Britten and Aldeburgh 1
Britten shopping for fish in Aldeburgh, early 1970s
Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears moved to Aldeburgh in 1947 and remained there until their deaths in 1976 and 1986 respectively. Britten’s music was shaped by his surroundings, by the sea and the Suffolkcountryside. He composed music for the people of Aldeburgh and for the Aldeburgh Festival which he co-founded. He once wrote: 'I belong at home…in Aldeburgh. I have tried to bring music to it in the shape of our local festival; and all the music I write comes from it.'
The tour begins on the seafront, at Britten’s first Aldeburgh home.
Crag House
Britten and Pears’s first home in Aldeburgh was Crag House, 4 Crabbe Street, a handsome house built in 1915 and where they lived from 1947 to 1957. For Britten, this was the ideal location. He later told an interviewer: ‘I’ve always felt I wanted to live by the sea. I’ve tried living away from the sea but something has gone slightly wrong, I always felt. I have needed that particular kind of atmosphere that the house on the edge of the sea provides’.
Britten's studio at Crag House
Britten composed many works here at his desk overlooking the sea, including the operas The Little Sweep, Billy Budd, Gloriana and The Turn of the Screw.
During the composition of Billy Budd, the novelist E. M. Forster, who was writing the libretto with Eric Crozier, stayed at the house on several occasions. The writing of this opera Britten described as “my own happiest collaboration” and wrote of Forster ‘I think the writing of the libretto gave him great pleasure. Certainly the summer of 1950, when he stayed for a long time at Aldeburgh, when the sun seemed to shine continuously and we would go out for relaxation in a boat with a fisherman friend (curiously resembling the Billy we were writing about)…’
Crag House, 1978, at the unveiling of the Britten memorial plaque
On 31 January 1953, a huge storm hit the Aldeburgh coast, and flooded the ground floor of the house. Britten was away at the time, but hurried back and reported to his sister Barbara, ‘We are slowly getting the water out of the house, but there’s plenty of mud left!’ Clearing up took a further two weeks, at a time when Britten was under great pressure to complete the opera Gloriana.
But if the flood couldn’t drive Britten away, eventually the public gaze did. The windows at Crag House were easily visible from the sea front and passers-by would increasingly stop to watch the composer in his study. After moving to The Red House in 1957, Britten told Edith Sitwell that the new house was ‘alas, away from the sea, but thankfully away from the gaping faces, & irritating publicity of that sea-front’.
The Moot Hall
Moot Hall
To the north of Crag House is an imposing sixteenth-century building, the Moot Hall, where inhabitants of the town have been meeting for hundreds of years. The main chamber, with its dark oak panelling and impressive timber frame, provided the setting for the Prologue to Britten’s opera Peter Grimes.
Jubilee Hall
A short distance to the south of Crag House, also on Crabbe Street, is the Jubilee Hall, built in 1887 for concerts, dances and meetings but improved and expanded in recent years. The Aldeburgh Festival of Music and the Arts was founded in 1948 by Britten, Pears and the librettist and producer Eric Crozier in order to provide a base for the English Opera Group while enriching the life of the Suffolk town.
Britten rehearsing A Midsummer Night's Dream in the Jubilee Hall
The majority of concerts and events held during successive Aldeburgh Festivals took place in either the Jubilee Hall or Aldeburgh Parish Church until a dedicated concert hall was opened at Snape Maltings in 1967. The Meare at Thorpeness, 2 miles north of Aldeburgh, was one of the more unusual venues of the early Festivals with performers singing from boats on the water. The first performances of Britten’s operas The Little Sweep and A Midsummer Night’s Dream took place in the Jubilee Hall. Britten and Pears were actively involved in the Aldeburgh Festival performing in operas, concerts, recitals and other events, and also undertaking the artistic direction of the Festival.