The postwar period also saw the beginning of Bush's 20-year involvement with grand opera, a genre in which, although he achieved little commercial recognition, he was retrospectively hailed by critics as a master of British opera second only to Britten. His first venture, "Wat Tyler", was written in a form which Bush thought acceptable to the general British public; it was not his choice, he wrote, that the opera and its successors all found their initial audiences in East Germany. When eventually staged in Britain in 1974 the opera, although well received at Sadler's Wells, seemed somewhat old-fashioned; Philip Hope-Wallace in "The Guardian" thought the ending degenerated into "a choral union cantata", and found the music pleasant but not especially memorable. Bush's three other major operas were all characterised by their use of "local" music: Northumbrian folk-song in the case of "Men of Blackmoor", Guyanese songs and dances in "The Sugar Reapers", and American folk music in "Joe Hill" – the last-named used in a manner reminiscent of Kurt Weill and the German opera with which Bush had become familiar in the early 1930s.