Edward Benjamin Britten was a pianist, conductor, and composer from England. He is best known for his extensive operatic output, which includes Peter Grimes, Billy Budd, and The Turn of the Screw, among other works, but he also composed song cycles and a significant number of symphonic works.¹⁾

Britten suffered with his health throughout his childhood after catching pneumonia when he was three months old. He was also exceedingly sensitive to criticism, and he frequently distanced himself from former acquaintances who insulted him.²⁾

Britten attended a small fee-paying elementary school in his birthplace of Lowestoft as a child before transferring to Gresham's School in Norfolk in 1928. He spent two years there before receiving a scholarship to the Royal College of Music in London, where he studied with John Ireland and Ralph Vaughan Williams.³⁾

Britten and Pears sailed to North America as friends in 1939, where they finally fell in love and began a relationship. Britten wrote the first of many song-cycles for Pears in 1940, Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo.⁴⁾

This Christmas choral piece, written around the same time as the Hymn to Saint Cecilia in 1942, is one of Britten's best-known pieces. It's written for a three-part treble chorus, solo voices, and harp, and it's based on eleven Middle English texts.⁵⁾

In 1948, Benjamin Britten founded what would become the famed Aldeburgh Festival in the Jubilee Hall on Crabbe Street, just a few doors down from his first house. It's now one of the summer's highlights for classical music fans, presenting new music by contemporary composers as well as Britten's classics.⁶⁾

Britten spent the majority of his life at Aldeburgh, in the red house close to the golf course, where he would take brisk afternoon strolls to clear his mind before continuing to compose. This photograph was taken in the grounds of Aldeburgh in 1955, and shows Britten conversing with Imogen Holst (daughter of Gustav Holst) and Peter Pears.⁷⁾