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 (a 'second founder') of opera. The same can already be said today, as far as the modern British – perhaps not only British – field goes, of Britten". In addition to his own original operas, Britten, together with Imogen Holst, extensively revised Purcell's "Dido and Aeneas" (1951) and "The Fairy-Queen" (1967). These "realisations" brought Purcell, who was then neglected, to a wider public, but have themselves been neglected since the dominance of the trend to authentic performance practice. His 1948 revision of "The Beggar's Opera" amounts to a wholesale recomposition, retaining the original melodies but giving them new, highly sophisticated