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Britten: The English Achievement
Six operas that gave Britain its first major opera composer in two centuries
4 selections · Stage Door Society Editorial
The British Operatic Problem
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.
Peter Grimes (1945)
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.
