<\/p>
H<\/span>is <\/span>wiry grey hair was ominously flat. The quicksilver energy had evaporated. The demon tennis-player found it hard even to hold a racquet. The fanatic who plunged into the sea five times a day could no longer swim.The finest accompanist in England had abandoned the piano, even for his own pleasure. Britain\u2019s pre-eminent composer had lost confidence in himself. His manuscript paper was virtually blank.<\/strong><\/p>\n \u00a0Benjamin Britten<\/a><\/strong> was a shadow of his former self. In 1973, after completing his opera Death in Venice<\/i>, he had had emergency heart surgery, and suffered a stroke on the operating table. He survived, just, but came out of hospital an invalid, often confined to a wheelchair. With a severely weakened right hand, composing was physically arduous. But, worse than that, he had lost his mental stamina. His friends looked desperately for someone to re-charge his musical batteries.<\/span><\/p>\n The person who came to the rescue was the Queen. In a series of previously undisclosed handwritten letters, now stored at the Britten-Pears Library in Suffolk, she stimulated him to take up his composing pencil once again, to write one of his most charming song cycles. More than 20 years earlier, she had publicly commissioned him to write an opera for the Coronation, Gloriana. <\/i>This time the commission was private and personal \u2013 a generous act of royal patronage.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p><\/div> <\/section> \u2018Dear Ben,\u2019 she wrote from Buckingham Palace in January 1975. That in itself is startling. But so are the two sides of her strong, elegant handwriting, familiar to most of us only from her official \u2018Elizabeth R\u2019 signature. Letters are normally sent on her behalf by a lady-in-waiting, but this was her own doing. She had a request to make, she said, not as a queen, but as a daughter. Her mother\u2019s 75th birthday was coming up in August, and she wanted Ben to write some music for her. \u2018Please try\u2019, she added.<\/span><\/p>\n Britten took up her offer immediately. He said he wasn\u2019t strong enough to compose a symphony, and suggested some songs for voice and harp, using poems by Robert Burns, in honour of the Queen Mother\u2019s Scottish blood. Back came another letter from the Queen, this time from Sandringham. She was relieved he had shied away from a symphony, and thought the songs right for her mother, if they were short and musically satisfying. <\/span><\/p>\n Britten, who had recently managed to write a short suite for orchestra, set to work with a will. He and the Queen exchanged further letters, discussing the particular Burns poems he wanted to use. The Queen showed lively and detailed enthusiasm for the words, which was just as well, since Britten was so fired up with the project that he had already written the music for them. He proposed the title A Birthday Hansel<\/i>, although the Queen confessed she had never heard of the Scottish word \u2018hansel\u2019, meaning a gift to bring someone luck. She added that she and the Duke of Edinburgh<\/a><\/strong> were just off for a fortnight to Jamaica, Hong Kong and Japan, as if they were going off on holiday rather than attending a Commonwealth Conference and making a State Visit.<\/span><\/p>\nLetters from the Queen<\/h2>\n