The music man

When Humphrey Carpenter published the first major biography of Benjamin Britten in 1992, many of the composer’s associates were still alive and breathing down his neck. Carpenter’s knowledge of the music wasn’t intimate, nor did he have available to him the primary source of the superb edition of Britten’s correspondence, now completed with a sixth 800-page volume covering the decade before his death in 1976: deadly dull though these letters intrinsically are, the magnificent accompanying annotation and detailed apparatus make them richly revealing.

Thus hobbled, Carpenter’s effort amounts to a broad-brush portrait and a gripping narrative, but also something of a rushed and unpolished job — unbalanced and half-digested, peppered with small errors and marred by a rather crude psychological portrait of a man obsessed with his mother and bewitched by pubescent boys.

This second major biography emerges as the long-meditated and authoritative corrective. Somewhat shorter than Carpenter’s, it is cleanly shaped and moves as swiftly and surely as the music it honours.