The man whose music has veered from the populist (his 1968 work The Whale was taken up by the Beatles, who financed a recording of it on the Apple label) to the profoundly weird (his opera Mary of Egypt, a "moving ikon" about the whore of Alexandria who became a desert saint) to the genuinely accomplished (his throbbing rhapsody for cello, The Protecting Veil) ventured dangerously close to the middle of the road when his music was used at the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales. It is, to put it mildly, unusual for a contemporary composer to receive the celebrity treatment, and Haydon's wry detachment make him the ideal biographer for the job.
