Peter Pears, E. M. Forster, Robin Long, Benjamin Britten and Billy Burrell, on board Burrell's boat at Aldeburgh (1949)

Description	:	In writing Peter Grimes, Britten had ‘wanted to express my awareness of the perpetual struggle of men and women whose livelihood depends on the sea’. The next step was to move there himself, and in 1947 Britten moved into Crag House, on the sea front at Aldeburgh, the ideal location, as he was later to write: ‘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.’ Here he embarked on his next major work on a maritime theme, the opera Billy Budd, based on a novella by Hermann Melville and written in collaboration with E.M. Forster and Eric Crozier as librettists. 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) …’
Copyright	:	Photo: Kurt Hutton