketched and completed in the spring of 1940, that would instead carry the final title Sinfonia da Requiem. But within seven years the momentous premieres of Peter Grimes and The Rape of Lucretia and subsequent formation of the English Opera Group channelled his energies in different and ostensibly non-symphonic directions. The variety of music that followed, most of it involving text and the voice, shows a composer consistently ambivalent about those ideas central to symphonic traditions – tonal hierarchies, authorship and genre writ large, the grand and universal statement, and the classicist and folklorist ideas that spawned a symphonic renewal in the decades after the First World War. Perhaps it was to be expected, then, that Britten's symphonic works would be few and undoctrinaire: the Sinfonietta (a student composition written in 1932), Sinfonia da Requiem (1940), Spring Symphony (1949), and Cello Symphony (1963) differ extremely in tone, instrumentation, structure and symphonic morphology. Like the contrasting ‘symphonies’ and symphonic attempts by those who influenced Britten's early development most directly – Mahler, Schoenberg, Berg and Stravinsky – his four symphonic scores define the post-tonal symphony, and things post-tonally ‘symphonic’, in at least four different ways.

The variances to Britten's essays in this most generic of forms – that is, the form saddled since Beethoven with the heaviest conventions of structure, instrumentation, and manner of performance and reception – also point to a non-generic and non-serial quality to this composer's output that goes beyond issues of genre and structure. Even Mahler's symphonies, which invite a collective hearing in series as some kind of autobiographical meta-symphony, obey certain laws of genre that Britten's symphonies and operas and canticles do not.

It is tempting to speculate on the kind of composer Britten might have become if he had gone on to write that second piano concerto, composed a successor to his ‘rather serious’ Violin Concerto, or followed along the path of symphonic, purely instrumental composition opened up in 1940 by his Sinfonia da Requiem. In the event, the student of Britten's music has to be satisfied with the Cello Symphony of 1963 as a long-postponed return to the preserve of ‘absolute’ music – a preserve from which Britten may seem to have become creatively estranged since his well-nigh total commitment to opera and song-cycle after Peter Grimes in 1945. Yet this divorce from ‘abstract’ sonata form, from the socalled ‘sonata cycle’ and its three or more movement musical ‘plot’ was by no means confrontationally hostile and – to say the least – a covert relationship continued. In 1945 (at the instigation of Curzon) he revisited his Piano Concerto – by now seven years old – and replaced the original third movement (‘Recitative and Aria’) with a fine reflective passacaglia that managed to integrate thematically and stylistically with the other three movements. Moreover, the achievement of the Second and Third String Quartets as well as the concentrated Sonata for cello and piano of 1961 testify to a significantly recurring need for the committed opera composer (who at times found himself not beyond critical reproof for the apparent over-reliance of his music upon words) to test himself in the arena of the ‘absolute’ – albeit through the ‘private’ world of chamber music.

Billy Budd and Death in Venice between them cover many of Britten's fundamental concerns in life and art: the overriding commitment to artistic expression, the conflict between the individual and the constraints imposed by society, the awfulness of war, the role of homoerotic desire. While to a large extent the two operas are differentiated by their subject-matter – war and fate on the one hand, and art and the artist's vocation on the other – both are concerned with love between males, and on this point, two important differences between them should be noted at the outset. Billy Budd was written at a time when not only was society's rejection of homosexuality embodied in the criminal law, but when the British stage was still subject to censorship. It is one of several operas in which, I believe, Britten intended to make a statement about homosexual experience, but, because of the censorship, had to do so in coded form. Death in Venice, on the other hand, was composed after the abolition of censorship in 1968, when its theme of same-sex love could be openly stated. A further, and important, difference is that while Tadzio is a teenage boy, Billy Budd is a mature man – a good deal more mature than the Billy presented by Melville.

Herman Melville's Billy Buddy Sailor was the great American novelist's last work. It was found among his papers when he died in 1891 in a form which still awaited final revision. It was perhaps in part occasioned by a historical incident in the US Navy, in which three innocent seamen had been executed in the interests of averting mutiny. Melville's cousin had been implicated in condemning the men, and the novelist may well have intended to devise 'a series of circumstances which would make a brutal hanging of a seaman inevitable and justifiable'. There is, of course, much more to Melville's story than this.

In his introduction to the original production of Peter Grimes in 1945, Britten stated: ‘I wanted to express my awareness of the perpetual struggle of men and women whose livelihood depends on the sea – difficult though it is to treat such a universal subject in theatrical form.’ Pears stated that ‘Ben and I had imagined the sea as being in the orchestra so it was not necessary to see it on stage.’ If the ‘sea’ can be understood almost as another operatic character, it becomes so primarily through its symbolic representation of human emotions; it may be seen to have the potential for providing a commentary on the dramatic action, mediating between it and the audience. This function is clearly to be seen in the six orchestral interludes that punctuate the opera, two located in each of the three acts. It is essential to distinguish between Britten's specifically programmatic designation of four of these as ‘Sea Interludes’ (‘Dawn’, ‘Sunday Morning’, ‘Moonlight’ and ‘Storm’) for the purposes of creating a concert-hall orchestral suite, and their greater psychological and narrative import – undesignated beyond the generic title ‘Interlude’ – in the operatic context.

Britten's ‘sea’ may, in fact, be read as a metaphor of Peter Grimes himself. A great deal of ink has been spilt in the fifty years since the opera's premiere by critics and scholars wrestling to understand the ‘divided’ character of Britten's Grimes. The unresolved ambiguities of his character only begin to become explicable when he is understood as an incarnation of the dualism at the core of Britten's musical personality.

This chapter examines Britten's relatively few mature works for conventional chamber ensemble-just three numbered string quartets – and four pieces written for the artistry of a single virtuoso instrumentalist: the Sonata in C, and the three solo Suites, all for the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich. The small number of works under discussion need not imply a lack of sympathy for purely instrumental composition on the part of a composer whose career was dominated by opera. Britten's precocious boyhood compositions include numerous chamber works (in 1926–8, for example, he wrote four pieces under the title ‘String Quartet’), and this early involvement with chamber music – continued as a student at the Royal College, where Britten played piano trios regularly – was certainly reinforced by his contact with Frank Bridge. Much later in life, Britten wrote publicly of his debt to his teacher: ‘He taught me to think and feel through the instruments I was writing for: he was most naturally an instrumental composer, and as a superb viola player he thought instrumentally.’

The cello works for Rostropovich (and also the haunting Nocturnal for guitarist Julian Bream) are solitary, private statements, and they do not offer the chamber-musical interplay of voices within a group. In clarity of line and textural transparency, though, they encapsulate that aesthetic ideal of chamber music – in the composer's words, ‘a subtlety, an intimacy … usually lacking in grander forms’ – that informs all of Britten's work.

Robin Holloway has commented that there exists a ‘two-sidedness’ in Britten's ‘primeval’ harmonic language:

One possible key to this essential stylistic dichotomy may be summarized as the simultaneous co-existence of progress and regress in his musical aesthetic. These apparently conflicting states were bound together by Britten throughout his creative life by an artistic quest for Beauty. This may be viewed as a highly personal interpretation of an essentially Platonic position: Plato's pre-Christian philosophy revolved around the concept of god-like invisible archetypes (‘Forms’) standing outside creation yet partially revealed through the contemplation of it. Thus, classically, in the association of Platonic epistemology with Greek homoeroticism the ‘Form’ of Beauty could be most perfectly perceived by encountering it through the beauty of a young boy. For one to whom the beauty of childhood meant so much, the appropriation of this philosophy would be virtually intuitive. Britten's most overt public revelation of the personal significance of this theme is explored in his final opera, Death in Venice.

Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream is undoubtedly the most successful Shakespearean opera to employ Shakespeare's original text as the sole basis for its libretto. The choice of a pre-existing text was partly a pragmatic response to the composer's decision to write (at comparatively short notice) a full-scale opera to celebrate the opening of the newly refurbished Jubilee Hall at the Aldeburgh Festival in June 1960, and the opera's music was composed within the astonishingly short space of nine months. The task of adapting Shakespeare involved the judicious shortening of the play to around half its original length and presented the composer with a number of challenging dramatic problems. Britten stressed the importance of faithfulness to the original literary source in an interview published a few days before the opera's first performance on 11 June 1960. Shakespeare's Dream, however, conveniently provided him with an unusual degree of narrative flexibility on account of its continuous action, reflected in the First Quarto edition of 1600 by the complete absence of act or scene divisions. The plot develops by juxtaposing self-contained groups of characters; and because both lovers and rustics are ignorant not only of each others' existence but also of the fairies' presence, certain aspects of dramatic sequence are rendered relatively unimportant.

Shakespeare's play is set within a symmetrical frame provided by static scenes at the Athenian court, with Theseus and Hippolyta removed from the action and unaffected by the magic of Oberon – although it is implied that their marriage cannot take place until the dispute between Oberon and Tytania is resolved. Theseus's judicial pronouncement on Hermia initiates many of the complications exacerbated by the supernatural powers at work in the wood, and his nuptials provide the ceremonial conclusion to which the activities of all the characters progress.

Gloriana was conceived during a skiing holiday Britten spent with Peter Pears and the Harewoods in March 1952. In his memoirs, the Earl of Harewood recalls an aprés-ski discussion of great national operas, amongst them Smetana's The Bartered Bride, Musorgsky's Boris Godunov, Wagner's Die Meistersinger and, above all, Verdi's Aida, which Britten cited as ‘the perfect expression of every kind of nationalist feeling, national pride’. When it was pointed out that no such work existed in the English repertory, the answer seemed obvious – he would have to write one. Given that Elizabeth II had just acceded to the throne, it was natural for a composer with Britten's innate sense of occasion (and practicality) to suggest that this opera should be part of the forthcoming Coronation celebrations. It was then almost inevitable that the subject should be the first Queen Elizabeth, although Henry VIII was considered, and rejected, before the decision was made. By the time the holiday was over, Britten had already chosen as his source Lytton Strachey's Elizabeth and Essex: A Tragic History, which the Earl had recently read, and settled on his preferred librettist – William Plomer, with whom he was currently working on ideas for children's operas. Within a few weeks, royal approval had been given to the scheme and funding had been promised – at that stage either directly from the Treasury or from Covent Garden – and things seemed set fair for another major triumph for Britten and for British opera. Few could have predicted the storm of critical abuse that would ensue.

It is clear from the assuredness of his Op. 1, the Sinfonietta, that Britten was already a composer of some experience when he started work on the piece in June 1932 at the age of eighteen. He himself hinted at the extent of that experience in interviews and articles published in the early and mid-1960s, while evidence of it began to emerge in the late 1960s and early 1970s when he released reworked versions of a few childhood pieces: the Five Walztes [sic] for piano, originally written between 1923 and 1925 (published in 1970); Tit for Tat, a collection of songs written between 1928 and 1931 (1968); and a String Quartet in D major written in 1931 (1975). Because of the reworkings, however, the published versions of these pieces are not reliable as indicators of Britten's early achievement. It was only after his death and the establishment in 1980 of the archive in the Britten-Pears Library in Aldeburgh, when access to unrevised material became possible, that a critical portrait of his juvenilia could begin to be constructed.

By 1987 most of the music composed before the Sinfonietta had been listed in A Britten Source Book (BSB), and a few key childhood works had been performed, recorded and published under the auspices of the Britten Estate. Until much more recently, though, the only juvenilia available for study were these works and those donated to the British Library in lieu of death duties, so that commentaries on Britten's early progress have of necessity been circumspect. Now that the entire corpus of extant juvenilia can be surveyed, it is clear that nothing short of an extended study will do it justice. What is offered here is a brief overview, with some more detailed observations on particularly significant pieces.

Britten wrote these lines to Edith Sitwell on 28 April 1955, six months before the momentous concert tour which took him halfway across the globe for five months in the winter and spring of 1955–6 and provided him with the opportunity for ‘some deep thinking’. The significance of those travels in exposing the composer to vivid firsthand experiences of various Asian musical traditions, and the surface impact these had on his own style, have long been recognized. But Britten's identification with Far Eastern music went far deeper than the obvious borrowings from the Balinese gamelan to be heard in The Prince of the Pagodas (1955–7) or the emulations of the Japanese Nō theatre in Curlew River (1956–64) would suggest. Britten's style was at a turning-point in the mid-1950s, as his remarks to Sitwell attest: the intense motivic economy and dodecaphonic techniques in Canticle III and The Turn of the Screw had clearly left him wondering in which direction his style would now develop. The Asian adventure, with perfect timing, opened his ears to other traditions of musical economy and structural clarity while his compositional thinking was clearly running along similar lines, and his travels strengthened a latent curiosity about exotic cultures that had originated many years before.

There could be no clearer expression of Britten's artistic creed than that of his thoughtfully worded speech on receiving the Aspen Award, in which he spoke of his belief in ‘occasional music’, of an artist's role in society and that music should demand of a listener ‘some effort, a journey to a special place, saving up for a ticket, some homework on the programme perhaps’. Here already we have three ideas which, given the right circumstances, could be made to flourish in the shape of a festival. The fourth ingredient necessary for the formula was that ‘special place’, Aldeburgh; a place which Britten was to regard as his home. As he memorably said in the 1964 speech, ‘I do not write for posterity – in any case, the outlook for that is somewhat uncertain. I write music, now, in Aldeburgh, for people living there, and further afield, indeed for anyone who cares to play it or listen to it. But my music now has its roots, in where I live and work.’

It was while driving to Lucerne in 1947 for performances with the newly formed English Opera Group that Pears turned to his companions Britten and Crozier and suggested, ‘Why not… make our own Festival?' The idea was prompted by the absurd hardship and expense of travelling abroad to find audiences for new English operas that were not being supported in their country of origin.

Any account of the evolution, chronology and documentation of Britten's pacifism will, I believe, benefit from first acquiring a familiarity with what I would describe as his creative awareness of Violent climates', when we may be a shade surprised by the persistence and sheer volume of it. This means a scrutiny, brief in some instances, more extensive in others, of those works in which that creative response shows itself.

Its manifestations were various, varying indeed according to aim, utility and genre. This in itself will entail breaking the broad generalization down into categories, to the first of which, ‘documentary’, I assign to film, the so-called ‘Peace’ film of 1936 – Peace of Britain – and the Pacifist March (a unison song) that was written in 1937 for the Peace Pledge Union. These and others like them are works or collaborative projects that, literally and liberally, document Britten's pacifist convictions and his political and social sympathies. They speak for themselves; indeed, the need for simplicity and clarity – for the clear articulation of a ‘message’ – defines the ‘documentary’ mode and its necessary limitations. These ‘documentaries’ are in fact close to propaganda; and it is worth remembering that they belong to a period when Britten was highly active in collaborating in the creation of a genre of film, with its own aesthetic, that was to become known as ‘documentary film’. It was an aesthetic, incidentally, that incorporated a very powerful element of social propaganda. These were films with a ‘message’, undisguisedly, but executed with such sophistication and so imposing an array of innovative techniques that a reference to ‘propaganda’ seems singularly inappropriate.

From his early boyhood, Britten seems to have been fascinated by the musical possibilities inherent in words; as he later explained, he was initially exposed to ‘a catholic choice of poets’. Several early de la Mare settings were revised and published in 1969 as Tit for Tat, and he also set French poetry, amplifying his comment to Murray Schafer that he was 'not a linguist, but I pride myself that I have a feel for languages. While still at school, he began to write music for vocal ensembles. A Wealden Trio, Sweet was the Song the Virgin Sung and three de la Mare settings (all for women's voices), as well as The Sycamore Tree (for SATB), were revised for publication in the 1960s, but A Hymn to the Virgin (for double choir) was released with minor changes (including transposition down a semitone) as early as 1934. The text is a modernized version of a fourteenth-century macaronic original; although the setting is largely syllabic, the melody is increasingly allowed to blossom for the Latin phrases which cap each line of verse. If Britten's ‘Englishness’ is often overlooked, in choice of text at least he follows the example of Vaughan Williams, Hoist and Warlock, as he does in the recently unearthed Thy King's Birthday (1931).

In late September 1938 – in the aftermath of the Anschluss and the German invasion of Austria, and in the fool's-gold glow of the Munich conference – The Times published a delightfully pompous editorial:

Less than two years later, with W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood discovering a brave new American way of life, an epigram was printed in the Spectator (its author rumoured to be the Dean of St Paul's):

This short journey from the public's conscience to its whipping boy of course reflects the change in Britain's and Auden's domestic circumstances; yet it also delineates a public conception of the poet's role in society. This was a relatively new phenomenon – one shaped on the Somme and at Ypres but ultimately refined in the politically turbulent 1930s. Moreover, this public delineation of role came from both sides of the political debate: The Times was the Establishment newspaper, while the Spectator – not yet the right-wing zoo it would delight in being fifty years later – published many young and left-wing intellectuals of the day.