A member above cites the usual platitude that there was no English opera between Purcell and Britten.  Without wishing to derail the Verdi/Britten discussion, this is fundamentally wrong, and merely not knowing who the composers of English opera were between 1695 and 1945 doesn't mean there weren't any.  It is wrong to suggest that Britten created English Opera "out of a void".  Britten, like many English composers before him, wrestled with innate British snobbish prejudice against their own composers... in the field of opera this was maintained for many years by a Royal Patent which gave a monopoly on the performance of opera to Italian works only.  This Patent was upheld by the Lord Chamberlain, who acted in several cases to prevent through-composed English operas reaching the stage.  Consequently we have to accept that a lot of English opera appears in the form of Masque entertainments, and of "dialogue operas" which have spoken text between the numbers.  (It is worth mentioning that this characteristic has been used to rubbish English works whilst ignoring the fact that Mozart, Beethoven and Weber all wrote in the same genre).

The list of English opera composers in this period is too long to give here in complete form.  However, notable composers include...

... Daniel Purcell, Henry's brother, who wrote a large corpus of theatre music both before and after his brother's death... Handel, who became a naturalised British citizen... (and wrote both Italian and English work viz ACIS & GALATEA) John Frederick Lampe, another German who took British citizenship, and produced entertaining spoofs of Handel's work in a mock-heroic style, including THE DRAGON OF WANTLEY and PYRAMUS & THISBE... Pepusch, yet another assimilated foreigner in London, whose BEGGAR'S OPERA remained in repertoire continuously for over 120 years and revolutionised the genre of comic opera (providing inspiration to Brecht, a person whom the member is overfond of quoting)... Thomas Arne, whose operas ROSAMUND and ARTAXERXES are well worth anyone's time, as well as his masque ALFRED, which includes a number in Prom 72...  Charles Dibdin, who excelled in comic one-acters such as THE BRICKDUST MAN and THE EPHESIAN MATRON, as well as his seasongs (another Prom 72 regular inclusion)... Thomas Linley the Elder, who was Sheridan's main collaborator and set THE DUENNA amongst many other operas... Thomas Linley the Younger (who suffered the unfortunately regular fate of English composers to die young, at 22... setting his father off on a nervous breakdown which ended his career also)...  Arnold, the composer of the astonishing INKLE & YARICO (the ill-fated relationship between a British sailor and a Native American girl... the work was being performed as widely as New Yori, Calcutta and Jamaica within four years of the premiere)... William Shield, whose tuneful if unremarkable music gained from the biting social comedies of their librettos by O'Keefe...  Of course, it wouldn't be a show without Punch, and I hope I'll be indulged for once again mentioning Stephen Storace, whose smash-hit operas (The Pirates, The Cherokee, The Haunted Tower, The Siege Of Belgrade, The Iron Chest, No Song No Supper, Dido Queen Of Carthage and others) broke box-office records during his foreshortened career. (One still finds these operas, which are in the full-blown Viennese style of Salieri or Cimarosa, dismissed as "ballad operas" in reputable "Histories Of Music"). The last great flowering of English opera before Victorian piety closed-in was probably Balfe (who should properly be described as Irish)...  known (if at all) these days only for THE BOHEMIAN GIRL, but his scores for THE MAID OF ARTOIS, and JOAN OF ARC are worth delving into.  Desperately in need of reassessment is Sullivan, forever chained to WS Gilbert, but also the composer of other English opera too...   numbers such as "The Ghost's High Noon" from RUDDIGORE and most of the score of YEOMEN OF THE GUARD hint at his potential as a serious opera composer.

Nor is British opera in the C20th before Britten the closed book suggested above.  AT THE BOAR' HEAD... SAVITRI... FENNIMORE & GERDA, KOANGA, A VILLAGE ROMEO & JULIET, SIR JOHN IN LOVE, MERRIE ENGLAND (not at all what you'd guess it to be, btw), THE WRECKERS....

Not only is all this music out in the wilderness undeservedly...  even its existence has been comprehensively denied by a legion of Percy Scholes and Ebenezer Prouts,  and a malediction of organist-musicologists whose worst nightmare is anything connected with a theatre.  You don't have to like it.  But repeating - yet again - the utter drivel that it doesn't exist is really a slap in the face to talented composers who don't deserve such treatment.  The sad thing is that without even hearing it, most Brits will be shaking their heads in sad sympathy at anyone defending any of this music... because surely (by virtue of having been penned by non-Germans) it must indeed be talentless dross that's being plugged out of a mistaken sense of patriotism?      

(And then you'll listen to "Rule Britannia" and "Tom Bowling" at the Last Night and still keep saying there was no English opera between Purcell and Britten... "because Percy Scholes and the Ladybird Book Of Music said so")

Mary, yes, I was thinking of minor operas, and if we include his 'vaudeville' The Golden Vanity we end up with four.

 I wonder whether at this point it might be worth pointing out that without a singer such as Pears working alongside him, Britten's contribution to the genre of vocal writing might have been less distinguished: that having a performer he so obviously admired for his extraordinary powers of verbal interpretation spurred him further to develop his setting of language, and that in any case it's not just one tenor who becomes Britten's voice, but a nucleus of singers with similar talents of communication (including Jennifer Vyvyan, Janet Baker, John Shirley-Quirk, Owen Brannigan and even Fischer-Dieskau) and that something analogous happens with Rostropovich as an instrumentalist, too. It's very apparent that Britten was a composer who was inspired by direct contact with outstanding musicians: had he not met any of them, or discovered others instead, he'd still not have become another anyone else, though he might have become a different Britten....

 To return to the influence of Pears for a moment, I think, also, that Pears's presence was very important and influential in a personal way. Britten's personality was so fragile that he needed PP's calmer character to give him a sense of stability and security he would not otherwise have had. I think it entirely possible that he would have broken down completely without Pears to steady him, and we would possibly have lost a great composer.

In case it isn't clear from the rather chopped-up messages above...  my point in saying all of the above in relation to Britten was that he succeeded in not only writing, but getting stagings for (which is even more difficult) a series of works which were what HE wished to write.  An inherent fallacy in this "could have been another Verdi" nonsense is that Britten's work would have been "better" if it had been conceived alla Italiana...  in other words, as ersatz Italian opera.

The prospects this opinion holds-out for new work in Britain in the C21st are extraordinarily depressing