One of the happiest and the most creative meetings of East and West came about in a work by the British composer Benjamin Britten (1913-76). During a short stay of twelve days in Japan, he saw two performances of the Japanese medieval Noh play Sumidagawa, and eight years later he completed his opera Curlew River, which was based upon this Noh play. In November 1955, he and the tenor Peter Pears along with their patrons, Prince Ludwig of Hesse and Rhine and his wife Margaret, left England on a world concert tour. On 8 February 1955 they arrived in Tokyo, and three days later they attended a performance of Sumidagawa (Sumida River), Juro Motomasa's fifteenth-century drama, at the Suidobashi Noh Theater in Tokyo. The performance was being staged by the Umetani Group of the Kanze School with Takeshi Umewaka playing the leading role. The day was to be remembered as one of the most significant of the entire tour.
