Letters from a Life: The Selected Letters of Benjamin Britten, 1913-1976: 1958-1965

This fifth volume of Britten's letters covers a period of intense activity in his life and works, cultimating in his great pacifist choral masterpiece, War Requiem.

He was Musicologist at the Britten-Pears Library, Aldeburgh, for more than a decade, and is currently Head of Publications at English National Opera. He has been co-editor of all four previous volumes of Letters from a Life, and is now Editor-in-Chief of the series in succession to Donald Mitchell. For their editing of the first two volumes. he and Donald Mitchell received a Royal Philharmonic Society Award. Reed has contributed to many studies of Britten's music, including volumes on Peter Grimes, Gloriana and War Requiem; edited The Travel Diaries of Peter Pears and On Britten and Mabler: Essays in Honour of Donald Mitchell on His Seventieth Birthday, and co-authored, with Mervyn Cooke, the Cambridge Opera Handbook on Billy Budd. He is editorial consultant for the recently launched Overture Opera Guides, published in association with English National Opera.
He is Professor of Music at the University of Nottingham, and was formerly Research Fellow and Director of Studies in Music at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge. Among his many publications on Britten are the monograph Britten and the Far East, The Cambridge Companion to Benjamin Britten, and (with co-author Philip Reed) the Cambridge Handbooks on Billy Budd and War Requiem. He is also the editor of Donald Mitchell's Cradles of the New (Faber), and of The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century Opera and (with David Horn) The Cambridge Companion to Jazz, and the author of two illustrated books on jazz (Thames & Hudson). His recent publications include A History of Film Music (Cambridge University Press) and The Hollywood Film Music Reader (Oxford University Press).