This article analyzes Benjamin Britten's late works through the lenses of late style discourse and theories of aging, showing how these final compositions can be read as a reflection of the ways in which Britten's illness and physical disability in the last years of his life prematurely ushered the composer into 'old age' and its attendant physical and psychological difficulties. From Death in Venice on, Britten's compositions display an unmistakable preoccupation with mortality, both in terms of subject matter and in terms of an even further finessed concision of musical style. While the stylistic decisions in these last works cannot be divorced from Britten's very real sense and eventual acceptance of the nearness of his own death, neither can they be wholly accounted for by it, marking as they do an undiminished capacity for creative achievement in the midst of significantly diminished physical capabilities.

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In Ezra Pound's Le Testament, the first of his three operatic compositions, the relentless drive for linguistic precision is undermined by an ironic recourse to the imprecise, even mystical, signifying capacity of music and rhythm. Given Pound's lifelong engagement with translation, it is likely not surprising that his turn to opera was essentially literary in purpose, serving the poet as a means to ‘translate’ the category of poetic language he termed melopoeia (in this case, François Villon's Le Testament). What is surprising, however – particularly given Pound's notorious fascist sympathies and his own esoteric poetic style – is Pound's determination to make this poetry accessible, intellectually and materially. Though Le Testament unapologetically valorizes Villon's poems for their unique difficulty, the use of opera (and later radio opera) as the means of translation reflects Pound's desire to make Villon's poetry ‘sing’ to the masses – calling into question the common conflation of modernist difficulty with modernist elitism.