Theme Park Britten: Staging the English Village at the Aldeburgh Festival

Abstract

Journalists and scholars have long observed how Aldeburgh seems to function as a larger stage for Benjamin Britten’s village-themed operas. Not only is it the explicit setting forPeter Grimes, but it also serves as the site for the annual Aldeburgh Festival of Music and the Arts, founded by Britten in 1948. This article examines how the Festival served as a parallel construction of the village life seen in Britten’s early operas, particularlyAlbert Herring(1947) andLittle Sweep(1949). Analysing materials from the initial years of the Festival – including programme books and accounts of exhibitions and performances – I trace how Festival organisers drew upon the rhetoric and modes of behaviour of contemporary tourism in promoting a particular vision of the local community. By blurring the line between the fictional worlds of Britten’s village-themed operas and the site of Aldeburgh, the Festival encouraged the visitors to fabricate the very kind of community that organisers claimed could already be found at Aldeburgh.