Britten shows the violent force of ideology at work by intercrossing it with the musical, dramatic, and psychological structures of his operas. Striating these works, which were composed in bursts of activity between 1942 and 1973, are concrete and abstract antagonisms between individuals and society, self and other. The ideological component of Britten's operas is as the warp to the weft of the stories that are sung and acted on stage. Neither the stories nor the ideology alone can account for the full effect of the subtly variegated texture of these works. Without either, an opera's sometimes laddered weave would fray utterly.

To watch or listen to Britten's operas is to engage with a vivid artistic testament to the ideological world of mid twentieth-century Britain. But it is more than that, too, because in many ways Britten's operas proffer to contemporary receivers a diagnosis of certain unresolved problems in our own time. Only rarely, as in A Midsummer Night's Dream, which reveals the fantasies underlying everyday understanding of sexual relations, and Peter Grimes, which shows the violence inherent in all forms of social and psychological identification, does Britten unmistakably call into question fundamental precepts of his contemporary ideology. This has not, however, prevented some writers from romanticizing Britten as a quietly revolutionary fighter for the sexual underdog. This book argues, in contrast, that his operas, and some interpretations of them, have obscured a greater social and philosophical complicity that it is timely - if at the same time uncomfortable - for his early twenty-first-century audiences to address.

Ideology is a gnarled concept, and its meaning varies in political, journalistic, and academic uses. The last is, predictably, the least well known, but all are relevant for an introduction to the issue in the case of Britten's operas. When an Anglophone politician or journalist claims that an individual or a political party cleaves to a policy ‘for ideological reasons', they use the word to describe the cardinal dogma of an entire political worldview.