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.

Not long ago I attended a formal dinner at a college belonging to one of Britain's most ancient and prestigious universities, and was introduced to the institution's head of house as someone engaged in researching the music of Benjamin Britten. ‘Really?’ came the Master's reply. ‘There's not much point to the Aldeburgh Festival now that Britten and Pears are both dead, is there?’ Before I could respond, the Master had moved swiftly down the line, presumably to impart another morsel of wisdom in whatever subject-area was appropriate to the next guest. After dinner, I sat next to the wife of a senior fellow and was introduced in a similar manner. ‘Well,’ she said as she sipped her coffee thoughtfully, ‘I'm afraid I find Britten's music just too aggressively homosexual, don't you?’ This time I managed to issue a sophisticated rejoinder (the single word ‘Why?’, if I remember rightly), upon which she rapidly changed the subject.

The persistence of such bigoted views on Britain's most internationally successful and respected twentieth-century composer seems scarcely credible as the century draws to a close, and it remains an uncomfortable fact that – in his native country, at least – a small but vociferous body of commentators still seeks to denigrate Britten's self-evidently significant artistic achievements. Britten was himself no stranger to such negativity, and the seeds of an incipient critical malaise were sown as early as the 1930s when he was making a name for himself as a precocious newcomer armed with a formidable compositional technique embodying a resourcefulness and flexibility never before encountered in British music.

During the 1930s under the visionary leadership of John Grierson, the film units of two government agencies, the Empire Marketing Board (EMB) and the General Post Office (GPO), produced documentary films of interest and quality – and occasionally of innovation. While the EMB's earliest films had been ‘silents’, the acquisition of sound-recording equipment by the GPO Film Unit led to some deliberate experimentation in the sound film, and striking results were achieved. Pett and Pott and The Song of Ceylon, both with music by Walter Leigh, are possibly the most fascinating examples of the GPO Film Unit's earliest consciously experimental sound films and evidently provided useful role-models for the youthful Britten when he arrived as a new member of Grierson's team in May 1935.

Although Britten was first engaged to write a through-composed twenty-minute score for The King's Stamp, a documentary tracing the history and production of postage stamps, he was soon seconded to a more challenging and controversial project: a social documentary examining the conditions prevailing at the time in the mining industry. While The King's Stamp possessed some experimental qualities, it can hardly be claimed they extend to its soundtrack or musical score – whatever their respective merits overall. Britten's next film score, however, shows a remarkable grasp of many experimental techniques; having demonstrated to his colleagues at the Unit what he could achieve in conventional circumstances, Britten was now chosen for Coal Face, from the outset a highly experimental production.

How Brahms gave his music to the world

There are two compelling descriptions of Brahms composing: one by Brahms himself talking to his young friend the singer (and later conductor) Georg Henschel on 26 February 1876 during a train journey between Koblenz and Wiesbaden, the other by his biographer Max Kalbeck, who happened to meet him on one of his composing walks. Both in their different ways testify to intense mental activity away from manuscript paper: Brahms composed in the main, not at the piano or at his desk, but in his head. It is no surprise therefore to find his musical handwriting, when he came to write a piece down, characterised by a certain urgency. Of course he sketched and drafted (mostly destroying such material after it had served its purpose); but his writing out of the full form of a composition was usually as a working copy, which had running corrections as he changed his mind on details. The script is characteristically fluent, and all sorts of short-cuts are employed – including notational abbreviations, or ways of forming characters which are really economical (he used to combine leger-lines and note-stems into one stroke of the pen, and he developed a way of writing natural signs with one stroke too). His correction methods needed to be similarly efficient, and the two most common are surely also the two fastest – smearing the ink when still wet, then writing in the revised notation over the smear, or crossing something out in ink and replacing it alongside; on occasions he also used a knife to scrape out mistakes. The meaning of dynamic and articulation signs is usually clear as he wrote them, though the placement of crescendo and decrescendo hairpins can be approximate, increasingly so perhaps towards the bottom of pages.

Commentators from Brahms's century and our own have largely interpreted Schumann's prophetic remark about the ‘powers amassed in the orchestra and chorus’, on which Brahms should draw, as a reference to the Beethovenian symphonic tradition at mid-century and, specifically, the challenges posed by the choral finale of Beethoven's Ninth. Robert Schumann had certainly led his readers in that direction when, earlier in ‘Neue Bahnen’ (‘New Paths’), he refers to sonatas that were ‘veiled symphonies’ among those pieces the twenty-year-old Brahms played for Clara and himself in October of 1853. Nevertheless, it is likely that Brahms and his contemporaries understood Schumann's comment to refer at least as much to orchestrally accompanied choral music as to choral symphonies or symphonic music more generally. Schumann, after all, produced many of his large choral works during the last decade of his life, by which time his own style had veered decisively towards Mendelssohn's more traditional legacy. And when Brahms did finally establish himself as a major force on the German music scene in 1868 he did so with a major choral work of his own, Ein deutsches Requiem Op. 45, the largest piece he was ever to compose.

Given the tremendous success of that work and the various shorter works for chorus and orchestra that followed around 1870 (Alto Rhapsody Op. 53, Schicksalslied Op. 54, Triumphlied Op. 55), it is easy to lose sight of the fact that by 1868 Brahms had already produced a large number of choral works of more modest proportions and that he continued to compose choral music of all types for the next two decades. And whereas Brahms’s status as a composer of choral music is much acknowledged in the choral world, his signficance in this area among musicians at large has been overshadowed by his reputation as a symphonist and chamber music composer.

There exists an early photograph – a shadowy person, a stretch of wall – which dates from 1824: three years before Beethoven's death. It sets the mind racing with the thought that just such a primitive apparatus might well have been turned on Beethoven himself. Just as the early gramophone captured the last castrato, so a spectral image could well have existed of this extraordinary little man who even in his lifetime had become one of the great mythic figures of the civilisation of the West. Only a few years were to pass, and the next generation – Schumann, Berlioz, Chopin (beautifully, in that nakedly revealing tragic late photograph by Bisson) – are all recorded. Musicians, and many others: the heroic age of photography produced, in the hands of Nadar, startlingly immediate images of Baudelaire, which make him peculiarly our contemporary. Such images lend to the historical existence of those depicted something which all the documentation in the world cannot: this immediacy, this contemporaneity, this sense of Now. The invention of the camera created a great dividing line in our experience of the past.

Such thoughts arise when one gazes at the many existing photographs of Brahms. They put him in a different category to Beethoven, whom the passing of time has cut off from us, has reduced to a history-book figure. Brahms, by the aid of the camera, can be imagined as tenuously alive, as a real person to be seen walking about the streets of Vienna. The arguments for the greater truth of character portrayal achieved by the art of the portrait painter are still occasionally rehearsed and (more rarely) justified. It is also true that the typical nineteenth-century photograph is a posed one; whereas we esteem in a photograph a touch of the arbitrary, the fortuitous: the ‘snapshot’.

An approach to the music

The completion of my series of Brahms recordings with the London Classical Players provides an opportune moment to reflect on my approach to them. I have come to Brahms as the latest stage in a long exploration of musical performance from a historically-informed viewpoint which began with the Baroque era, continued into the classical era with Haydn and Mozart, and has stretched through the works of Beethoven and Schubert to the Romantics Mendelssohn, Berlioz and Schumann, and eventually to Brahms, Wagner and Bruckner. The aim has been to seek to restore as much as possible the relationship between the scores, which have not changed, and the instruments, forces and performing styles, which most certainly have. I wanted to find out how things actually were in the performing situation, to get the relationship right in order to enable the music to sound fresh and natural. The use of earlier instruments and playing styles does not force us to be old-fashioned: on the contrary, it ought to help us to re-create these masterpieces afresh. Like Schumann, Brahms has long had a reputation as a poor orchestrator, his textures being seen as overloaded and unclear. Though Brahms's scoring has had many detractors, I have never agreed with their objections. But there is equally no doubt in my mind that using the resources of his own time can tell us much about his orchestration, and about the music itself.