In 1941 he had read E.M. Forster’s study (published in The Listener) of the poetry of the Suffolk poet, George Crabbe and his links with the East Coast. Apart from contributing to the decision to return to England, two years later this bore fruit. Koussevitsky also played a part. The Boston-based conductor asked Britten what he wanted to write at the time. When Britten told him he had an opera in mind but could not afford it. Koussevitsky said ‘All right, I’ll commission it.’ 

Britten worked with Montagu Slater on a libretto for Peter Grimes, an opera based on ‘The Borough’. The work was to preoccupy him during the early 1940s until its completion in February 1945. The shattering first performance was given at Sadlers Wells in London that summer as the war, which had formed the tragic backdrop to the writing of the opera, shuddering to its close. Pears recalled that it was down to Joan Cross that it was put on at all. There had been opposition to it from the old school of governors and singers. 

The reception of Peter Grimes by the first night audience was wonderful and critics were generally favourable. There were rumours that the first night would be the scene of a demonstration but nothing came of this. It was nothing less than an outstanding world-league success for the 31 year old composer. Artistic clocks were reset. It marked not the end of an old era but the start of a new. Of all his works it is Grimes which has kept Britten’s reputation at its high-flame level. From Grimes he quarried, without too much invasive surgery, the Four Sea Interludes and the Passacaglia. These works have a directness of message and language which grip the imagination. If Britten had written nothing else these orchestral portraits of the sea and the emotional life of mankind in all its coldness, fury, cruelty and beauty would have secured his future. Britten always made it clear that he felt at home near the sea: “I cannot do without it.” Of course there were other echoes as well for Grimes too is rejected by his community. Grimes was a dreamer and visionary who could not be tolerated in his community. Despite his success Britten saw himself in this way.
RADIO MUSIC

The ending of the war saw Britten visiting the concentration camps at Belsen and elsewhere in company with Yehudi Menuhin. It was also the year of the second string quartet and his musical collaboration with Louis Macneice over the BBC Third Programme radio play, The Dark Tower. The Britten music for radio plays is another rich area for excavation, discovery and recording. It is to be hoped that along with the film music this music will be treated to systematic authentic performance and recording. 
THE WAR IS OVER

The opera The Rape of Lucretia, a concept suggested by Rudolf Byng, was premiered at Glyndebourne in July 1946. It was distinguished by a fine cast which was lead by Kathleen Ferrier. In after years Britten recalled how during one of their tours of the opera he had had a blazing row with a friend who was a member of the cast. He recalled that Ferrier took him to one side and gently told him that he must “try to be nice”: which he did! Given that it had been a Koussevitsky commission it was fitting that the first U.S. performance of Grimes was given at Tanglewood in August 1946. 

For many their introduction to the music of Britten came with The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra. This work, which was filmed by the Crown Film Unit for which Britten had already done work, was a further success. The film showed Malcolm Sargent leading the wing-collared orchestra, as well as giving the commentary. It was used widely in schools until well into the 1960s and is now available on video (Beulah RT152) with its ‘sibling’ production ‘Steps of the Ballet’ to music by Arthur Benjamin. Children and amateur performers were at all times close to the heart of Britten’s musical motivation. The film was first shown at a Leicester Square cinema on 29 November 1946. It has of course had a concert life separate from the now somewhat dated film and has been recorded with various celebrity narrators occasionally as a coupling for Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf (1936). 

Other operas followed over the intervening years. Albert Herring was completed in 1947. The English Opera Group, which Britten had founded with Joan Cross, Eric Crozier and Peter Pears in 1946, toured Holland and Switzerland in summer 1947. Before the first Aldeburgh Festival in June 1948 Britten had completed and brought to first performance a version of John Gay’s ballad-work The Beggar’s Opera. 

The Aldeburgh Festival (an annual fixture without fail and which has continued since Britten’s death) was a Britten-centred event and behind which he was the very clear moving force. The premises: various churches and the Jubilee Hall, Aldeburgh were very small and unsuitable but triumphs were won from these adverse circumstances. The first festival opened with Britten’s cantata Saint Nicolas. This was the year in which the first grains of an idea of an opera based on Hermann Melville’s novella Billy Budd began to form in conversation with the novelist E.M. Forster and Eric Crozier. However before this major work was completed another took precedence: the Spring Symphony. Gripping and glistening, this symphony for solo voices and chorus was premiered in Amsterdam by Eduard van Beinum in July 1949, a couple of months before Pears and Britten returned to the U.S.A. for a recital tour.
THE CONFIDENT 1950s

Peter Pears ca.1959 Photo: Lotte Meitner-Graf Courtesy of the Britten-Pears Library

The Festival of Britain in 1951 was a time of much musical activity. There were premieres of Vaughan Williams’ drama Pilgrim’s Progress and another operatic ‘Progress’, The Rake’s by Stravinsky. Britten was made Honorary Freeman of Lowestoft. As the year drew to a close he conducted the premiere at Covent Garden of Billy Budd. Post-war confidence was high. A new idealism and a fresh ethos was at work. The Labour Government had introduced many reforms and there was a determination to reject the old and embrace the innovative and slightly dangerous new. The accession of Queen Elizabeth II took place in February 1952. While on a skiing holiday in Austria, Britten conceived the idea of a Coronation opera. Later that year he was made a Companion of Honour. His Coronation project developed into Gloriana which was completed in Coronation year, 1953 and was performed in June. It was not a great success critically. The New Elizabethan Age rejected the opera and it has hardly surfaced since, though a recent recording has thankfully restored its availability. The process of reassessment of this opera has begun with as much vigour as the exploration of the radio and film music. 
International travel and the Aldeburgh Festival dominate the years 1954 and 1955. Skiing remained a particular enthusiasm. This however was not to the detriment of his writing activity. In 1954 he completed his operatic setting of the Henry James psychological drama The Turn of the Screw. In 1955 he was finally persuaded to go on a world tour holiday. During the tour he heard gamelan music in Bali and the Noh play ‘Sumidagawa’ in Tokyo. Gamelan had a profound influence upon him. The impact of the exotic east is to be found in a number of his later works including The Songs from the Chinese, the grand ballet The Prince of the Pagodas (strongly accented by gamelan) where he used a virtually independent percussion orchestra and much later in his 1964 opera Curlew River. The voice of gamelan is also to be heard in the opera Death in Venice. 

Too easily overlooked is his work for other composers. His performances of Mozart, Purcell, Schumann and Schubert were important and full of insight. His dedicated support for the music of Percy Grainger extended to revivals at the Aldeburgh and a ‘Salute to Grainger’ LP (Decca). This tradition has continued in the safe hands of the conductor Steuart Bedford among others.
TRAVELLING

In 1957 he toured the English Opera Group to Canada. Returning to the U.K., he moved into The Red House in Aldeburgh, now home of the Britten Trust and Estate, in November. Noye’s Fludde, another operatic adaptation, was begun that year and brought to premiere in Orford Church during the following summer. The production was memorable among other things for using struck tea-cups strung on a piece of twine to evoke the first ominous raindrops of the Flood. Apart from some settings of Hölderlin and occasional cantatas the intervening years until October 1959 saw no major creative activity. However in the late autumn of 1959 he began work on his opera Midsummer Night’s Dream which was completed with his accustomed speed in April of the first year of the new decade. 
RUSSIAN ENCOUNTERS AND FRIENDSHIPS

The 1960s, with their upheavals and emphasis on popular youth culture and a rising commercialism, left Britten’s music as a distinct tributary. It was no longer within the cultural mainstream, at least not as defined by the atonalists predominant at the BBC and elsewhere. Britten however did not suffer to anything like the same degree as many other essentially tonal composers. In September 1960 a new phase was ushered in by meetings with Rostropovich and Shostakovich. He wrote a Cello Sonata for ‘Slava’ and premiered it with him at Aldeburgh in July 1961. He was very much at ease with ‘Slava’ and his wife, the soprano, Galina Vishnevskaya. Ms Vishnevskaya took the soprano part in the premiere of War Requiem. The Red House carried ‘Beware of the Dog’ signs in various languages including Russian. 

There was a commission to write a major work for the opening of the rebuilt Coventry Cathedral in the English Midlands. The original city cathedral had been destroyed in massive bombing by the Luftwaffe. The 1961 inaugural service was to be a major event of reconciliation and Britten rose to the challenge with his War Requiem. This was by far the most successful work to emerge from the Coventry celebrations. It eclipsed Arthur Bliss’s Beatitudes, a work of comparable sincerity and achievement but which suffered in the glare of the glittering success of the War Requiem as also, to a slightly lesser degree, did Tippett’s opera King Priam, another work premiered in Coventry at the time. The War Requiem was first performed in Russia in Moscow in May 1966. 

The Russian connection continued in March 1963 when he visited the USSR. He composed the Cello Symphony in that year. This was written for Rostropovich who recorded it, with the composer, for Decca: a touchstone performance which for many years had the field completely to itself. It was premiered in Moscow in March 1964. Curlew River was given its premiere in Orford Church during that summer but, in October, Britten was back in the USSR with the English Opera Group touring three of chamber operas.
A CHANGE OF PUBLISHERS

He switched publishers in 1965 the year in which he added the Order of Merit to his litany of honours. Emigrating from Booseys to Faber Music he took up a place on the Board of the company and continued to exercise a very strong and direct control over the propagation of his works. His name and music achieved even greater prominence. Broadcasts from Aldeburgh were a fixture of the Third Programme. Britten spent increasing amounts of time in Decca recording studios and not just on his own music. 

His Blake settings were completed in April and an Armenian holiday (charted in Pears memoir) followed in August. Apart from a surgical operation, 1966 was marked by a tour of Austria with Pears and after the successful revival of Gloriana in a revised version at Sadler’s Wells in October, a Christmas visit to Leningrad and Moscow to see Shostakovich and Rostropovich. 
THE MALTINGS, SNAPE 
 

Benjamin Britten ca. 1960 Photo: Lotte Meitner-Graf Courtesy of the Britten-Pears Library

For years the Aldeburgh Festival had been labouring with unsuitable accommodation for concerts. At last Britten found a suitable local site for a concert hall. This was the maltings which he had been able to see from his house for so many years. The purpose-built (or I should say substantially adapted) concert hall at The Maltings, Snape had a Royal opening by H.M. The Queen, in June 1967 only to burn to the ground two years later. However 1967 saw plentiful activity including a further tour with the English Opera Group, this time to Montreal, and then tours to New York and South America for a recital series with Peter Pears. 

Britten’s celebrity secured a televised performance of Grimes conducted by the composer in 1969. This was the same year in which Britten and Pears began strenuous tours to assist in the fund to rebuild the Maltings. He toured Australia with the EOG in 1970 and gave recitals with Pears in New Zealand. The fund-raising process was a success. Public and institutional support was heartening. The concert hall rebuilding was able to proceed apace and with improvements over the original structure. A reopening took place in June 1970 only a year after the destruction of the first structure. With memories of the Grimes broadcast still fresh his new opera Owen Wingrave was film-recorded in November 1970 and broadcast to a cool critical reception in May 1971. This was also the year of a further visit to Moscow and Leningrad. Britten conducted a performance of Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius in June 1970. Later he recorded it to considerable success. This was the year in which he began work on his last opera Death in Venice based on a short story by Thomas Mann.
THE CLOSING CHAPTERS

In the last years he moved with Pears and his nurse to a house at Horham and the music room at the bottom of the garden at Horham was where he wrote Phaedra, Death in Venice, the Third String Quartet and the orchestral suite A Time There Was. Although suffering from heart disease he continued to work. There were tours to Schloss Wolfsgarten with Pears. He recorded a benchmark account of Schumann’s Scenes from Goethe’s Faust. Death in Venice, that strange story of obsession was completed in 1973 and premiered in June at the Aldeburgh Festival. Despite a major heart operation he was able to go to the Covent Garden premiere of Death in Venice on 18 October, a month or so before his 60th birthday and also to holiday with his nurse in attendance one last time at Venice. The opera was recorded at the Maltings the following Easter with the composer in attendance. He continued to compose despite deteriorating health and the Suite on English Folk Tunes (well known from the pioneering Bernstein CBS recording) dates from this era. The suite was full of memories about his idyllic childhood: about what had been and about what could have been but now never could be. There were to be yet more performances of Death in Venice and in July 1975 a performance of Peter Grimes. He also completed his song cycle Phaedra (similar in approach to Bliss’s) that year and finished his third and final numbered string quartet between April and November. 

During 1975 one of Britten’s projects had been the revision of his 1941 opera-musical Paul Bunyan. With this completed the BBC broadcast the work in a studio performance in February 1976 and the stage premiere of this version was given at the Maltings in June. Phaedra (effectively a mini-opera) was premiered with Dame Janet Baker at Snape later that month. He was created Baron Britten of Aldeburgh on 12 June 1976, the first composer to enjoy that honour (Lord Berners was an hereditary peer). His fragile health prevented him from ever taking his seat in the House of Lords. 

He took a summer holiday in Bergen but was back to hear a private performance of the Third String Quartet given by the Amadeus Quartet in The Red House library in late September. He celebrated his 63rd birthday on 22 November 1976. On 4 December, in the arms of Peter Pears, he died at the Red House. Pears recalled that Britten was not afraid of dying. He died peacefully with sadness at the thought of leaving friends and responsibilities. Pears recalled him saying that to him: “I want to die before you. I don’t know what I could do without you.” He was buried in Aldeburgh Cemetery on 7 December 1976.
AND THEN ……

The obituaries and tributes were full but the praise was attenuated in the atmosphere of the time. Other composers extended tributes to Britten some during his life and some afterwards. Shostakovich dedicated his Symphony No. 14 (1969) to Britten. Appropriately the symphony is a massive song cycle for soprano, bass, string orchestra and percussion. Walton produced his orchestral Improvisations on an Impromptu of Benjamin Britten (1969 - the theme is from the Piano Concerto). Peter Racine Fricker wrote a Sinfonia in his memory in 1978. Arvo Pärt’s reputation was largely established with the generalist music lover in the late-1970s by the gentle tolling of his Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten.

Britten’s music while largely escaping the usual post-mortem neglect was, in the 1970s and 1980s, seen as somewhat reactionary. However it has continued to be performed and recorded and shows no sign of losing momentum. What the perspective of 2025 or 2050 will be we do not know but while works of the accomplishment, beauty and vigour of Grimes and the Serenade are still available it is dubious that they will ever fall out of the concert or recorded repertoire. Perhaps other works will rise to prominence from amongst the incidental music. Many have been revived in recent years. 

Some previously unpublished pieces have been produced in collaboration with the Britten Estate. These include the Double Concerto for Violin and Viola, premièred at Snape by the Britten-Pears Orchestra under Kent Nagano in June 1997. Two Portraits for String Orchestra were premièred BBC Radio 3 in December 1995 by the Northern Sinfonia under Martyn Brabbins. The World of the Spirit has been revived in both the full version (first performed in 1938 on the BBC Home Service) and the abridged version in December 1995. The King Arthur Suite for Orchestra was premièred at Snape in 1995 by the Royal Academy of Music Symphony Orchestra under Lutz Kohler. His last work Praise We Great Men (a Sitwell cantata) was unfinished although it was completed by Colin Matthews and premiered at the Snape Maltings in 1985 with Marie McLaughlin, Heather Harper, Philip Langridge, Richard Jackson, Philharmonia Chorus and Orchestra all conducted by Mstislav Rostropovich. 

Our Hunting Fathers is still a rare item. This is quite unaccountable. It may yet become more popular. All it needs is for one of any generation of rising young sopranos to take up one of the songs as a competition piece. OHF is a virtuoso piece for singer and orchestra although it has many other deeper qualities as well. With the exception of Grimes I doubt the longer-term ‘staying power’ of the operas. There is however so much in Britten’s music with that vital flame that his reputation and, more to the point, his music, is likely to survive in the concert hall, on radio and on recorded media well into the 21st century and beyond. People will also enjoy the rare privilege of his recorded interpretations of his own music living on in excellent sound in perpetuity.