The experience that coloured everything Britten went on to write

In 1945, the violinist Yehudi Menuhin was on a short tour of Germany, offering recitals to survivors of the concentration camps. On Friday 27 July 1945 he reached Bergen-Belsen, liberated three months earlier, and gave two concerts, in the cinema at the camp. The experience had a profound impact. “I shall not forget that afternoon as long as I live,” said Menuhin. “After Belsen, Yehudi was never the same again,” his sister Yaltah Menuhin reported. Anita Lasker, a survivor of Belsen, was present at one of those concerts. Nineteen years old, and a cellist, as a child she had been at Auschwitz, where she played in the women’s orchestra, under the direction of Alma Rosé, the niece of Gustav Mahler. Lasker wrote to her cousin about the concert. “Who would ever have believed that Belsen Camp would hear Yehudi Menuhin playing? A wonderful evening”, which included “the Bach/Kreisler Prelude and Fugue, the Kreutzer Sonata, Mendelssohn’s Concerto, something by Debussy and several smaller, unfamiliar items”. Lasker’s eye for detail was unsparing. Menuhin’s attire “bordered on the slovenly, which matched the surroundings perfectly”. He played “faultlessly”, but she sensed he held back. Perhaps he was not inspired by the atmosphere, she wondered (“it was impossible to get complete silence in the hall, and I was thoroughly ashamed of the audience”). Lasker noted, too, that Menuhin performed with a pianist, whose name she omitted. He left an impression: “As for his accompanist, I can only say that I cannot imagine anything done more beautifully. He was completely unobtrusive and yet I found myself transfixed by him sitting there as if he wouldn’t say boo to a goose – but playing to perfection.” Lasker’s memory never faded. She later told an interviewer. “I couldn’t take my eyes off that guy who was playing the piano, and that was Benjamin Britten.” In the 1960s, Lasker-Wallfisch, as she became following her marriage to pianist Peter Wallfisch, would perform with “the guy who pl…