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
Il Postino (opera) opera unfolded. The critic for the British magazine "Opera" wrote "The only real problem is that Catán, for some inexplicable reason, keeps the story set in Italy-despite writing the opera in Spanish. [...] Likewise, Skármeta's novel is set not in Italy but on an island off the coast of Chile. Where was the dramaturge during all of this?" Setting: The fictional Italian island of Cala di Sotto during the 1950s "Prelude"<br> Di Cosimo, a politician running for office on the island, sings a nationalist song. Soon after, an announcement is made on the radio stating that Pablo Neruda, a great