Edward Benjamin Britten, Baron Britten, was an English composer, conductor and pianist. He was the first composer to be given life peerage.

Britten was born in the fishing port of Lowestoft in Suffolk as the youngest of four children of a dentist and a talented amateur musician. He show musical aptitudes since very young age and began to compose at five.

The first of his compositions to attract wide attention were his Sinfonietta (op.1) and a selection of choral variations, A Boy Was Born for the BBC Singers. The next year he met writer W.H. Auden with whom he collaborated in the song cycle Our Hunting Fathers, radical in its musical treatment and political sense, the Cabaret Songs and other works.

In April 1939 Britten and Peter Pears, his lifelong partner sailed to North America following Auden and looking to distance themselves from the War World II. They came back in 1942 and immediately Britten started working on his opera Peter Grimes, which opening in 1945 was one of his biggest hits. Britten began to find opposition in the Londoner musical circle, and he gradually move out the London musical scene creating the English Opera Group in 1947 and the Aldeburgh Festival the next year with the express purpose to produce his own work and commission new English operas and other works.

Together with his War Requiem, stand out his proliferous and thrilling works for the scene, among which are operas who already form part of the operatic repertory such as The Rape of Lucretia, Billy Budd, The Turh of Screw, A Midsummer’s Night Dream and Death in Venice.

Britten was made Companion of Honour in occasion of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953 and on 2 July 1976, he became Baron Birtten of Aldeburgh in the County of Suffolk.

He died on December 4, 1976 of congestive heart failure at his Aldeburgh house.