ALDEBURGH.- When composer Benjamin Britten died in 1976, it wasn’t clear how the public would remember him.

There was Britten the rooted composer, firmly set in his native Suffolk, England, and the Aldeburgh Festival with his life partner, tenor Peter Pears; Britten the establishment composer, friendly with the “Queen Mum,” the creator of “Gloriana” and the first composer to receive a peerage; and Britten the immediate composer, whose belief in art’s purposefulness meant he consciously avoided what he called writing for posterity.

Others, however, were committed to the posterity of Britten’s work on his behalf. Rosamund Strode, a Britten assistant since 1964, became the founding archivist of the Britten Pears Foundation, and set the guidelines for one of the most comprehensive composer archives in existence.

What, though, of his festival?

“Understandably, particularly after Britten’s death, and later after Pears’ death, there were people who wanted to properly protect what they felt were the sacred flames, because they were nervous of whether this thing was going to carry on after the two founders of this organization,” Roger Wright, departing CEO of Britten Pears Arts, said in an interview. Those people “needn’t have worried,” he added, “but there were bumpy times, and it’s very easy to forget that.”

In the end, the Aldeburgh Festival, which recently celebrated its 75th edition, has produced many more editions without Britten than with him.

The festival has gained a reputation for consistency, with well-attended, well-reviewed and richly programmed seasons. This year was no exception, including a new production of the church parable “Curlew River” alongside “Sumidigawa,” a Noh play that inspired it. (The show was filmed for a future BBC broadcast.)

There’s a quiet confidence to Aldeburgh’s programming, particularly in its support of new work. There were more than 25 premieres at this year’s festival, and a good deal of nearly new pieces from the featured composers, Unsuk Chin and Judith Weir. The festival is also becoming more distinct in England’s classical music ecosystem, as the aftershocks of funding cuts from local governments and national arts organizations are still rattling programming across the country.

“Being a tall poppy is not a place to be,” Wright said. “You want to be in a landscape which is really flourishing, in which everybody has the opportunity to program with confidence.” Despite the festival’s relative prosperity — it receives more than 1 million pounds (about $1.3 million) a year from Britten’s royalties, something most British arts organizations could only dream of — the foundation can’t afford to rest on its laurels.

“None of this stuff does itself,” Wright said. “We’ve got to raise more than 2 million pounds a year in philanthropy in this community, just to stand still.”

This is still Britten country, though. He played a role in transforming Aldeburgh — a coastal town with neither a port nor a pier, and whose train station closed in 1966 — into a tourist destination. The churches and early festival venues remain, as do the houses of Britten’s circle, and the town’s main street retains many of the independent shops that Britten and Pears frequented.

But since Britten’s death, the story of the festival has been of his slow transition from the foreground to somewhere farther back.

The festival began in 1948, with Pears suggesting “a modest festival with a few concerts given by friends.” Its inception coincided with a surge of arts festivals in Europe, with Cannes and Avignon in France, and Edinburgh in Scotland, all starting within a few years of one another.

In England, Cheltenham, Bath and the Dartington summer school emerged around the same time, all part of Britain’s optimistic, post-World War II rebuilding project that came under Clement Attlee’s Labour administration. “There’s this sense that politics had torn Europe apart, and art was going to be involved in putting it back together,” said Christopher Hilton, head of archive and library at Britten Pears Arts.

The first editions of Aldeburgh Festival were modest, revolving around the Jubilee Hall, a small, multipurpose, redbrick hall in the middle of town that Britten and Pears occasionally rented to play badminton.

Knowing that his music would be performed in a venue with limited space for musicians and audience shaped Britten’s compositions. In letters, he referred to the hall as “the real home” of his comic opera “Albert Herring,” which he brought to the festival in 1948, having premiered it at the Glyndebourne festival the year before. That sense of the site-specific work remains. Last month, on the pebble beach at Aldeburgh, Xhosa Cole and Mark Sanders created a collaboration “between saxophone, drums and sea.”

Actor Robert Speight, writing at the time of the first festival, remarked that “no one seemed able to explain where the large audiences came from. The Parish Church was equally full for a recital of verse and music at 11 in the morning as it was for a concert by Britten and Pears or the Zorian Quartet at 6 in the evening.” So it has continued; a recent Thursday morning piano recital by Rolf Hind — with music by Chin and Weir, alongside works by Maurice Ravel, Charles Koechlin, Olivier Messiaen and Hind — drew a healthy crowd.

As Britten composed “Peter Grimes” from his home in the Old Mill at Snape in 1944, he could see the barley-malting buildings of Snape Maltings in the distance. It ceased operation in 1965, and Britten leased the large central building, which would become the main concert hall. It opened in 1967.

Gradually, the site’s other buildings have been redeveloped as an arts hub that, alongside the festival, houses a Young Artists program and year-round community program. (The singing project “Friday Afternoons” is one of a number of community projects that make clear their links to Britten.

Britten Pears Arts recently started an investment program that responds to need over want. In addition to modernizing some original parts of the complex — the hall’s wicker chairs mean audiences enter the concert space armed with cushions — the program will address something unusual for a concert hall: flood defenses.

The tranquil location, by the reed beds next to the River Alde, belies its exposure to imminent environmental change. “It’s such a delicate ecology,” Wright said. “If the river overtops, the concert hall will be 10 feet underwater. We’re on borrowed time.”

A few miles up the road lies the Red House, the home of Britten and Pears for many years, which has been lovingly preserved, with their considerable art collection exhibited on rotation. It feels like an extremely comfortable place, demonstrating the kind of bourgeois “nest of love” that W.H. Auden chided Britten about earlier in his career.

Britten and Pears often welcomed other artists with similar mindsets into their home. “I have to write for people or for occasions,” Britten told CBS in 1968, and the couple’s benevolence to other artists also took the shape of a house to live in, or a quiet place to work.

In the case of artist Philip Sutton, Britten and Pears “gave him a home to live in for a couple of months, which ended up being a couple of years,” said Ella Roberts, head of the Red House. “It’s the postwar thing of starting again, of establishing a creative landscape, that they were really invested in.” Today, artists seeking a creative retreat can stay in a house built for artist Mary Potter on the grounds of the Red House, and, in a cute corner of town, another built for Imogen Holst, the composer, Britten assistant and longtime festival administrator.

Britten once explained what he called “this holy triangle”: composer, performer and listener. It’s not a universally loved idea. But when bound by trust, and buoyed by ample royalty payments, it’s a good guide for the Aldeburgh Festival, even as its main characters change.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.