Britten was born one of the four children of Robert Victor Britten (a dentist) and Edith Rhoda née Hockey (a secretary for a choral society). Britten was exceptionally prolific in a variety of styles and genre, composing solo instrumental works, solo vocal, brass band music, and so forth. But he is... More information best remembered for his work for the operatic stage, including Peter Grimes (1945), Billy Budd (1951), The Turn of the Screw (1954), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1960), and Death in Venice (1973). He frequently worked with Welsh librettist Mary Myfanwy Piper. For Billy Budd, though, an operatic adaptation of a novella by Herman Melville, his librettists were Eric Crozier and the novelist E.M. Forster. In 1948, Britten, along with Crozier and tenor Peter Pears, founded the Aldeburgh Festival of Music and the Arts, a festival that takes place in Suffolk every year. Britten died of congestive heart failure in 1976 and was buried in the churchyard of Aldeburgh Parish. Less information