Britten’s early love for the cinema - when he was spellbound in particular by the work of Charlie Chaplin and the Marx Brothers - and his later apprenticeship as a composer for documentary films in the 1930s are both charted in this chapter, which analyses his comments on the medium in his youthful letters and diaries and goes on to consider the impact film music had on his later stylistic development as a composer of works for the stage. High points of his own work in film include his scores for the General Post Office (GPO) Film Unit, including two celebrated collaborations with the poet W. H. Auden (Coal Face, 1935; Night Mail, 1936), his score for the feature film Love from a Stranger (1937), and his virtuosic orchestral music for Muir Mathieson’s educational film Instruments of the Orchestra (1946). The chapter concludes with an account of Britten’s close involvement with his own local cinema in Aldeburgh during the late 1960s.

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.

‘“But this is my work, this is my work”, he repeated, and banged the table to emphasise the point.’ Such was the response of the frustrated Montagu Slater, librettist of Britten's Peter Grimes, to the composer's negative reaction on hearing – just one week before the opera's first performance – that Slater intended to publish his libretto in a form of which he alone approved, uncorrupted by all the practical revisions Britten had made to it in order to help the drama come to life vividly on the stage. As Philip Brett concluded in his pioneering investigation of the source materials for Grimes:

Brett, who here refers to Britten's team of advisers as ‘supporters’ rather than ‘collaborators’, explicitly suggests that the composer was the omnipotent guiding genius behind the project. Such an auteurist view of opera composition is currently one of the least fashionable ways of approaching the medium.

Yet in the case of Britten, his dealings with his various librettists – often chronicled in considerable detail in his voluminous correspondence – reveal that this is precisely how he himself viewed his role, his input into the premiere productions of his stage works also embracing vital contributions to broader aspects of stagecraft and visual presentation. Such controlling tendencies resulted in his notorious resistance to later, alternative interpretations of his operas, with the first productions always regarded as definitive. ‘I take complete responsibility for the planning of the opera’, he wrote to fellow composer William Alwyn on the subject of Owen Wingrave, and told an interviewer who asked him about The Turn of the Screw: ‘I always have the greatest say in shaping my operas, and could claim the credit, if that's the word, for their form.