Benjamin Britten Lord Harewood called it "the first genuinely successful British opera, Gilbert and Sullivan apart, since Purcell." Dismayed by the in-fighting among the company, Cross, Britten and Pears severed their ties with Sadler's Wells in December 1945, going on to found what was to become the English Opera Group. A month after the opening of "Peter Grimes", Britten and Yehudi Menuhin went to Germany to give recitals to concentration camp survivors. What they saw, at Belsen most of all, so shocked Britten that he refused to talk about it until towards the end of his life, when he told Pears that
Shadowtime (opera) Shadowtime (opera) Shadowtime is the first opera by Brian Ferneyhough, written to an English libretto by Charles Bernstein. It was written from 1999 to 2004 and was premiered on 25 May 2004 at the Prinzregententheater in Munich. The City of Munich commissioned the composition and libretto in 1999 for the Munich Biennale. It is in seven scenes : The composer regards "", a scene set to the composer's own text and played by a Liberace-like figure, as the centre-piece of the opera . The opera begins with the suicide/death of philosopher Walter Benjamin and goes on to deal with various