Benjamin Britten must be accepted as the most outstanding English composer working in the mid-20th century. He won a significant international reputation while remaining thoroughly English in inspiration, a feat that his immediate predecessors had been unable fully to achieve.

Operas

Britten won a triumph in 1945 with his opera Peter Grimes, first staged when Sadler’s Wells Theatre in London reopened after the Second World War. The aspirations of the central character, the fisherman Peter Grimes, a man at odds with the community in which he lives, are frustrated by a combination of social pressure and sheer chance, leading to his suicide. The drama is set against the background of the sea, in various moods, summa...