Although by 1963 Britten and Shostakovich already shared a long-standing creative affinity, it is perhaps in their preoccupation with the topic of death that their musical relationship can most coherently be traced over the last twelve years of their lives. Of course, one must acknowledge that this is only one way of looking at their relationship as it developed in the 1960s, and a way that ultimately relies upon a subjective reading of musical and circumstantial evidence as opposed to explicit documentary proof: this theme is not mentioned in the letters between the two composers and also seems to have remained unspoken on the relatively few occasions on which they met privately in the Soviet Union or the United Kingdom. One might equally suggest, for example, that just as Britten saw in Shostakovich his unfulfilled destiny as a symphonic composer, Shostakovich particularly admired Britten for his extensive operatic output. Moreover, the preoccupation with death was not widely recognised critically at the time: Stephen Walsh, writing just after Britten's death, felt that ‘notwithstanding his chronic illness, few of us thought of his mid-seventies music as “valedictory” or “other-worldly”’. On the other hand, with the benefit of hindsight, a consideration of their shared treatment of death does enable an overall assessment which convincingly transcends both the purely personal aspect of the association and its specific geographical and political contexts, both amplifying and qualifying its peculiarly Russian dimension and polarised Cold War backdrop. In this respect, some comparison can be made with the relationship between Vaughan Williams and Holst, who shared a friendship and several close aspects of creative sensibility: though their creative closeness was by no means consistent, and their outputs not identical, each at times regarded the other's latest compositions as offering an answer to ongoing compositional questions and a stimulus to further compositional activity. Vaughan Williams most explicitly acknowledged this in his near-quotation from The Planets in the epilogue of the Sixth Symphony, fourteen years after Holst's death and his own unexpected return to composition after the Fifth.