Archive Treasures

The Archive at The Red House, Aldeburgh, is the most complete composer archive in the world. Find out about the fascinating lives of Benjamin Britten, Peter Pears and their creative circle, through some of the objects inside. Plan your visit to the Archive.

List of News Articles

  1. Archive Treasures: An Angel in Blythburgh Church

    Festival Walks are still a fixture of today’s Aldeburgh Festival, but the Church…
  2. Pears and friends at his Birthday Gala Concert at Snape Maltings

    Archive Treasures: 70th birthday presents by Hockney and Holst

    The 33rd Aldeburgh Festival in 1980 marked the 70th birthday of Peter Pears. His birthday fell on the last day of the festival and a whole day of…

  3. 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…
  4. 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…
  5. 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…
  6. 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…
  7. 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…

  8. 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…

  9. 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…
  10. 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…

  11. 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…

  12. 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…