Edward Benjamin Britten, Baron Britten, OM CH (22 November 1913 – 4 December 1976) was an English composer, conductor, violist and pianist. Britten was born in Lowestoft, Suffolk, the son of a dentist and a talented amateur musician. He showed musical gifts very early in life, and began composing prolifically as a child.

He was educated at Old Buckenham Hall School in Suffolk, an all-boys prep school, and Gresham's School, Holt. In 1927, he began private lessons with Frank Bridge; he also studied, less happily, at the Royal College of Music under John Ireland, with some input from Ralph Vaughan Williams. Although ultimately held back by his parents (at the suggestion of College staff), Britten had also intended to study with Alban Berg in Vienna.

Britten was a prolific juvenile composer; some 800 works and fragments precede his early published works. His first compositions to attract wide attention, however, were the Sinfonietta Op. 1, "A Hymn to the Virgin" (1930) and a set of choral variations A Boy was Born, written in 1934 for the BBC Singers.

In April 1935, he was approached by the film director Alberto Cavalcanti to write the film score for the documentary The King's Stamp, produced by the GPO Film Unit. He subsequently met W. H. Auden, who was also working for the GPO Film Unit: together they worked on the films Coal Face and Night Mail.

They also collaborated on the song cycle Our Hunting Fathers Op. 8, radical both in politics and musical treatment, and other works. Of more lasting importance to Britten was his meeting in 1937 with the tenor Peter Pears, who was to become his musical collaborator and inspiration as well as his life partner.

In the same year he composed a Pacifist March (words, Ronald Duncan) for the Peace Pledge Union, of which, as a pacifist, he had become an active member, but the work was not a success and soon withdrawn.

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