Chapter 2 of Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891) opens by describing Marlott, the village where Tess was born. But the passage goes beyond mere description by providing the reader with important aesthetic directives. After locating the village geographically in “the Vale of Blakemore or Blackmoor” and noting that tourists and landscape painters have usually avoided the valley, Hardy's narrator predicts that its beauty will attract future visitors. Yet he quickly chills the enthusiasm of such prospective viewers. After initially asserting that the fertile spot never succumbs to dried-up springs or brown fields, he now calls attention to the “droughts of summer” only to recite further obstacles: poor ways to travel, difficult roads, and consequent disappointments one might want to avoid. The narrator then reverses himself again by insisting that any traveler from the coast will inevitably be “delighted” by contrasts between the calcareous downs and lush cornlands (T, ii, p. 18).

The word Wessex was, until the last quarter of the nineteenth century, a purely historical term defining the south-western region of the island of Britain that had been ruled by the West Saxons in the early Middle Ages. But since Hardy unearthed the word and used it in his novels and poems, it has come to mean to more and more people a district - to some degree coterminous with the Saxon kingdom - populated by characters sprung from the novelist's imagination. Indeed, Wessex has come to mean the whole culture - predominantly rural and pre-industrial - found in Hardy's novels and poems. So powerful and widely disseminated has been Hardy's imaginative creation that even during his lifetime, Wessex was being used once again in the traffic of everyday life to denote a region of vague extent in south-western England. Now, at the end of the twentieth century, a glance at a directory to any town to the south and west of Oxford will probably throw up a business or two with Wessex in its name; and this is Hardy's doing.

Wessex as Hardy left it for his readers when he died in 1928 has been the subject of many illuminating critical and descriptive studies, made from a range of points of view. But there is one fundamental truth about Wessex that has scarcely been recognized, nor have its implications been considered: it is that the complex social and environmental organization that readers and critics think of as Hardy’s Wessex did not exist in the novelist’s imagination when he first began to write, and, as this chapter sets out to show, did not exist in anything like the form we are now accustomed to, until the writing of his last three novels, and more particularly until the publication of the first collected edition of his work in 1895-96.

According to Peter Szondi, a crisis in European drama occurs around 1880. The reason for this crisis is essentially generic: drama is no longer absolute and primary (unfolding as a linear sequence in the present), but relies for its effect on narrative elements incorporated into the dramatic structure. Szondi's main example is Henrik Ibsen, in whose plays - such as Ghosts (1881) and The Wild Duck (1884) - the thematic significance of the actions, dreams, and desires of the main characters is inseparable from their past histories as unravelled through the playwright's sophisticated retrospective technique. “Here the past is not, as in Sophocles' Oedipus, a function of the present.”

Like most turning-points in literary form, the crisis Szondi identifies in European drama in the late nineteenth century is productive in that it precipitates the formal experimentation of twentieth-century drama. Szondi's notion of crisis also implicitly accentuates the link between various forms of generic interplay and the ways in which the characteristic features or sub-genres of one particular genre can be combined. In the genre of drama, Ibsen's dramaturgic use of the past is partly motivated by his understanding of tragedy.

Britten's folksong arrangements – mainly from the British Isles, with their gallery of lovers, soldiers, sailors, characters and genre scenes drawn from rural life – are strongly representative of the ‘English’ Britten and span a working life that extends from the time just before the return to England (and Peter Grimes) in 1942 to the stricken composer's last summer in 1976. Here is the composer who worked with the English language, whose feeling for oddity, humour and peculiar sentiment – for particularity – was rooted in a sense of place, in what remained (despite a widely travelled artist's sophistication) a villager's sense of local character: the kind of curiosity that prompted Forster to write on Crabbe or William Plomer to lecture on ‘Old Fitz’. Much of this feeling was strongly linked to an attraction towards – perhaps even a kind of nostalgia for – what might be termed the ‘expressive character and modes’ of life in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England (the period settings, after all, of Peter Grimes, Albert Herring, The Little Sweep, Billy Budd, etc.). Britten's own native Suffolk – with its strong Victorian sea-side associations, its buildings and maritime history – still visually recalls this period, that saw the accumulation and collection of folk and ‘national’ songs dealing with a rapidly vanishing rural way of life. What makes this oeuvre distinct, however, is its absolute removal from the kind of ‘Englishness’ that maybe associated with the Edwardian pomp and pageantry of Elgar, or later characterized in the watery meadows and ‘gaffers on the green’ modal meanderings and rustic frolics of the school of the English folklorists.

The success of Peter Grimes owes much to Britten's convincing use of substantial forces; his creation of appropriately powerful and imposing textures for the depiction of sea, storm and the social menace of a crowd bent on vengeance and retribution. Grimes is grand opera after the model of Verdi, Puccini, Berg and Gershwin, a genre which aimed to hold and persuade a substantial audience in a large theatre. Yet this was not how opera, music drama, had first been conceived, and by the middle of the twentieth century it seemed clear to many composers that the romantic and late-romantic eras had explored only one of the ways in which music and drama might interact.

Britten's interest in such precedents for a more intimate kind of music theatre as Dido and Aeneas and The Beggar's Opera would have been sharpened by his regard for twentieth-century compositions like Holst's Sāvitri (three singers, at most twelve players in the orchestra) and various works by Stravinsky (Renard, The Soldier's Tale) which turned their backs on opera as traditionally conceived. In a manifesto of 1946 Britten put the point with characteristic directness: ‘I am keen to develop a new art-form (the chamber opera, or what you will) which will stand beside the grand opera as the quartet stands beside the orchestra. I hope to write many works for it.’ The impulse behind this ‘new art-form’ was nevertheless not purely aesthetic.

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.