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
Gormenghast (opera) were "convincing both as drama and as compositions." In his review of the 2004 revival, Dieter Lintz described Schmidt's score, especially for the singers, as predominantly tonal and "quite ear-friendly" with elements of Baroque music, Benjamin Britten, and Andrew Lloyd Webber. He also noted how overwhelming sound waves combined with "a rich, driving, yet finely differentiated beat" often washed over the auditorium and concluded that the work was such an unusual combination of elements that it constituted a new and unique musical art form. Gormenghast (opera) Gormenghast is an opera in three acts composed by Irmin Schmidt to an English-language