Album: King Lear and The Tempest
King Lear and The Tempest As with Anna Karenina, Pears remarked that early critical attention forced the similar abandonment of an opera on King Lear. He recalled that Britten was planning it as a chamber work; the venture was first proposed by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau in 1963. Shortage of time also meant that incidental music and songs for another Shakespeare play, one which would have suited Britten immensely, was never undertaken. Having produced the revival of Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Covent Garden in 1961, John Gielgud suggested The Tempest as an opera with a boy Ariel and himself as Prospero. Further negotiations eventually led to a proposed film for Paramount, probably to be shot in Bali (at Britten’s suggestion, rather than in Japan as originally proposed) with gamelan-influenced music for Ariel and the spirits. The project was still under discussion in 1969 but Britten’s other commitments and his ill health forced the project to be postponed indefinitely.

Album: ‘A great and mighty wonder’
Britten always hoped to return to the Chester Mystery cycle, his source for Canticle II, ‘Abraham and Isaac’ (1952; see exhibits 53 and 54) but it was not until the end of his life that he began to plan a major dramatic production along the lines of his earlier children’s opera Noye’s Fludde, in this case a Christmas sequence tailored for the accomplished forces of the specialist music school at Pimlico, London. The composer’s ill health allowed him to note only a few scraps of plainsong and some carol tunes before his death and the absence from his catalogue of what would clearly have been a poignant and profoundly affecting work is greatly to be regretted, particularly as a much earlier project on a similar subject—‘For the Time Being’, a Christmas oratorio to texts by Auden (1941)—also came to nothing.

Album: Attend the Tale of Mr Tod …
The adaptation of Beatrix Potter’s fourteenth book into a children’s opera for the English Opera Group was already being considered by Britten during the writing of Billy Budd in 1951. Such a work would have capitalized on the great success of The Little Sweep which had proved very profitable for the Group since its composition two years earlier. Britten’s chosen librettist was William Plomer; the cast would have comprised four adult soloists: soprano, tenor (Pears as Mr Tod), baritone, bass (Owen Brannigan as Tommy Brock) and possibly six children. Unfortunately, copyright difficulties proved insuperable: the publishers argued for a 50% share of the royalties but as this was completely uneconomical for the Group the entire project was reluctantly shelved.

Album: The Abandoned Planet
After the failure of Mr Tod, Britten asked Plomer to write an original libretto for a children’s opera to avoid any further problems of copyright. He responded with a science-fiction scenario, of which a few leaves survive in the author’s customary violet ink. The story of Tycho the Vegan (the h in the character’s name was later omitted in correspondence) dates from 1952 and was quite an advanced notion for the time, capitalizing on the growing media speculation in all things extraterrestrial, the rise of pulp fiction and the pioneering film Destination Moon (1950). However, the Earl of Harewood’s suggestion to Britten that he might write a national opera to mark the forthcoming coronation took precedence. Plans for the space opera were quickly abandoned and Britten and Plomer began transforming Lytton Strachey’s Elizabeth and Essex into Gloriana.