Benjamin Britten

Neil Powell is a poet, and it shows. Fluent… intimate… psychologically adept… [Powell does] an exceptional job of bringing this strange, neurotic and evasive man to life. – Bryan Appleyard * Sunday Times *[A] fine biography… Powell has a more personal touch… takes a more literary approach, and is good at relating the vocal pieces to their sources. * Daily Telegraph *A sensible, well-written book by an author who is a literary scholar: this is the biography to choose if you are new to Britten and want an introduction to his life. * Country Life *Powell carries the torch into the present, naming those singers now performing the work anew, painting a portrait of the Aldeburgh festival as it is today. His account has air and light, and brings alive the sense of landscape – the East Anglian coast, the marshes, the wind and waves – which have coloured so much of Britten’s music. * Observer *Tightly focused… sympathetic. Powell lives in Suffolk and has a strong understanding of the composer’s cultural rootedness in that part of the world. * Economist *This concise and well-written biography draws effectively on almost every available major source to provide a valuable synthesis of modern scholarship and opinion … This book comes with many rare photographs, a very useful bibliography, and is well indexed … For a well-written distillation of Britten’s life and art, Neil Powell’s biography can be thoroughly recommended, particularly to those who want an accessible and comprehensive account as a preface to further study. * Classical Music magazine *Powell has a certain ease as a writer… and an unerring eye for the unexpected revealing quotation. * TLS *Powell’s biography provides a reliable, uncluttered narrative, useful for Britten beginners. * Financial Times *

Neil Powell is a poet and biographer who has written extensively on literature and music. His previous books include Roy Fuller- Writer and Society (1995), The Language of Jazz (1997), George Crabbe- An English Life (2004) and Amis & Son- Two Literary Generations (2008), as well as seven collections of poetry, the most recent of which is Proof of Identity (2012). He lives in Suffolk.

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