Archive Treasures
Explore treasures from the Archive which give us an insight into the fascinating lives of Benjamin Britten, Peter Pears and their creative circle.
List of News Articles
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Archive Treasures: Slow train to Aldeburgh – Britten and Dr Beeching
James Callaghan, Roy Jenkins, Barbara Castle: the list of Ministers in Harold Wilson’s 1964-1970 Labour government in the UK includes many political…![Pages from Holst’s 1940 scrapbook about air raids and the internment of Rauter and Müller-Hartmann.]()
Archive Treasures: Imogen Holst’s World War II scrapbooks and her émigré musician friends
For this month’s archive treasures story we are going to delve again into Imogen Holst’s wonderful scrapbooks. Holst kept a series of large scrapbooks…![Peter Pears, Colin Matthews, Imogen Holst and Donald Mitchell with the Amadeus String Quartet during rehearsals for the premiere of Britten’s String Quartet No. 3, Snape Maltings, December 1976]()
Archive Treasures: Voices in December
The Christmas season was always celebrated with gusto at The Red House. Correspondence and cards found in the Archive collections underline the cheer…![Choir boys in their costumes for The Golden Vanity playing in Blythburgh churchyard, 1969]()
Archive Treasures: ‘my favourite choir at my favourite school’
Our archive has recently established a link with former members of the Wandsworth School Boys’ Choir – a choir with whom Britten and Pears worked on…![Mono recording of T.H. White reading from The Sword in the Stone, Argo Record Company Limited EAF 63, 1963]()
Archive Treasures: Britten, Myth and Radio
‘Read some Ingoldsby legends in evening’, Britten recorded in his diary on the 15 August 1932. The young composer was enjoying a collection of…![]()
Archive Treasures: The Absent Composer
In our archive we hold a short note, in Britten’s frail hand, sent to Snape Maltings on the first performance of his final opera Death in Venice on…![]()
Archive Treasure - What might have been: Britten, Milligan and Lewis Carroll
The archive at the Red House documents the careers of Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears in great detail. Making up a fascinating sub-set of the archive…![Tilda Swinton in Derek Jarman's War Requiem, 1989]()
The Anti-War Art of War Requiem, Sixty Years On
May 2022 marks the sixtieth anniversary of War Requiem, ‘Perhaps the most important work I have yet written’ as Britten described it in his…![]()
Archive Treasures: The Birth of a Music School
In 2022 we celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Britten-Pears Young Artist Programme (previously the Britten-Pears School for Advanced Musical…![]()
Archive Treasures: Sentinels by the Reedbeds
Today’s Archive Treasure lives not at the Red House but some miles away at Snape; rather than being tucked into an archive box, it is…![]()
Archive Treasures: Reynolds Stone, Britten, Pears and their Bookplate
During recent times when catching up on reading has been a viable option for many of us, find out how Britten and Pears’ unique and beautiful…![A brown record cover saying 'The Music of Bali']()
Archive Treasures: Two Pianos and a Gamelan
The audio-visual collection in the archive of Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears gives us a fascinating overview of the two men’s sound-world, the music…
