Albert Herring

Albert Herring
Chamber opera by Benjamin Britten
The composer in 1968
Librettist	Eric Crozier
Language	English
Based on	Le Rosier de Madame Husson by Guy de Maupassant
Premiere	20 June 1947 (1947-06-20) Glyndebourne Festival Opera

Albert Herring, Op. 39, is a chamber opera in three acts by Benjamin Britten.

Composed in the winter of 1946 and the spring of 1947, this comic opera was a successor to his serious opera The Rape of Lucretia. The libretto, by Eric Crozier, was based on Guy de Maupassant's novella Le Rosier de Madame Husson, with the action transposed to an English setting.

After having composed and staged The Rape of Lucretia, Britten decided he should attempt a comedy, preferably set in England. Crozier suggested adapting the Maupassant short story Le rosier de Madame Husson and transplanting it to the Suffolk landscape already familiar to Britten from his home in Snape. Britten composed Albert Herring at his home, The Old Mill at Snape, in the winter of 1946 and the spring of 1947. He scored the opera for the same instrumental forces he had used in his first chamber opera The Rape of Lucretia, intending it like the earlier opera for performance by the English Opera Group.

The opera premiered on 20 June 1947 at Glyndebourne, conducted by the composer. According to one writer, the owner and founder of Glyndebourne, John Christie, "disliked it intensely and is said to have greeted members of the first night audience with the words: 'This isn't our kind of thing, you know'." Some 38 years later Glyndebourne's 1985 production was "one of the most successful the opera has had".

The opera received its U.S. premiere on 8 August 1949 at the Tanglewood Music Festival. In 1949, Britten's English Opera Group toured with both Rape of Lucretia and Albert Herring, giving ten performances between 12–23 September in Copenhagen and Oslo. An almost complete recording of one of the Copenhagen performances has been released commercially.

Sviatoslav Richter called it "the greatest comic opera of the century" and in 1983 staged Albert Herring as part of the December Nights Festival at Moscow's Pushkin Museum.