Britten's comments about the wider significance of his first successful opera in this letter to Imogen Holst written nineteen days after its premiere (Mitchell and Reed 1991, 1268) were indeed prescient. Opera had in fact figured strongly in the worklists of British composers in the first half of the twentieth century: the genre was central to the work of Charles Stanford, Ethyl Smyth, Gustav Holst and Rutland Boughton, while Frederick Delius's A Village Romeo and Juliet and Ralph Vaughan Williams's Riders to the Sea contain some of their composers' best music. But Britten's Peter Grimes excited an unprecedented degree of faith in opera's possibilities, sustained to this day. Since the Second World War, few British composers of any substance have been able to resist the siren call of what is still probably the most risky of all compositional undertakings, beset as it is by the dangers of multiple collaboration and the strong possibility that, because of the scarcity of funds, the fruits of many months' (if not years') labour will fall silent after the first production. For some composers (Peter Maxwell Davies, Harrison Birtwistle and Judith Weir are a few examples, along with Britten and Michael Tippett) opera has been crucial in forging or honing a distinctive style; sometimes (as in the case of Tippett's King Priam) it has been the catalyst for momentous stylistic shifts.