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
Taras Bulba (opera) long scene in Act III and then vanishes from the rest of the opera; there is no attempt to balance the historical events with the story of Andriy and Maryltsya (which is effectively entirely squeezed into the antipenultimate scene); the absence of emotional or musical transition from the death of Andriy to the triumphalist conquest of Dubno (the final scene, which involves no singing) is evident and uncomfortable. Amongst those who have sung the role of Taras is the Ukrainian singer Boris Gmyrya, who also featured in a recording of the opera. The opera is set in Kiev, Taras's village