Benjamin Britten

His music was deeply rooted in the landscapes of Suffolk, but Britten also drew inspiration from well outside Europe

- Daniel Jaffé

Britten is widely celebrated for his profound connection with Suffolk’s flat, open landscapes, its coast and its rich birdlife of waders and waterfowl, one of which is celebrated in his opera (or ‘Church Parable’) Curlew River. It’s a curious paradox, then, that much of his music, even some that is most apparently rooted in that East Anglian region – including in his great ‘home coming’ opera of 1945, Peter Grimes – was profoundly inspired by music from even further East, virtually the other side of the world.

It was not through travelling East, but westwards across the Atlantic that Britten had his first encounter with Balinese music. In 1939, despondent about the rise of fascism, Europe’s fate and that of his own country, Britten left for the US just months before the outbreak of World War II. There, while in Long Island as house guest of the German émigré psychiatrist William Mayer, he met the Canadian composer and ethnomusicologist Colin McPhee. A sufferer of debilitating depression – hence his frequent visits to Dr Mayer – McPhee nonetheless played a vital role in researching and documenting music in Bali, living several years on the Indonesian island for that purpose.

McPhee persuaded Britten to play several of his two-piano transcriptions of Balinese music, five of which they recorded in a New York studio early in 1941. One of these, ‘Taboeh teloe’, particularly sank into Britten’s creative consciousness, resurfacing in