As a plaque in her honour is unveiled at Jennifer Vyvyan's previous home in Hampstead, we look back at this Gramophone Icons feature, celebrating her life, career and close association with Benjamin Britten.

When Jennifer Vyvyan died in 1974 she was just 49, which was an awkward age in terms of lasting recognition: neither young enough to be sensational nor old enough to have fulfilled the possibilities of a still flourishing career. As a result, the world largely forgot her – except as a satellite figure in the universe of Benjamin Britten and a name on two classic recordings of Handel’s Messiah. She had never been a major presence in core repertory on the world opera stage. And, Messiah apart, core repertory of any kind acknowledged in the mid-20th century was never central to her work. She sang Baroque and modern: not much in between.

Unpacking that statement, however, you find a remarkable career encompassing far more than the few things for which she’s vaguely remembered. With a sure technique, a brilliant, blazing coloratura, and a fiery stage presence, she was a key member of the English Opera Group from its earliest days and – for a while – Britten’s soprano of choice. Tytania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Lady Rich in Gloriana, Mrs Julian in Owen Wingrave and, most significantly, the Governess in The Turn of the Screw were all written for her.

‘Vyvyan combined a feisty, spirited, emotionally tempestuous character with vulnerability and neurotic tendencies’

But she also played an important role in the music of other contemporary composers, from Poulenc and Milhaud to Malcolm Williamson. And she was a leading light of the mid-20th century Baroque revival: a celebrated Rameau, Bach and Purcell singer, and a star of landmark 1950s and ’60s reappraisals of the Handel operas, virtually unknown to audiences at that time.

Born in 1925 into a family of Cornish landowners with a country seat and an ancestral history of baronets, bishops and generals, Vyvyan wasn’t an obvious candidate for a singing career, but nonetheless went to the Royal Academy of Music – first as a mezzo before moving up to soprano and on to further study in Geneva and Milan. She won the 1951 Geneva International Concours, a big deal at the time; and for a while it looked as though she was set for a conventional stage career. In the early 1950s there were Mozart roles with Sadlers Wells and at the Edinburgh Festival, and a Puccini Il tabarro in a television broadcast; and Covent Garden showed some interest. At the same time, she became a popular figure on the oratorio circuit, singing Messiah for the likes of Beecham, Boult and Sargent.

But the most enduring aspect of Vyvyan’s career was fixed in 1948, when she joined the newly founded English Opera Group, starting as the sharp young trollop Jenny Diver in Britten’s The Beggar’s Opera. New contemporary music soon became a speciality. But central to it all was Britten, with endless performances of Spring Symphony,

Les illuminations, Cantata academica and War Requiem – and, above all, the stage roles written specifically for her voice.

Her relationship with Britten had its ups and downs. As his letters to her made clear, she was at one point his favoured soprano and his first choice for future Ellen Orfords (Peter Grimes). But she never did sing Ellen. And the reason seems to have been some kind of distancing during the early 1960s that meant she was dropped from the recording of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and had no new opera roles written for her until Owen Wingrave in 1970.

That said, she was still regularly booked for other repertory at Aldeburgh, and she sang in Britten’s 50th birthday concert at the Festival Hall in 1963. And one thing that is clear is that when Britten did write for her, he put her into the piece body and soul. Like Lady Rich, the Governess, Tytania and Mrs Julian, Vyvyan herself combined a feisty, spirited, emotionally tempestuous character with vulnerability and tendencies to the neurotic. In her diaries there’s a sense of living on the edge in an exuberant, barely managed chaos.

That she also struggled with the long-term respiratory illness that eventually killed her, keeping it a secret for as long as possible, only increased the tensions under which she worked. And there were times when the voice suffered – to a degree that may have been a factor in the cooling down of her relationship with Britten.

Her discography, though, proves what she could do in peak condition. And pride of place can only go to her 1954 The Turn of the Screw with Britten and the English Opera Group: a classic Decca set that concentrates her vocal and dramatic strengths into a truly thrilling, no-holds-barred, all-round performance. It’s comparable in its way to Baltsa’s Carmen or Callas’s Tosca, and is among examples of the greatest British singing of its time.