¹ The new title indicated that it was a unique, onsite production and also differentiated it from the stage performances of Peter Grimes that took place in the Snape Maltings Hall during the 2013 Festival. It also set it apart from the later film, entitled Peter Grimes on Aldeburgh Beach, which was screened in cinemas that fall. For more on the film version, see Danielle Ward-Griffin ‘Virtually There: Site-Specific Performance on Screen’, Opera Quarterly (forthcoming).

² Service, Tom, ‘Peter Grimes on the Beach? Shiver me tenors!’ The Guardian, 12 June 2013Google Scholar.

³ Clements, Andrew, The Guardian, 18 June 2013Google Scholar. Reviewers for the major newspapers were nearly unanimous in their praise of this production. See, for example, Church, Michael, The Independent, 18 June 2013Google Scholar; Shirley, Hugo, The Telegraph, 18 June 2013Google Scholar.

⁴ Bradbury, Ernest, ‘An Ideal Setting for a Festival: Town with a Touch of Theatre’, The Yorkshire Post, 21 June 1958Google Scholar.

⁵ Shawe-Taylor, Desmond, ‘Aldeburgh’, New Statesman and Nation, 1 July 1950Google Scholar.

⁶ See Adams, Richard, A Book of British Music Festivals (London, 1986), 18Google Scholar; Kildea, Paul, Selling Britten: Music and the Marketplace (Oxford, 2002), 151Google Scholar.

⁷ Elizabeth Sweeting, ‘Let’s Make a Festival! The Early Years of the Aldeburgh Festival (1948–55)’, unpublished memoir, Tate Britain Archive, TGA 200410/3/4/35, 17.

⁸ See, for example, Eric Crozier, Programme Note for Albert Herring, Programme for the First Aldeburgh Festival (1948), 17; Robert Gathorne-Hardy, Programme Note for Albert Herring, Programme for the Sixth Aldeburgh Festival (1953), 22–3; John Lewis, Programme Note for Let’s Make an Opera!, Programme for the Ninth Aldeburgh Festival (1958), 60; Anthony Gishford, Programme Note for Albert Herring, Programme for the Tenth Aldeburgh Festival (1959), 27–8.

⁹ Heather Wiebe, Britten’s Unquiet Pasts: Sound and Memory in Postwar Reconstruction (Cambridge, 2012), 20.

¹⁰ See, for example, Crozier, Eric, ‘The Origin of the Aldeburgh Festival’, 183–184Google Scholar, Programme for the First Aldeburgh Festival (1948), reprinted in New Aldeburgh Anthology, ed. Ariane Bankes and Jonathan Reekie (Suffolk, 2009); Benjamin Britten, ‘The Aldeburgh Festival and the Future’ (1967) in Britten on Music, ed. Paul Kildea (Oxford, 2003), 313–4.

¹¹ Benjamin Britten, ‘England and the Folk-Art Problem’, in Kildea, Britten on Music, 34.

¹² Wiebe, , Britten’s Unquiet Pasts, 35Google Scholar, 22.

¹³ Harris, Alexandra, Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper (New York, 2010), 142–143Google Scholar. Also see Stradling, Robert, ‘England’s Glory: Sensibilities of Place in English Music, 1900–1950’, in The Place of Music, ed. Andrew Leyshon, David Matless and George Revill (New York, 1998), 180Google Scholar.

¹⁴ Wiebe, , Britten’s Unquiet Pasts, 16–40Google Scholar.

¹⁵ One report in the press, for example, written by Festival supporter Robert Speaight in the New English Review, boasted that ‘the Festival was conceived and executed as a local, though never a provincial celebration. The English people in this corner of Suffolk came together in a common enjoyment of their culture. It was as simple and as stimulating as that.’ Speaight, ‘The Aldeburgh Festival’, New English Review, August 1948, [n.p.], Press Cuttings, Britten Pears Library [henceforth BPL]. See also E.M. Forster, ‘Looking Back on the First Aldeburgh Festival’, Programme for the Second Aldeburgh Festival (1949), reprinted in Bankes and Reekie, New Aldeburgh Anthology, 185.

¹⁶ For instance, W. Moelyn Merchant claimed that ‘there is no sense of false “culture”, an alien substance veneered on to a reluctant community’. Merchant, ‘The Dream—with a New Vision’, Western Mail, 18 June 1960. Festival insiders often made this same case in the press. For example, see Speaight, ‘The Aldeburgh Festival’; Imogen Holst, ‘The Aldeburgh Festival’, Radio Times, 10 June 1965, [n.p.], Press Cuttings, BPL.

¹⁷ One gossip magazine even nicknamed the Festival the ‘Festival of Britten’. Spike Hughes, ‘Festival Fancy’, Tatler, 10 November 1961.

¹⁸ Crozier, , ‘The Origin of the Aldeburgh Festival’, 183Google Scholar.

¹⁹ Kildea, , Selling Britten, 149Google Scholar.

²⁰ The question of whether townspeople could afford to go to the Aldeburgh Festival was a matter of great debate in the early years of the Festival. In the church bulletin, Cranbook noted that free seats were provided for any events held in the church. See ‘Funeral Raises Question of Future Policy’, Aldeburgh Church, June 1956; Aldeburgh Parish Magazine, July 1950. As an early review of the Festival noted, however, tickets for opera and other concerts held in Jubilee Hall were quite expensive. Allen Andrews, ‘The Arbiter of Aldeburgh’, Public Opinion, 2 March 1951, 14.

²¹ Sweeting, ‘Let’s Make a Festival!’, 45.

²² Sweeting, ‘Let’s Make a Festival!’, 29.

²³ Britten to Crozier, 19 February 1948, in Letters from a Life: the Selected Letters and Diaries of Benjamin Britten, 1913–1976, vol. 3, ed. Donald Mitchell and Phillip Reed (London, 1991), 366.

²⁴ Programme for the Fifth Aldeburgh Festival (1952); Committee Minutes on 3 May 1949 (overseas broadcasts); General Meeting, 1 February 1950 and 4 March 1953 (long-playing records for America); 1 June 1951 (statistics on foreign visitors), MSC 10/1, Aldeburgh Festival Minutes, BPL.

²⁵ Other festivals established after the war include the Cheltenham Contemporary Music Festival, Stroud Festival (Gloucestershire), and the King’s Lynn Festival.

²⁶ Bartie, Angela, The Edinburgh Festivals: Culture and Society in Post-war Britain (Edinburgh, 2013), 4CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁷ Earl of Harewood, ‘The Aldeburgh Festival’, Programme for the First Aldeburgh Festival (1948), 5, Programmes, BPL; Sweeting, ‘Let’s Make a Festival!’, 37.

²⁸ Forster, , ‘Looking Back on the First Aldeburgh Festival’, 185Google Scholar.

²⁹ Rebellato, Dan, 1956 and All That: The Making of Modern British Drama (London, 1999), 41Google Scholar.

³⁰ Quoted in Glasgow, Mary, ‘The Concept of the Arts Council’, in Essays on John Maynard Keynes, ed. Milo Keynes (Cambridge, 1975), 262Google Scholar. Other critics included an anonymous columnist at The Times and John Christie of Glyndebourne. See Rebellato, 1956 and All That, 40–1.

³¹ Bartie, , The Edinburgh Festivals, 46Google Scholar.

³² Crozier, , ‘The Origin of the Aldeburgh Festival’, 184Google Scholar; my italics; Sweeting, ‘Let’s Make a Festival!’, 37. Such lofty standards could conflict with the desires of the townspeople, a number of whom enjoyed more popular fare. In a town hall meeting following the first Aldeburgh Festival, one resident asked for ‘music of a lighter nature for those whose musical education is of a lower standard’. See Committee Minutes, General Meeting, 16 November 1948 and 1 February 1949. To accommodate such tastes, the Festival featured the odd brass band or even Forster’s hated Morris dancers; see, for instance, Committee Minutes, 10 August 1951, Programme for Sixth Aldeburgh Festival (1953). Remarks by chairwoman Fidelity Cranbrook, meanwhile, show the gulf that separated the tastes of the committee and those of the townspeople: ‘it took a long time and a lot of effort for simple people to realise that string quartets don’t play God Save the King’. See Fidelity Cranbrook, ‘Informal conversation between Lady Fidelity Cranbrook and PMW, 3 Feb. 1988, notes made afterwards’ [henceforth ‘Conversation’], BPL.

³³ For more on these projects, see Wiebe, , Britten’s Unquiet Pasts, 27–32Google Scholar.

³⁴ For example, see Crozier, , ‘The Origin of the Aldeburgh Festival’, 184Google Scholar; Britten, , ‘The Aldeburgh Festival and the Future’, 313Google Scholar; Sweeting, , ‘Let’s Make a Festival!’, 24Google Scholar.

³⁵ Committee Minutes, 28 April 1948; 10 January 1949; 16 March 1948; 14 December 1948.

³⁶ Sweeting in Fidelity Cranbrook, Interview with Elizabeth Sweeting, 29 October 1985 [henceforth ‘Interview’], BPL.

³⁷ Harewood, , ‘The Aldeburgh Festival’, 5Google Scholar.

³⁸ Harris, , Romantic Moderns, 155Google Scholar.

³⁹ Harris, , Romantic Moderns, 14Google Scholar.

⁴⁰ Chowrimootoo, Christopher, ‘The Timely Traditions of Albert Herring’, Opera Quarterly 27 (2011), 30–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴¹ His co-editor was John Betjeman. Other artists who worked on county guides in this series include Paul and John Nash. For more on the Shell Guides, see Spalding, Frances, John and Myfanwy Piper: Lives in Art (Oxford, 2009), 440–442Google Scholar.

⁴² Harris, , Romantic Moderns, 221Google Scholar.

⁴³ A sampling includes: John Nash’s paintings at the 1953 Festival, John Betjeman’s lectures on Victorian architecture in 1953 and stained glass in 1955, Norman Scarfe’s article on ‘Suffolk in the Middle Ages’ in the 1960 programme, and the exhibition of John Piper’s paintings of Suffolk at the 1966 Festival. See Aldeburgh Festival Programmes, BPL.

⁴⁴ Sweeting, , ‘Let’s Make a Festival!’, 91Google Scholar.

⁴⁵ Sweeting, quoted in Time & Concord: Aldeburgh Festival Recollections, ed. Jenni Wake-Walker (Saxmundham, 1997), 28.

⁴⁶ Crozier, , ‘The Origin of the Aldeburgh Festival’, 184Google Scholar.

⁴⁷ Heyworth, Peter, ‘Greatness gathers at Aldeburgh’, The Observer, 27 June 1965Google Scholar, Press Cuttings, BPL.

⁴⁸ Holst, Imogen, Festival’, ‘The Aldeburgh, Radio Times, 10 June 1965Google Scholar, Press Cuttings, BPL.

⁴⁹ Rowley, Trevor, The English Landscape in the Twentieth Century (London, 2006), 221Google Scholar.

⁵⁰ Leavis, F.R. and Thompson, Denys, Culture and Environment: The Training of Critical Awareness (London, 1933), 3Google Scholar.

⁵¹ Wild, Trevor, Village England: A Social History of the English Countryside (London, 2004)Google Scholar, xv.

⁵² Wild, , Village England, 146Google Scholar.

⁵³ Burnett, John, A Social History of Housing 1815–1970 (London, 1978), 251Google Scholar.

⁵⁴ J.B. Priestley, English Journey: Being a Rambling but Truthful Account of What One Man Saw and Heard and Felt and Thought During a Journey through England During the Autumn of the Year 1933 (London, 1934), 38.

⁵⁵ Wild, , Village England, 145Google Scholar, 149.

⁵⁶ Martins, Susanna Wade and Williamson, Tom, The Countryside of East Anglia: Changing Landscapes, 1870–1950 (Woodbridge, 2008), 191Google Scholar.

⁵⁷ Williams, Raymond, The Country and the City (Oxford, 1973), 12Google Scholar.

⁵⁸ Harris, , Romantic Moderns, 169Google Scholar.

⁵⁹ Sharp, Thomas, The Anatomy of the Village (Harmondsworth, 1946)Google Scholar.

⁶⁰ Festival organisers arranged for posters all along the rail lines to Aldeburgh and fretted about a train strike that may affect the arrival of visitors. Committee Minutes, 3 May 1949; Cranbrook, ‘Conversation’.

⁶¹ Quoted in John Culshaw, ‘Benjamin Britten: The Man Behind the Music’, Radio Times, 16 November 1967, Press Cuttings, BPL.

⁶² There is variation in sources from this period about what constituted a village. For example, in encouraging women to put on plays in their local communities, the Women’s Institute defined a village as any place with a population of fewer than 4,000. See Wallis, Mick, ‘Drama in the Villages: Three Pioneers’, in The English Countryside Between the Wars: Regeneration or Decline?, ed. Paul Brassley, Jeremy Burchardt and Lynne Thompson (Woodbridge, 2006), 102–115Google Scholar.

⁶³ Sharp, Anatomy of the Village, 28–9.

⁶⁴ According to Martins and Williamson, ‘relative geographical isolation and a paucity of employment opportunities ensured that a distinctly rural way of life was maintained at least until the outbreak of the Second World War’. They also suggest that rural life was eroded by suburbanisation much more in south-eastern England and the Midlands than in East Anglia; see Countryside of East Anglia, 176–177. Wild also notes that suburbanisation mostly affected the Home Counties surrounding London; see Wild, Village England, 129. In his history of Aldeburgh, Alan Powers notes that there have been some modern developments in East Anglia, such as the Richard Garrett Engineering Works at Leiston or the nuclear power station at Sizewell, but they have been ‘limited in their effect on the wider economy and landscape’. Powers, Alan, ‘The Destructive Element: Benjamin Britten and Aldeburgh’, in Modernism on Sea: Art and Culture at the British Seaside, ed. Lara Feigel and Alexandra Harris (Oxford, 2009), 218Google Scholar. Construction of Sizewell, meanwhile, was not begun until 1961, and Ronald Blythe points out that the engineering factory was actually in a state of decline by the post-war period: ‘Foreword’, in Bankes and Reekie, New Aldeburgh Anthology, 10.

⁶⁵ Williamson, Martins and, Countryside of East Anglia, 183Google Scholar.

⁶⁶ Britten, ‘On Receiving the Freedom of the Borough of Aldeburgh’ (1962), in Bankes and Reekie, New Aldeburgh Anthology, 77.

⁶⁷ Forster, ‘Looking Back on the First Aldeburgh Festival’, 187Google Scholar; Rowley, , English Landscape, 232Google Scholar.

⁶⁸ Robert Gathorne-Hardy, ‘In Praise of Aldeburgh’, Programme for the Third Aldeburgh Festival (1950), 8, Programmes, BPL.

⁶⁹ Gathorne-Hardy, , ‘In Praise of Aldeburgh’, 8Google Scholar.

⁷⁰ Britten to Mayer, 4 February 1948, in Mitchell and Reed, Letters from a Life, vol. 3, 357.

⁷¹ Aldeburgh is not unique in this respect. Wild suggests that there was a middle-class takeover of the countryside. As development in the countryside became more restricted, especially after the 1947 Town and Countryside Act, less property was available for development at the same time that a greater number of people began to retreat to the country. As a result, prices on desirable cottages in the heart of the village rose dramatically, and those with long-standing ties to the village often could not afford to stay there. Britten was part of this middle-class ascendancy, as seen in his purchase of the Old Mill in Snape and Crag House in Aldeburgh. Wild, Village England, 158–62.

⁷² William Servaes, quoted in Carpenter, Humphrey, Benjamin Britten: A Biography (London, 1992), 255–256Google Scholar.

⁷³ Carpenter, Benjamin Britten, 255. Carpenter also notes that, as tourism increased, the huts of the fishermen moved farther away from the sea.

⁷⁴ In the collection Time & Concord, chairwoman Felicity Cranbrook recalls receiving a phone call from a local Aldeburgh lady: ‘The person in question was important in Aldeburgh, and had a very fierce husband. She was making a last entreaty for me to stop the whole terrifying venture. After about half an hour of trying to make me see reason, she brought out her final shot: “Don’t you see that if we get these long-haired types coming to Aldeburgh, the Nice People won’t come?” Very calmly I said, “You mean if my friends come, yours won’t?”’ Wake-Walker, Time & Concord, 3.

⁷⁵ Cranbrook, in Wake-Walker, Time & Concord, 2–3; Sweeting, ‘Let’s Make a Festival!’, 19. During town hall meetings, Britten and Peter emphasised the involvement of the townspeople. See Sweeting in Cranbrook, ‘Interview’; Crozier, ‘The Origin of the Aldeburgh Festival’, 184.

⁷⁶ On the critical side were journalists such as Allen Andrews who wrote that ‘if, in initiating the Aldeburgh Festival, he [Britten] sought to restore to the fisherfolk the transmuted experience he drew from their community, he has not yet succeeded’. Andrews, ‘The Arbiter of Aldeburgh’, 14. This attack is in the minority; more articles defend Britten vigorously against any possible charges. See, for example, Merchant, ‘The Dream—with a New Vision’; Speaight, ‘The Aldeburgh Festival’; Holst, ‘The Aldeburgh Festival’.

⁷⁷ From Aldborough Described, reprinted in Burrows, Jill, The Aldeburgh Story: A Pictorial History of the Aldeburgh Foundation (Ipswich, 1987)Google Scholar, [n.p.], BPL.

⁷⁸ In a BBC talk, Forster downplayed the tensions: ‘To all who hit little balls about or who float upon bits of wood in the water, apologies are perhaps due – and also apologies to the inhabitants.’ Forster, ‘Looking Back on the First Aldeburgh Festival’, 186.

⁷⁹ Claiming to be inspired by the programmes of the Aix-en-Provence Festival, Glyndebourne adopted this practice in 1952. See Glyndebourne website, http://glyndebourne.com/1952-programme-book (accessed 20 May 2014).

⁸⁰ Crozier, Interview with Nancy Evans and Anthony Burton, BBC transcript, 6 November 1990, BPL [henceforth ‘Interview’].

⁸¹ Later programmes also featured images that encouraged visitors to see the landscape of the past. See, for example, ‘Views of Aldeburgh Past and Present’, Programme for the Fourth Aldeburgh Festival (1951) and the reprinting of ‘Sea-Bathing’ from ‘A Guide to Aldeburgh with a brief description of Adjacent Places, being a handbook for visitors and residents’ (1861), Programme for the Fourteenth Aldeburgh Festival (1961).

⁸² Gathorne-Hardy, , ‘In Praise of Aldeburgh’, 8Google Scholar.

⁸³ Gathorne-Hardy, , ‘In Praise of Aldeburgh’, 8Google Scholar.

⁸⁴ Norman Scarfe, ‘Suffolk in the Middle Ages’, Programme for the Thirteenth Annual Aldeburgh Festival (1960), BPL.

⁸⁵ Sweeting, in Wake-Walker, Time & Concord, 13.

⁸⁶ Sweeting, ‘Let’s Make a Festival!’, 37; my italics.

⁸⁷ Ratcliff, Nora, Rude Mechanicals: A Short Review of Village Drama (London, 1938)Google Scholar; Rowley, , English Landscape, 227Google Scholar. During the war, Imogen Holst was involved in CEMA’s rural music school project. See Holst, ‘Rural Music’, The Royal College of Music Magazine 36 (Summer 1940), [n.p.], BPL.

⁸⁸ Crozier, ‘Interview’.

⁸⁹ See, for instance, Warren, Henry C., England is a Village (New York, 1941)Google Scholar; Moore, John, The Blue Field: Portrait of an English Village (New York, 1948)Google Scholar; Williams, W.M., The Sociology of an English Village: Gosforth (London, 1964)Google Scholar.

⁹⁰ ‘The Herring: A Symposium’, Programme for the Eleventh Aldeburgh Festival (1958), BPL.

⁹¹ According to a 1942 survey, urban dwellers thought that the decline of village life and the sense of distance from the land were two of the most pressing problems facing England. See Howkins, Alun, ‘Qualifying the Evidence: Perceptions of Rural Change in Britain in the Second Half of the Twentieth Century’, in Geographies of British Modernity: Space and Society in the Twentieth Century, ed. David Gilbert, David Matless, and Brian Short (Oxford, 2003), 101Google Scholar.

⁹² Sweeting, , ‘Let’s Make a Festival!’, 138Google Scholar.

⁹³ Sweeting, , ‘Let’s Make a Festival!’, 137Google Scholar.

⁹⁴ Kirschenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara, Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage (Berkeley, 1998), 171Google Scholar.

⁹⁵ Kirschenblatt-Gimblett, , Destination Culture, 168Google Scholar.

⁹⁶ Sweeting, , ‘Let’s Make a Festival!’, 97Google Scholar.

⁹⁷ Programme for the Seventh Aldeburgh Festival (1954); Programme for the Ninth Aldeburgh Festival (1956); Wiebe, , Britten’s Unquiet Pasts, 11Google Scholar; LeGrove, Judith, ‘Micropolitan Art? Exhibitions at the Aldeburgh Festival 1948–67’, in A Musical Eye: The Visual World of Britten and Pears, ed. Judith LeGrove (Saxmundham, 2012), 114Google Scholar.

⁹⁸ Holst, ‘The Aldeburgh Festival’.

⁹⁹ Harewood, ‘Foreword’, Programme for the Fifth Aldeburgh Festival (1952).

¹⁰⁰ Early programming decisions, such as the introduction of a Festival club pass only for the duration of the whole week, or the repetition of the same concert two weekends in a row, did not readily accommodate the weekend visitor. Although organisers eventually learned to alter their programming accordingly, such missteps indicate the desire for a week-long Festival community. See Committee Minutes, 25 January 1948; 9 April 1948.

¹⁰¹ Smith, Matthew Wilson, The Total Work of Art: From Bayreuth to Cyberspace (New York, 2007), 25Google Scholar. See also Britten, Interview with the Earl of Harewood, People Today, BBC Home Service, 23 June 1960, reprinted in Kildea, Britten on Music, 177.

¹⁰² See visitors’ comments in Wake-Walker, Time & Concord, 29 and 90–1.

¹⁰³ Britten, Benjamin, On Receiving the First Aspen Award (London: Faber & Faber, 1964), 20Google Scholar; my italics.

¹⁰⁴ Wilson Smith, The Total Work of Art, 29.

¹⁰⁵ Tony Palmer, dir., Benjamin Britten and his Festival, BBC2, 16 November 1967, Video Collection, BPL. Other programmes on the Festival include: G. Hatjinikos, dir., The Aldeburgh Festival, BBC Television, 1961, Video Collection, BPL; Peter Pears, nar., Aldeburgh Story, unpublished documentary, Aldeburgh Foundation, 1983, Video Collection, BPL.

¹⁰⁶ This idea is a variant of Baudrillard’s concept of simulacra: ‘Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest [of America] is real.’ Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor, 1994), 12.

¹⁰⁷ Sweeting, , ‘Let’s Make a Festival!’, 58Google Scholar.

¹⁰⁸ ‘The Festival Club’, Programme for the Ninth Aldeburgh Festival (1956).

¹⁰⁹ Refusing another town’s offer of bunting, organisers arranged for the lamp standards to be filled with flowers and for the church to be floodlit at night. The committee also asked the mayor to appeal to residents to ‘brighten their homes using window-boxes’. Committee Minutes, 28 April 1948; 5 April 1949; Interview.

¹¹⁰ Ronald Blythe, ‘Some Suffolk Excursions’, Programme for the Thirteenth Aldeburgh Festival (1960), 24–6.

¹¹¹ MacCannell, Dean, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (Berkeley, 1999), 91–105Google Scholar.

¹¹² Sweeting, , ‘Let’s Make a Festival!’, 102Google Scholar.

¹¹³ Kirschenblatt-Gimblett, , Destination Culture, 47Google Scholar.

¹¹⁴ In his description of Aldeburgh in 1951, Allen Andrews reported that about only half a dozen one-man boats were still in operation, and these were mainly seasonal. Little work was to be found in Aldeburgh proper since the boat building yards had been hit hard by the decline in the fishing industry. See Andrews, ‘The Arbiter of Aldeburgh’, 14.

¹¹⁵ Kirschenblatt-Gimblett, , Destination Culture, 151Google Scholar.

¹¹⁶ Sunday Times, June 1965, Press Cuttings, BPL.

¹¹⁷ ‘Horner Goes Beachcoming’, News Chronicle, 16 June 1951. Image provided by the Britten-Pears Foundation (www.brittenpears.org). Reproduced with permissions from the Daily Mail.

¹¹⁸ Sweeting, in Wake-Walker, Time & Concord, 11.

¹¹⁹ Committee Minutes, 16 November 1948 and 16 March 1948.

¹²⁰ Paul Fincham, in Wake-Walker, Time & Concord, 43; italics in original.

¹²¹ Sweeting, , ‘Let’s Make a Festival!’, 51Google Scholar.

¹²² John Amis, in Wake-Walker, Time & Concord, 40.

¹²³ Britten, On Receiving the Aspen Award, 22.

¹²⁴ Culshaw, ‘Benjamin Britten’.

¹²⁵ Sweeting, in Wake-Walker, Time & Concord, 21.

¹²⁶ Even before the first Festival, it was suggested that opera be cut to reduce expenses, but this idea was mooted by Pears and Crozier. Committee Minutes, 10 November 1947.

¹²⁷ Sweeting, ‘Let’s Make a Festival!’, 16.

¹²⁸ Albert Herring was performed at the 1948, 1949, 1951, 1953 and 1957 Festivals. Although Peter Grimes may seem like the more natural choice for performance in Aldeburgh, it was too large for Jubilee Hall. Selections were performed in 1950, but a full-stage presentation was not even a remote possibility until the 1967 establishment of the Maltings Concert Hall.

¹²⁹ Sweeting, ‘Let’s Make a Festival!’, 99.

¹³⁰ Gathorne-Hardy, Programme Note for Albert Herring; italics in original.

¹³¹ Standard literature on the opera includes Chowrimootoo, ‘Timely Traditions’; Brett, Philip, ‘Character and Caricature in “Albert Herring”’, Musical Times 127 (1986), 545–547CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hindley, Clifford, ‘Not the Marrying Kind: Britten’s Albert Herring’, Cambridge Opera Journal 6 (1994), 159–174CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kennedy, Michael, Britten (London, 1981)Google Scholar; White, Eric Walter, Benjamin Britten: His Life and Operas (Berkeley, 1983)Google Scholar; Whittall, Arnold, ‘The Chamber Operas’, The Cambridge Companion to Benjamin Britten, ed. Mervyn Cooke (Cambridge, 1999), 95–112CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹³² The Aldeburgh Carnival is believed to be over 170 years old. See Aldeburgh Carnival website, www.aldeburghcarnival.com (accessed 15 June 2014).

¹³³ The same production was used in the 1940s and 1950s. In 1962, John Piper created new designs for the Festival performance. Still, nearly every production strives to recreate the traditional village setting. Even Peter Hall’s much-vaunted ‘realistic’ Suffolk production at Glyndebourne in 1985 retained the standard village set pieces, albeit with more detail than in the original production.

¹³⁴ Hazel Fisher, in Wake-Walker, Time & Concord, 26.

¹³⁵ Brett, Philip, Caricature’, ‘Character and, 545Google Scholar.

¹³⁶ Chowrimootoo, ‘Timely Traditions’, 8, 33.

¹³⁷ Eric Crozier, Arthur Oldham and Sebastian Welford, ‘Recollections of Britten’s Years at The Old Mill, Snape (1937–47)’, BBC Radio 3 broadcast, 18 June 1993, Broadcasts, Box 7, Crozier Papers, BPL.

¹³⁸ See, for instance, Crozier, Programme Note for Albert Herring, 17; Gathorne-Hardy, Programme Note for Albert Herring, 22–3; Gishford, Programme Note for Albert Herring, Programme for the Tenth Aldeburgh Festival (1957), 27–8.

¹³⁹ Cross, Joan, ‘Twenty Years On’, Opera Magazine (Autumn 1967), 10Google Scholar. Reprinted in Programme for the Twentieth Aldeburgh Festival (1967).

¹⁴⁰ Chowrimootoo, , ‘Timely Traditions’, 2Google Scholar.

¹⁴¹ Esty, Jed, A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England (Princeton, 2004), 81Google Scholar.

¹⁴² Imogen Holst, ‘Aldeburgh Festival’, Ballet & Opera, August 1949, 51, HO/2/12/1, BPL; my italics.

¹⁴³ Committee Minutes, 3 May 1949; Julian Potter, in Wake-Walker, Time & Concord, 48–9.

¹⁴⁴ Forster, , ‘Looking Back on the First Aldeburgh Festival’, 187Google Scholar.

¹⁴⁵ Rita Fryer, in Wake-Walker, Time & Concord, 45.

¹⁴⁶ Crozier, Notes on Albert Herring, Albert Herring File, BPL. Other famous examples of works that feature both a rehearsal and a performance of a song include Lully and Molière’s Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme and Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg.

¹⁴⁷ The singing audience was not completely new: in her account of festivals in the 1940s, Imogen Holst waxes nostalgic about drop-in singing events in which ‘listeners get absorbed into the chorus and the passers-by, waiting at the bus-stop with their Saturday’s shopping, become absorbed into the audience’. Holst, ‘Rural Music’.

¹⁴⁸ Holst, , ‘The Aldeburgh Festival’, 54Google Scholar.

¹⁴⁹ Let’s Make an Opera! is a play about members of the community who decide to put on an opera.

¹⁵⁰ Imogen Holst, ‘Let’s Make an Opera!’, Tempo 18 (1950–1), 12–16.

¹⁵¹ Sweeting, ‘Let’s Make a Festival!’, 87.

¹⁵² Sweeting, ‘Let’s Make a Festival!’, 87

¹⁵³ Albert Herring was also performed at the same festival that premiered Let’s Make an Opera! (1949).

¹⁵⁴ Britten-Pears Foundation, www.brittenpears.org/page.php?pageid=691 (accessed 19 June 2013).

¹⁵⁵ Punchdrunk specialises in what they describe as ‘immersive theatre’ events, in which audience members move through and participate in the theatrical site. See www.punchdrunk.com (accessed 23 November 2014).

¹⁵⁶ William Drew, ‘The Borough’, Exeunt Magazine, 3 July 2013.

¹⁵⁷ Hewison, Robert, The Heritage Industry: Britain in a Climate of Decline (London, 1987), 1–10Google Scholar.

¹⁵⁸ Andrew Porter, ‘Aldeburgh’, New Statesman and Nation, 21 June 1952.