Throughout much of his career, Benjamin Britten was acclaimed both as the most significant English composer in centuries and as an artist whose music embodied an innate Englishness.  Notwithstanding the subject matter and sources of many of his works, Britten himself resisted association with what were often vague – and frequently contradictory – assumptions about the very definition of that Englishness. While Britten accepted commissions from major national institutions throughout his career, he was also openly suspicious of prevailing attempts to align contemporary creative expression with a proudly English or British identity. This essay explores the origins of those attempts in the nineteenth century and traces some of their most prominent, influential manifestations in the institutions and artistic practices of the twentieth century.

This chapter considers Britten’s unique position in the sometimes unstable history of English opera. While acknowledging his central significance as the composer who (almost) single-handedly revived its fortunes with the instant and phenomenal success of Peter Grimes in 1945, it offers a nuanced assessment that views his achievements as part of a much broader picture in which the genre was arguably never as moribund as traditional accounts (and those perpetuated by Britten himself) might suggest. After surveying the riches of the courtly masque and the stage works of Henry Purcell, Italian baroque opera in London, and the surprisingly healthy state of English-language opera in the nineteenth century, the chapter provides a concise overview of Britten’s steady output of operas post-Grimes and his wider significance as a canny entrepreneur who promoted the genre widely – and indeed internationally – at the helm of the English Opera Group.

In England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, festivals expansively run the gamut from celebrations of flowers, seasonal harvests, and food and drink to the fine arts, music, theatre, and religion, in locations ranging from metropolitan centres, cathedrals, public and private parks and gardens, to locales rural in the extreme. Festivals could be unpredictable, and their organisers doubtless had to navigate uncertainties and last-minute cancellations, not to mention audience reception to programming; perhaps it is that element of unpredictability that gives festivals a general air of anticipation and excitement. This chapter explores post-Second World War festival culture with examples emerging from the Norfolk and Norwich Triennial Festival, the Glyndebourne Opera Festival, the Cheltenham Music Festival (subsequently renamed the Cheltenham Festival of Contemporary British Music), the Three Choirs Festival, the Aldeburgh Festival of Music and the Arts, and the Festival of Britain. The chapter also considers the intersections of the postwar socialised Arts Council funding for music and the arts in the British Isles, and the disparity between funding for metropolitan and rural centres.