The Robert O. Anderson Aspen Award in the Humanities was established in 1963 to honour ‘the individual anywhere in the world judged to have made the greatest contribution to the advancement of the humanities’. Britten received the inaugural award at a ceremony at Aspen, Colorado, on 31 July 1964, at which occasion he gave the following speech.

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Ladies and Gentlemen, when last May your Chairman and your President told me they wished to travel the 5,000 miles from Aspen to Aldeburgh to have a talk with me, they hinted that it had something to do with an Aspen Award for Services to the Humanities – an award of very considerable importance and size. I imagined that they felt I might advise them on a suitable recipient, and I began to consider what I should say. Who would be suitable for such an honour? What kind of person? Doctor? Priest? A social worker? A politician? Well, … ! An Artist? Yes, possibly (that, I imagined, could be the reason that Mr Anderson and Professor Eurich thought I might be the person to help them). So I ran through the names of the great figures working in the Arts among us today. It was a fascinating problem; rather like one’s school-time game of ideal cricket elevens, or slightly more recently, ideal casts for operas – but I certainly won’t tell which of our great poets, painters, or composers came to the top of my list.

Mr Anderson and Professor Eurich paid their visit to my home in Aldeburgh. It was a charming and courteous visit, but it was also a knock-out. It had not occurred to me, frankly, that it was I who was to be the recipient of this magnificent award, and I was stunned. I am afraid my friends must have felt I was a tongue-tied host. But I simply could not imagine why I had been chosen for this very great honour. I read again the simple and moving citation. The key-word seemed to be ‘humanities’. I went to the dictionary to look up its meaning; I found Humanity: ‘the quality of being human’ (well, that applied to me all right).