Colin Matthews was Britten’s assistant in the 1970s and was familiar with his daily work and life, and the people around him the Red House in Aldeburgh. He writes, about his time with Britten: ‘Now that a whole generation of musicians has grown up since Britten’s death it’s strange to look back forty years to the time when I worked with him. I suppose in a way I took it for granted, never asked him the questions that I would now. But it was an easy working relationship, and I am endlessly grateful for the trust he put in me. I worked with him for various periods between 1972 and 1976, the year he died. There was no regular pattern – he called when he needed me! – although there was a time when I stayed in Aldeburgh as long as two weeks, working on the full score of Death in Venice. To see a work like this coming to life was extraordinary; to have sat next to the frail composer, playing through the sketches of Phaedra and the Third Quartet for him, was an experience without parallel.’

Britten was the first to admit that he was not good with words. The Aspen Award speech was written with the help of Peter Pears – ‘my speech (our speech!) which I think you’ve done marvellously for me’, he wrote in a letter to Pears. It encapsulates the clearest statement of his musical ideals and objectives that he was ever to make outside of his music. Yet as a manifesto it is by no means as straightforward as might be expected from someone who was usually at pains to stress his own unsophisticated nature.

He begins with a slightly too self-effacing expression of surprise that he should have been considered for an Award for Services to the Humanities, and uses the peg of going to the dictionary to find out what ‘humanities’ means to launch the second section of his speech (it is divided into eight parts): ‘I certainly write for human beings – directly and deliberately.’ There seems to be something of an agenda here, which, as he continues, is a little perplexing: in the same paragraph he writes, ‘I certainly don’t think opera is better for not being effective on the stage.’