In July 1945, some two months after the end of the Second World War in Europe, the violinist Yehudi Menuhin and the composer Benjamin Britten went on a concert tour in Germany to play for displaced people, many of whom were still living in the death camps and had nowhere to go. Menuhin had proposed to take the pianist Gerald Moore as his accompanist, but Britten, who (in Menuhin’s words) had been “casting about for some commitment to the human condition whose terrible depths had been so newly revealed,” asked if he might go instead, and Moore agreed to step aside.

They played to audiences two or three times a day for ten days in what Menuhin described as “the saddest ruins of the Third Reich.” In a letter to his partner, Peter Pears, Britten described how they traveled by car over bad roads and saw completely destroyed towns and “millions” of displaced persons, many of whom were in appalling condition. They visited the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp and stayed a night there and visited the hospital. Conditions had improved since the British authorities had taken control. The prison huts had been burned down and the occupants were transferred to the former SS barracks where there was a theater. They were dressed in army blankets made into skirts and suits by the tailors among them, but they still looked haggard and many were still sick after their appalling experience.

He responded magnificently in his music to the themes