Cliff Eisen

Sometime in the early 1970s – his health poor, his country’s no better – the English composer Benjamin Britten asked his good friend and publisher Donald Mitchell to write his biography, imploring him to tell the truth about his long-term relationship with the tenor Peter Pears. In the ten years that followed Britten’s death in 1976, Mitchell amassed thoughts and notes, all the while deflecting the common query among friends and those outside the hallowed circle, ‘How’s the biography going?’

It seems astonishing that one of the most important studies ever undertaken on Mozart should have taken almost eighty-five years to reach the English language. Hermann Abert’s monumental, and indeed famous, work was first published in 1924 and was originally intended as an updated edition to that other monumental work of Mozart scholarship undertaken by Otto Jahn, published in four volumes between 1855 and 1859.