Benjamin Britten was the greatest English composer of the twentieth century and one of the outstanding musicians of his age.
Born in Lowestoft, Suffolk, in 1913, Britten was the youngest child of a dentist father and amateur musician mother. After studying at the Royal College of Music, he became a vital part of London-s creative and intellectual life during the 1930s, collaborating with W. H. Auden and meeting his lifelong partner, the tenor Peter Pears. At the outbreak of the Second World War, Britten and Pears were already in America, earning a precarious living as freelance musicians before re-crossing the Atlantic by ship in the perilous days of 1942.
But the east coast of England was where Britten, as he himself said, belonged: this was where he returned to write his most famous opera, Peter Grimes, and - with Pears and Eric Crozier - to found the Aldeburgh Festival in 1948. In the years that followed, his worldwide reputation grew steadily, helped by a b
