Britten and Pears had astonishingly hectic professional lives. Outside of Britten’s composing commitments and Pears’s singing career, they had a busy schedule of touring together as a recital duo, premiering operas, and putting on the annual Aldeburgh Festival. Their closest companions formed an enduring core over the years that was of great personal importance to both men. They had their own individual friends, but their most regular holiday companions and, at times, housemates were friends of them both. For the most part, it is striking that many of these friends were heterosexual couples and ‘conventional’ family units, although their circle did embrace gay friends Colin Graham, William Plomer, and Basil Coleman. The couples they both worked and holidayed with included John and Myfanwy Piper, Erwin and Sofie Stein – parents of Marion Stein, later Lady Harewood – and the flamboyant Russian couple Mstislav Rostropovich and Galina Vishnevskaya. This chapter introduces these close companions, among many others, and the extent to which they provided a nurturing and creatively stimulating circle of friends to Britten and Pears.

The authors summarise the collaborative work of Benjamin Britten (1913–76) and, in turn, artist John Piper (1903–92) and choreographer John Cranko (1927–73). Britten relied on having an early visual conception of whatever dramatic work he was undertaking. Piper’s work as a stage designer was therefore a crucial part of Britten’s creative process, as specific examples in this essay demonstrate. Britten’s inexperience with dance meant that in his largest collaboration with Cranko, the full-length ballet The Prince of the Pagodas (1957), he leaned to an unusual extent on the choreographer for the overall conception and even for the character and length of individual numbers. Both working relationships reveal the extent to which Britten’s creative process was fuelled by collaboration.

From mid-1943 until late-1950, Eric Crozier was an essential asset to Britten’s industry. His work alongside director and radio producer Tyrone Guthrie not only introduced Crozier to the Old Vic in London, but to the BBC as well, where Guthrie also worked. Joan Cross invited Crozier and Guthrie to each direct two different productions at Sadler’s Wells in 1943. Crozier directed and produced Britten’s first two operas, Peter Grimes in 1945 at Sadler’s Wells, and The Rape of Lucretia in 1946 for the short-lived Glyndebourne English Opera Company. Crozier wrote the librettos for Albert Herring and the children’s entertainment Let’s Make an Opera (with its central opera, The Little Sweep), in addition to writing the text for the cantata Saint Nicolas, and with E. M. Forster, he was co-librettist for Billy Budd. Britten, Crozier, and designer John Piper founded the English Opera Group. The endeavour was based on ‘the Britten–Crozier doctrine’ that sought the group’s own autonomy and ultimately a home to produce such works. That home was largely realised in the founding of the Aldeburgh Festival of Music and the Arts in 1948, for which Crozier was a founder and co-artistic director.