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
Nelson (opera) (enabling the composer and Lambe, who was an accomplished pianist, to play duets), and the fleet slowed down between Cape St. Vincent and Cape Trafalgar to enable the composer to drink in the scene of Nelson's final moments. The opera had a partial performance, to piano accompaniment, at the Wigmore Hall in London in 1953, when the part of Nelson was sung by Peter Pears. Critics received this well, but the reviews of the full version a year later, staged at Sadler's Wells Theatre with the encouragement of Benjamin Britten, were mixed. This may have been because Britten's own "The