Added to that Britten became ill. This continued throughout the 1950s and, one way and another, for the rest of his life (he died in 1976, aged sixty-three). From the letters in the present volume, we discover that his arm and shoulder troubled him, as they had since 1952. He also had a range of ailments and symptoms from gout to piles to diabetes, the last proving a false alarm.

If the composer’s confidence had suffered from his experiences with Gloriana and the ballet, it doesn’t seem to have affected his productivity. While he might complain here about his health and occasionally excuse himself on account of it, he always does it very politely. English, provincial, and middle-class to a fault, Britten is unfailingly tactful and well mannered. One must read between the lines to learn what he feels. A small example comes  in an interview with Finnish radio after he received the Sibelius Prize in 1965. Speaking of Sibelius, Britten says, ‘[A]lthough I wouldn’t pretend that I know or understand or even like everything he wrote, I find it a most sympathetic and interesting phenomenon in the musical world.’ In fact, he hated Sibelius’s music.

As in the previous volumes of this impeccably edited, annotated, and presented series, there are letters to friends and family, letters to performers and other composers, official letters, and – especially in this volume – letters to and about publishers. During the early 1960s, Britten became deeply unhappy with his long-time publisher Boosey & Hawkes and finally took his music – and Boosey’s Donald Mitchell – to Faber & Faber, that company moving into music publishing largely at the composer’s bidding. Of course, the letters show that it was done most tactfully.

Even the formal ending of his friendship with the Earl of Harewood is achieved with a certain decorum. Over his lifetime, Britten dismissed not a few friends from his circle, particularly from among the (mostly voluntary) workers and committee members of the Aldeburgh Festival, which he and Peter Pears had co-founded in 1948. Privately, Britten referred to these people as ‘corpses’, but, hating confrontation, he would generally use an intermediary to issue these notices of exclusion. He even tried to delegate the dropping of Lord Harewood, but finally summoned the nerve to do it himself in a letter.

Harewood was an old friend. He had been a great supporter of Britten’s work and was president of the festival. As the queen’s cousin, he brought a certain viceregal air to the role. He had also married Britten and Pears’s still older friend, Marion Stein. When, in 1964, Harewood fathered a child with Patricia Tuckwell (sister of the horn player, Barry), Britten at first said he wouldn’t take sides, but it was soon clear that he had no stomach for what, one suspects, he considered bad behaviour. There is an undeniable coldness about his letter to Harewood, suggesting (though not requesting and certainly not demanding) his resignation as president. It is tempered a little by ‘My dear George’ and ‘Yours, with sincere regret, Ben’.

There are several letters of encouragement to younger composers dotted throughout the volume, but perhaps the most jaw-dropping letter in the whole book is to Otto Klemperer, who had sought Britten’s opinion of his first symphony. As a conductor, Klemperer was a twentieth-century giant, but he was very much a part-time composer, and Britten’s reply requires all his powers of diplomacy. He is ‘highly honoured that a musician of [Klemperer’s] greatness should wish to have [his] views’, but points out that the score is ‘rather inaccurately’ notated, that ‘many doublings are not exactly parallel’, and that there are places ‘where I am not quite sure you want the clashes which are written’. He also tells Klemperer that his string writing is too exposed or too high (‘poor violas on page 45!’) and his horn writing ‘cruelly difficult’. It would have been unremarkable for Britten to find the music uninspired or too Germanic for his tastes, but to find him pointing out basic errors and impracticalities to this great conductor is astonishing.

What of Britten’s own music? This is the period of the operas Noye’s Fludde, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Curlew River – also the War Requiem. Britten’s Dream is now a repertoire piece, and the War Requiem a classic, albeit flawed in the opinion of some. But Noye’s Fludde and Curlew River are still underestimated, the former because it is largely for a cast of children, the latter because it is merely a ‘church parable’. The present volume brings some useful context, leading to the unavoidable conclusion that in 1958 Britten was looking for more stylised, less operatic vehicles, as he simultaneously worked on the fifteenth-century Chester mystery play and contemplated an operatic treatment of Japanese Nō theatre in Curlew River.

Britten’s writing for children is justly famous, but Noye’s Fludde is the zenith of his achievement in this area. Was it a relief to be working again for children after the reception of Gloriana and the struggle with The Prince of the Pagodas? Four years later, writing to the author of the program note for the première of the War Requiem, Britten takes issue with the description ‘angelic chorus’ for the boys’ choir: ‘If you could think of a phrase including the word “innocent” I should be happier.’ It says much about his attraction to children’s voices, and to children in general.

Curlew River, more than a decade in the planning, finally came to fruition in 1964. Stylised it may be, but there is no want of emotion: the role of the Mad Woman is one of the greatest Britten composed for Pears. Enormous flexibility was needed in an hour-long theatre piece for singers and instruments that the composer decided must be performed unconducted. It is not spelt out here, but the fact that he was simultaneously in correspondence with the Polish composer Witold Lutoslawski is revealing. The scoring solution that Britten came up with (and retained for the rest of his life) involved freeing the singers from bar lines. It is not quite the distinctive ‘aleatoric counterpoint’ of Lutoslawski, but it is close enough to make one feel that he might have been an influence. In 1965, the year after Curlew River, Lutoslawski was a guest at Aldeburgh, where his festival commission for Pears, Paroles tissées, was as perfectly tailored to the tenor’s idiosyncratic voice as any score of Britten’s. Perhaps the influence went both ways.

The final eleven years of the composer’s life will be covered in volume six, due in 2013, the year of Britten’s centenary.