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 of each set of characters: "the bright, percussive sounds of harps, keyboards and percussion for the fairy world, warm strings and wind for the pairs of lovers, and lower woodwind and brass for the mechanicals". In "Death in Venice" Britten turns Tadzio and his family into silent dancers, "accompanied by the colourful, glittering sounds of tuned percussion to emphasize their remoteness." As early as 1948 the music analyst Hans Keller, summarising Britten's impact on 20th-century opera to that date, compared his contribution to that of Mozart in the 18th century: "Mozart may in some respects be regarded as a founder