Short answers, pulled from the story.
Britten's best-known works include the opera Peter Grimes (1945), the War Requiem (1962), and The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra (1945). His operas are performed worldwide more than those of any other composer born in the twentieth century, and The Young Person's Guide became and remained his most often played and popular single work.
Britten was born on the 22nd of November 1913 in Lowestoft, Suffolk, on the east coast of England. The date fell on the feast day of Saint Cecilia, the patron saint of music.
Peter Pears was a tenor who became Britten's personal and professional partner from 1939 until Britten's death in 1976. Britten composed his first work for Pears within weeks of their meeting in 1937, and Pears was the muse for numerous song cycles and operatic roles. Britten was buried beside Pears's reserved plot in Aldeburgh Parish Church at his own request.
The Aldeburgh Festival is an annual music festival launched in June 1948 by Britten, Pears, and the librettist Eric Crozier in the small Suffolk seaside town where Britten lived. It was founded as an extension of the English Opera Group's mission to produce and commission new English works. Britten premiered new compositions at nearly every festival until his death in 1976, and the festival has continued into the twenty-first century.
The War Requiem was commissioned for the consecration of the new Coventry Cathedral, designed by Basil Spence, which stood on the site of a cathedral destroyed by an air raid in 1940. Premiering in 1962, the work interweaves the traditional Latin Requiem Mass with poems by the First World War poet Wilfred Owen. Shostakovich told Rostropovich he believed it to be the greatest work of the twentieth century.
In June 1976, the last year of his life, Britten accepted a life peerage, becoming Baron Britten of Aldeburgh in the County of Suffolk. He was the first composer ever to be granted a life peerage. He also won a composition scholarship to the Royal College of Music in 1930 and took multiple prizes there including the Sullivan Prize and the Ernest Farrar Prize for composition.