Benjamin Britten

British composer who is the most important English composer of the 20th century — whose operas (Peter Grimes, Billy Budd, Death in Venice) explore outsidership, persecution, and the tension between the individual and society — and whose War Requiem juxtaposes Wilfred Owen's WWI poetry with the Latin Mass.

Created a body of opera that makes the scapegoating of the outsider its central theme — Peter Grimes, Billy Budd, and Death in Venice are all about the community's destruction of the person who is different — making Britten's work a musical parallel to Girard's scapegoat theory.