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
Benjamin Britten works, including the "Nocturne" (1959), the "Spring Symphony" (1960) and the "War Requiem" (1963). The last sold in unexpectedly large numbers for a classical set, and thereafter Decca unstintingly made resources available to Culshaw and his successors for Britten recordings. Sets followed of "Albert Herring" (1964), the "Sinfonia da Requiem" (1964), "Curlew River" (1965), "A Midsummer Night's Dream" (1966), "The Burning Fiery Furnace" (1967), "Billy Budd" (1967) and many of the other major works. In 2013, to mark the anniversary of Britten's birth, Decca released a set of 65 CDs and one DVD, "Benjamin Britten – Complete Works". Most of