
Six operas that gave Britain its first major opera composer in two centuries
4 selections · Stage Door Society Editorial
For most of its history, British opera has been an importer rather than an exporter. Handel's English operas were Italian operas in English dress; Sullivan's operettas were French opéra-bouffe domesticated. Britain produced no major opera composer after Purcell until Benjamin Britten.
Britten changed this situation completely and permanently.
The Peter Grimes premiere at Sadler's Wells in June 1945 — weeks after the end of the war in Europe — was one of the most important nights in British cultural history. The opera's subject — a fisherman who is neither fully guilty nor fully innocent, destroyed by a community that cannot accommodate his difference — gave postwar Britain a cultural hero: the brilliant outcast.