Aldeburgh Festival Aldeburgh Festival The Aldeburgh Festival of Music and the Arts is an English arts festival devoted mainly to classical music. It takes place each June in the Aldeburgh area of Suffolk, centred on Snape Maltings Concert Hall. The Festival was founded in 1948 by the composer Benjamin Britten, the singer Peter Pears and the librettist/producer Eric Crozier. Their work with the English Opera Group (which they had founded with designer John Piper in 1947) frequently took them away from home, and it was while they were on tour in Switzerland with "Albert Herring" and "The Rape of Lucretia" in August
Aldeburgh Festival Peter and Saint Paul. It featured a performance of "Albert Herring" by the English Opera Group; Britten's newly written Saint Nicolas; and performances by Clifford Curzon and the Zorian String Quartet. Over the years the festival grew and took in additional venues in nearby Orford, Blythburgh and Framlingham. However, the lack of a large venue was holding back the further development of the Festival until one of the largest mid-nineteenth-century maltings in East Anglia, at Snape, a village just outside Aldeburgh, became available. Britten, who had lived in Snape in the 1930s, had the vision that the largest of the