Biography
Benjamin Britten (1913-1976), born in Lowestoft on the Suffolk coast, was the most important British composer since Purcell and established English-language opera as a serious international form. His breakthrough came with Peter Grimes (1945), premiered just weeks after the end of the Second World War. Britten's subsequent operas include The Rape of Lucretia (1946), Albert Herring (1947), Billy Budd (1951), The Turn of the Screw (1954), A Midsummer Night's Dream (1960), and his final masterpiece Death in Venice (1973). Beyond opera, Britten's War Requiem (1962), composed for the consecration of the rebuilt Coventry Cathedral, is his single most powerful work. Britten founded the Aldeburgh Festival in 1948 with his lifelong partner, the tenor Peter Pears. He was the first musician ever granted a life peerage, as Baron Britten of Aldeburgh, in 1976, just months before his death.
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