The Britten-Pears Library and Archive
Britten in the Library
The Britten–Pears Library was originally assembled by Benjamin Britten (1913–1976) and Peter Pears (1910–1986), as a working library built on their personal collections of books manuscripts, printed scores and sound recordings.
The Library buildings are adjacent to The Red House, where Britten and Pears came to live in 1957. In 1963 they engaged the architect Peter Collymore to design a library and music room. This involved the demolition of a cowshed on the chosen site, which was in a dangerous state of repair, although one wall was retained in the new building. Once completed, the room was used by Britten and Pears not only for their private library, but also as a private rehearsal space for vocal, chamber and small choral ensembles. Today, with the original furniture and books still filling the space, together with Britten’s piano, the Library retains much of the ambience instilled there by its founders.
Time, however, has not stood still, and since Britten’s death, the Library buildings have been much expanded to incorporate a reading room, archival storage space, offices, and a large exhibition area, built in 1993 to a design by Robert Wilson and Malcolm Ness over the swimming pool that Britten and Pears had installed in 1960, but which had fallen into disuse after Pears’s death in 1986.
The Britten-Pears Library Trust was established in 1973, and the building was officially opened to the public as a facility for research by Sir Peter Pears in May 1980. Since that time the holdings have expanded to include, in addition to books, scores and sound recordings originally owned by Britten and Pears, all published studies on the composer and singer’s life and works, together with a comprehensive collection of unpublished dissertations. Today the Library is still a growing collection and books on composers, writers, artists and musicians who worked with and who inspired them through their lives are continually added, together with all commercial releases of Britten’s music, making the library particularly strong in the areas of twentieth-century music and the arts.
Since Britten’s death, the Library has concentrated particularly on developing a comprehensive Britten archive and this has now grown into one of the country’s most important centres for music research and scholarship, holding an assemblage of manuscripts and other sources unrivalled by that of almost any other single composer collection, and including correspondence, photographs, concert programmes and press cuttings, sound recordings, set and costume designs, and even some costumes.
