MY NEXT ASSIGNMENT with Ben was sharing performances of The Rape of Lucretia with him during the autumn of 1969. It was the first time Colin Graham's production had been seen in London, and the first professional production in London for many years. Ben was determined to give it its best possible chance, helped by an incredibly strong cast, including Janet Baker, Heather Harper, Peter Pears, Benjamin Luxon and John Shirley-Quirk. That was a delight, to work with that group.

This was the first time I assisted him on live performances of one of his operas, and I played the orchestral piano part too, when he was conducting. In a sense it was like a homecoming for me, after my mother's history with the opera. Funnily enough, though, that never, ever came up.

If you want to get to know an opera really well, there isn't a better way of doing it than sharing performances with the man who wrote it. How can you do better? Especially when the man who wrote it really knew what he wanted. And it was on that final run that he took particular trouble with that piece. He tried to get the libretto right. It was then when we did a few revisions, particularly the end.

We were rehearsing in Gower Street, and Ben was at nearly every rehearsal. It was very noisy sometimes, but just around the corner from Heals, and Peter arranged his diary to meet various people he wanted to see for lunch in the Heals restaurant. The waiter said he wished he had an autograph book.

One day we took Colin Graham with us – so it was Ben, Peter, Colin and me – and we took the score, and we rewrote the end, textually; sorted things out and tried to make it work, because the libretto has always come in for incredible stick. Everybody complains about it. I can't quite see why, but I suppose I can understand. Some people say they don't like having a sermon preached at the end, for instance. That seems to be a lot of rot. You can object to things like ‘oatmeal slippers’ and various strange, very Duncanesque lines. I contributed an alternative line to ‘She had a restless night’, which had always raised a few sniggers in the past.