I was born on the day Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears arrived in Moscow from St Petersburg, then Leningrad, during their final visit to the Soviet Union in 1971; and Britten's Te Deum in C was the first piece I sang as a treble nine years later. Britten's music runs as something of a thread over my school years, well ahead of my first thoughts relating it to my love of Russian music nearly ten years ago.

Benjamin Britten and Russia examines the origins and development of the composer's interest in Russia over the course of his creative life, from his first documented acquisition of a Tchaikovsky score in 1925 to his unfinished work on Praise We Great Men, just over fifty years later, for Rostropovich to conduct in exile in the United States.

Various aspects of Britten's relationship with Russia have been discussed over the last thirty years and, in particular, his friendship with Shostakovich is now increasingly recognised as an important aspect of his creative persona during the last fifteen years of his life, as are his friendships with Soviet musicians, most notably Mstislav Rostropovich, Galina Vishnevskaya and Sviatoslav Richter. Donald Mitchell (1984), Eric Roseberry (1995) and Liudmila Kovnatskaia (2000) were pioneering in suggesting significant areas of shared affinity and preoccupations between Britten and Shostakovich to English readers, and this book builds upon the considerable foundations of their scholarship. In particular, Liudmila Kovnatskaia's longstanding interest in Britten, which began as a student at the Leningrad Conservatory in the 1960s and found expression in her detailed monograph of the composer in Russian in 1974, has resulted in an important series of publications on the Britten–Russia theme, enriched by her wider credentials as an authority on English music and a highly respected Shostakovich scholar. Yet other aspects of Britten's cultural ‘Russophilia’ – his abiding admiration for Tchaikovsky, for example, or his more ambivalent attitude towards Russian performance style – have received considerably less scholarly attention; and there is now much greater appreciation of the appeal to Britten of various forms of ‘otherness’.