Abstract
This essay is an attempt to gain further understanding of Britten’s particular reworking, or reconception, of tonality through an examination of his use of one of its most distinctive constructs, the augmented-sixth chord. The topic was prompted initially by Derrick Puffett’s claim in an article on the String Quartet No. 2 by Britten’s contemporary Michael Tippett that, in contrast with Tippett in the movement Puffett is analyzing, ‘Britten … is not noted for his fondness for augmented sixths’. Puffett is correct that Britten is not well known for this, but wrong in his assumption that he shouldn’t be. In fact, if one searches merely the output preceding his first opera, Peter Grimes (1945), one can find at least eight works in which the augmented sixth has a significant structural role.