Peter Grimes - San Diego Opera Peter Grimes In the Classroom Benjamin Britten and Peter Grimes Certainly the greatest single composer of opera in England since Handel, Benjamin Britten was born in Lowestoft, Suffolk in 1913. His was a solidly middle-class upbringing in the seaside town where early piano lessons stimulated a natural inclination to composition. Early connections and lessons with Frank Bridge and John Ireland (the latter at the Royal College of Music which Britten attended) were influential, although Brittenâs strong musical personality and intense curiosity about contemporary styles led him to eventually leave his mentors behind. After a trip to Europe with his mother after graduation and experiencing the musical excellence in foreign centers such as Vienna and Basel left him desperate on the subject of the current state of musical and cultural life in England. Meanwhile early compositions such as the Phantasy, Sinfonietta, Simple Symphony and A Boy Was Born raised the awareness of the British public, leading to a BBC broadcast, his lifelong association with the music publishing firm of Boosey & Hawkes and work at the GPO Film Unit scoring documentaries. At GPO he met the poet W.H. Auden who was to have an influential role in his life at this time.

It was during this same period, in 1937, that he met his eventual life partner Peter Pears at a rehearsal of the BBC Singers for one of his choral works. Pears, a tenor, was to provide important emotional and creative support for Brittenâs works, not only creating (and inspiring) most of the tenor roles in the composerâs operas but helping to form and âbirthâ the works as well. Brittenâs homosexuality and association with left-wing politics made his continued presence in England at the beginning of the Second World War tremendously difficult. His pacifism was particularly problematic, especially for a public person in a country rallying its people to form a united front against encroaching Fascism. Britten, Pears and poet W.H. Auden all left the country in 1939, first for Canada, and then the United States. It was there, in Escondido (cf.

âThe Literary Source for Peter Grimes: George Crabbeâs The Borough,â the companion article in Operapaedia), that the first idea for an opera on the subject of Peter Grimes, a character from George Crabbeâs The Borough, came to him. Upon mentioning the subject to Serge Koussevitsky during a visit to Boston, the conductor offered $1,000 (a tidy sum at the time!) in order to fund the completion of the work. Composition didnât actually begin until Britten was fully satisfied with the libretto but he began in earnest early in 1944, knowing that Koussevitsky had promised a performance at the Berkshire Music Festival in Massachusetts that summer. As it turned out, the festival that year was postponed until the end of the war. So a British production by the Sadlerâs Wells company was considered for the summer of 1945.

Quotes from Brittenâs letters to Pears (to be found in Humphrey Carpenterâs excellent biography on the composer, Benjamin Britten: A Biography, Charles Scribnerâs Sons, New York, 1992) give a glimpse into the compositional process. Very early on, he writes: âWell, at last I have broken the spell and got down to work on P.G. I have been at it for two days solidly and got the greater part of the Prologue done. It is very difficult to keep that amount of recitative moving, without going round & round in circles, I findâbut I think Iâve managed it.â On the 9th of April he writes: âGrimes is being such a brute at the moment. Still, I am over the worst now, and I can at least see ahead.â But in June he writes: âMy bloody opera stinks, & thatâs all there is to it.

But I dare say that I shall be able to de-odorize it before too long.â Working at Snape was difficult for him that year as his home was not terribly far from an air base. The constant comings and goings of Royal Air Force fighters into the European theatre provided not-so-welcome sonic accompaniment. The operaâs first sketch was finally finished in the fall of 1944 when he immediately began on the orchestration. While the composition process was coming to a close, Britten had to engage Sadlerâs Wellsâ board in order to get a final commitment on the production. It was certainly not a âdone dealâ as speculation as to the subject matter varied widely, depending on whom one was talking to. But a sing-through by Britten for the directors convinced them that the piece was worth doing and they began to search about for the best physical venue (the Sadlerâs Wells company, because of the war, was constantly searching about for different theatres in which to present their seasons). Rehearsals began in Manchester, where the company was on tour, and continued to be rehearsed in cities that the company happened to be visiting.

It was on this tour that Pears, already chosen for the title role, helped Britten re-write much of the title role in order to help fit his voice more perfectly, and where other parts of the libretto, particularly the mad scene in Act III, were re-written with the help of Ronald Duncan. (The official librettist, Montagu Slater, was infuriated by these changes and eventually published his original libretto on his own). As the date of the premiere came closer, nerves and tempers ruled the company until June 7th, the night of the opening at the Sadlerâs Wellsâ home theatre in Islington in the North of London. The production of Peter Grimes was to mark the official re-opening of their theatre. The opera was an enormous success, winning over those inside and outside of the company who were finally convinced that Britten was a composer to be dealt with and that he had created a masterwork. The curtain calls at the first performance were endless and much praise was given to Pears in the title role.

Britten wrote to Imogen Holst about a month after the premiere: âI must confess that I am very pleased with the way that it seems to âcome over the foot-lights,â and also with the way the audience takes it, & what is perhaps more, returns night after night to take it again! I think the occasion is actually a greater one than either Sadlerâs Wells or me, I feel. Perhaps it is an omen for English Opera in the future.â An omen, indeed. The first American performance of Peter Grimes occurred, appropriately enough, at Koussevitskyâs Berkshire Festival in Tanglewood, August 1946, with his illustrious student Leonard Bernstein conducting. The Literary Source for Peter Grimes: George Crabbeâs The Borough It is with great pride that music lovers in San Diego County can point to the sun-baked, inland city of Escondido as being the place where the first seed of an idea for Peter Grimes took root in the imagination of Benjamin Britten.

The composer and his lifelong companion, the tenor Peter Pears, had left England for the United States at the outset of the war in 1939. Their status as conscientious objectors during a time of great peril for England was a source of some criticism in the British press; undaunted, they followed the poet W.H. Auden and others into self-imposed exile. They spent much of their time on the east coast but in 1941 they were invited by the duo-piano team of Ethel Bartlett and Rae Robertson, who were summering in Escondido, to join them in California. Britten, who had cut his composerâs teeth scoring documentaries for the GPO (General Post Office) Film Unit, hoped for work in Hollywood but nothing came of it. He did receive and fulfill a commission from Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge to write a string quartet for a Los Angeles premiere which took up much of his time.

A letter dated July 29th, however, gives us a clue that much more was going on in the deep recesses of his composerâs imagination: âWeâve just re-discovered the poetry of George Crabbe (all about Suffolk!) & are very excitedâmaybe an opera one day--!â The reference to Suffolk relates to his childhood home at Lowestoft, overlooking the North Sea where storm, wind and ocean combine to wreak havoc on the rocky coast. But the poetry of George Crabbe relates to the Suffolk native poet whose work The Borough contains the pivotal characters that were eventually to populate the opera Peter Grimes. Crabbe (1754-1832) was a poet and clergyman who was widely regarded during his time, a friend of William Wordsworth, Walter Scott and greatly admired by Lord Byron for his unsentimental verse. The Borough was published in 1810 while he was chaplain to the Duke of Rutland in Leicestershire.

It is a collection of 24 âlettersâ which describe various inhabitants of the town in which Crabbe himself was born, Aldeburgh, Suffolk, about an hourâs drive south of Brittenâs hometown of Lowestoft. Letter XXII is the story of Grimes, told in heroic rhyming couplets, about a stubborn, brutal fisherman haunted by his own rough upbringing who perpetuated the abuse on three of his young apprentices. At the end of the poem he dies, haunted by his father and the ghosts of the boys who died under his rough treatment. Here is an excerpt from the poem which most parallels the situation of the boy apprentice in the opera: âSome few in town observed in Peter's trap A boy, with jacket blue and woolen cap; But none inquired how Peter used the rope, Or what the bruise, that made the stripling stoop; None could the ridges on his back behold, None sought his shiv'ring in the winter's cold; None put the question,--"Peter, dost thou give The boy his food?--What, man!

the lad must live: Consider, Peter, let the child have bread, He'll serve thee better if he's stroked and fed." None reason'd thus--and some, on hearing cries, Said calmly, âGrimes is at his exercise.ââ Britten and Pears cobbled together a synopsis of the proposed opera on the ship back to England in the spring of 1942. One of the first things Britten did on his return to the UK was to contract Montagu Slater, playwright, poet and journalist for whose theatrical work the composer had written music some years before, to be the librettist for Grimes. The main character went through a number of transformations, from cold brute through repressed homosexual to victim of societal judgment. Slater presumably worked from the Britten-Pears synopsis, but opened up the libretto to a raft of characters suggested by other sections of Crabbeâs Borough, creating a kind of community within which Grimesâ actions receive a context. Even after demanding some changes from Slater and accepting them, Britten continued to tinker with the libretto as he wrote the score, finally coming up with a text that pleased him.

During this evolution the main character became more complicated, more generously textured than before; Grimes became, in Pearsâ words, ââ¦âan introspective, an artistâ, a sensitive and gifted individual who is misunderstood and rejected by society.â (Benjamin Britten: A Biography by Humphrey Carpenter, Charles Scribnerâs Sons-New York, 1992) The Music of Peter Grimes Britten as a composer can be difficult to categorize, as each of his operas is unique in their musical approach to the solving of quite different dramatic problems. He was certainly eclectic, pulling from a broad palette of compositional techniques, forms and styles in order to express himself. Yet his music is easily identifiable because of its strong personality. With regard to Peter Grimes we can readily hear that weâre dealing with a composer with a considerable amount of experience in film music and scoring for radio plays. There are a number of instances in the opera where one experiences the musical equivalent of a âcross-fadeâ, moving from one scene into another seamlessly with the music constantly thrusting forward.

In other words, the physical set changes from one scene to the next while the orchestra bridges the visual gap with music that moves us from one environment to another. This takes some compositional ingenuity. The music from the previous scene must come to a satisfactory close without a sense of completion, and the music for the new scene must enter almost imperceptibly and establish the new âfeelâ quickly and forcefully. An obvious example of this musical cross-fading occurs at the end of the Prologue, set in the boroughâs Moot Hall where an inquest into the death of Grimesâ boy apprentice is being held. After it is found that the boy died in âaccidental circumstancesâ, Peter and Ellen the schoolmistress are left alone. Peter complains that he will always be under suspicion by the gossips in the borough, and Ellen tries to comfort him. This is all sung in an unaccompanied recitative for the two voices, singing in distinctly opposite keys (this helps to establish Grimesâ isolation from the village). As soon as their phrase comes to a quiet close the first violins in the orchestra introduce the First Interlude.

The curtain closes on the Moot Hall then opens on the scene outside the Hall, a street by the sea. This orchestral interlude perfectly sets the tone of early morning as the borough awakens to the sounds of seagulls and the calm ocean lapping gently against the dock. This technique is obviously cinematic and occurs a number of other places throughout the opera. The whole score is built in order to constantly remind the audience of Grimesâ âothernessâ, his role as an outcast in the village. Britten often gives his title character wide interval leaps in the vocal line, as in the soliloquy âWhat harbour shelters peace, away from tidal waves, away from stormsâ. It begins with a leap of a major ninth, seeming to symbolize the wide gap that exists between himself and the rest of society. His first utterance (in the Prologue during the inquest), as he is sworn in to testify, is typical. Mr. Swallow, the mayor and coroner of the town, reads the oath (âI swear to almighty Godâ¦â) in quick, short note values.

Peter repeats the oath with longer, more deliberate note values an octave above Swallowâs pitch level. Again the separation between Peter and other beings is emphasized as the two voices begin to overlap each other with complete independence one from the other. When the villagers take shelter from a storm at the local pub, someone begins singing a round in order to perk up their spirits: âOld Joe has gone fishingâ. The round is taken up enthusiastically by everyone gathered but when Peter enters the rhythm is âwrongâ, the timing âoffâ. The tuneful round falls apart. He canât keep step with any other human being in his acquaintance. His very existence seems to be an affront to the well-ordered universe within which he finds himself. Something else that sets Grimes the character apart from the villagers is that most of his solo utterances are monologues or soliloquies, not true arias. They are closer to the tradition of the great Verdi ariosos from Rigoletto, Falstaff or Otello.

They are freer in shape than a closed aria (which has a clear beginning and end) and have far more resonance in the drama than a formal set-piece. Thatâs not to say that there are not real tunes in the opera. Some of the choral melodies in particular are quite memorable, from the opening âOh hang at open doors the netâ to âOld Joe has gone fishingâ and âGrimes is at his exerciseâ. Britten, like other great composers of theatre music, is a painter of text and scene. The so-called Sea Interludes from Peter Grimes (often performed by orchestras in concert outside the context of the opera) draw quite specific and literal portraits of the time and place. The first, evoking dawn on a street beside the sea, has already been alluded to. The second interlude moves us from Act I, scene i into the storm which drives the inhabitants to the pub for protection. It is certainly one of the most musically exciting storms in all opera.

The third takes us into the scene on the beach with Ellen and the boy; it is Sunday morning and in the music we hear allusions to the ringing of church bells and their overlaying of sonic elements associated with the sea. These interludes hearken to the influence of Bergâs Wozzeck (one of Brittenâs favorite works), similar in length, âfeelâ and purpose, not just providing for movement from one scene to another but providing an emotional or psychological context for the upcoming scene. All in all, Peter Grimes is a remarkable statement from a young composer just beginning his operatic career.

CONNECT WITH US Peter Grimes: a short guide — News — Royal Opera House Librettist: Montagu Slater , after the poem ‘The Borough’ by George Crabbe , 1810 World premiere: 7 June 1945, Sadler’s Wells Theatre, London Current Royal Opera Production: first performed 3 July 2004, originally directed by Willy Decker with designs by John Macfarlane Background Peter Grimes is inspired by George Crabbe’s 1810 series of poems ‘The Borough’ set in Britten’s native county of Suffolk, on the east coast of England. Britten and his partner, the British tenor Peter Pears , worked on the scenario for the opera together, transforming Crabbe’s monstrous fisherman into a fundamentally sympathetic outsider, persecuted by a hostile community. Britten then asked the Communist writer Montagu Slater to write the libretto, who added many individual touches to the text. The opera was first performed in 1945, just after V.E. Day, with Pears in the title role. The Story Peter Grimes is a fisherman, living in a small Suffolk town.

He is summoned to court after the death of his young apprentice at sea; the townspeople are convinced Grimes is to blame, but he is let off with a caution and warned not to take another apprentice. Ignoring the court’s ruling, Grimes soon recruits a new lad from the workhouse. Some time later the boy falls to his death; the townspeople gather to hunt Grimes down, despite desperate pleas for mercy from the schoolmistress Ellen Orford. Grimes descends into madness. The old sea captain Balstrode tells him to sail his ship out to sea and drown himself. The Characters Peter Grimes: A fisherman and a solitary figure, who finds it impossible to integrate with the society about him. Ellen Orford: A widowed schoolmistress who cares for Peter. Captain Balstrode: A retired sea captain. Mrs Sedley: The town gossip. Ned Keene: An apothecary, who sources things for the inhabitants of the Borough, including Grimes’s apprentices. Auntie: Landlady of the Boar Inn. Auntie’s Nieces: Two young girls who work as prostitutes at the Boar Inn.

San Francisco Symphony - BRITTEN: Peter Grimes, Opus 33 San Francisco Symphony Music Then and Now: Twentieth Century and Contemporary Britten: Peter Grimes, Opus 33 Peter Grimes, an Opera in Three Acts and a Prologue Derived from the Poem of George Crabbe, Opus 33 Benjamin Edward Britten was born November 22, 1913, in Lowestoft, Suffolk, England, and died December 4, 1976, in Aldeburgh, Suffolk. He composed his opera Peter Grimes, to a libretto by Montagu Slater, from January 1944 through February 1945, and it was first staged June 7, 1945, at Sadler’s Wells Opera Theatre, London, with Reginald Goodall conducting, tenor Peter Pears in the title role, and soprano Joan Cross as Ellen Orford. These are the first San Francisco Symphony performances.

The score calls for an orchestral complement of two flutes (doubling piccolos), two oboes (second doubling English horn), two clarinets (second doubling E-flat clarinet), two bassoons and contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, xylophone, rattle, whip, tambourine, side drum, tenor drum, bass drum, triangle, cymbals, suspended cymbal, gong, celesta, organ, harp, and strings. Performance time: about two-and-a-half hours. During the season now ending, the music world has celebrated the centennial of the birth of Benjamin Britten, who was happy to point out that he was born on the Feast Day of Saint Cecilia, the patron saint of music. He studied piano seriously as a child and soon took up the viola as well. The noted composer and teacher Frank Bridge encountered the thirteen-year-old musician at the Norwich Festival and was sufficiently intrigued by his talent to accept him as a private composition student, instilling the technical grounding that would help him achieve an eminent position among the century’s English composers.

In 1930, Britten entered London’s Royal College of Music, where the composer John Ireland and the pianists Arthur Benjamin and Harold Samuel continued to refine his musicianship. He still worked with Bridge on the side, and this proved an important aspect of his education; while his conservatory studies concentrated on “the classics,” Bridge kept steering his young charge toward more up-to-date developments in scores by Mahler, Schoenberg, and Stravinsky. This exposure to modernism proved critical to Britten’s development, not because he ended up sounding like any of those composers but rather because it equipped him to rebel against the musical aesthetic his generation inherited, that of Elgar and, most directly, the “English pastoral tradition” typified by the more nostalgic or folk-infused works of Vaughan Williams. While this style would not do for Britten, he did maintain a distinct reverence for heritage and tradition. Britten turned often to esteemed English authors for texts, and he produced dozens of arrangements of authentic folk songs from the British Isles. Among Britten’s most formidable achievements was that he remained rooted in the musical tradition of his nation but nonetheless pushed boldly forward. While many of his finest scores sound instantly British, they also sound resolutely of the twentieth century.

Having completed his conservatory curriculum and garnered some notable honors to serve as imprimaturs, Britten set about earning a living through his music. To this end, he found a job as a composer in the General Post Office Film Unit, writing film scores for postal-related documentaries. This proved to be not just gainful employment but also an aesthetic experience far more decisive than one might have predicted. The GPO Film Unit, it turned out, was a hotbed of personal escapade and professional creativity that also included the poet W.H. Auden (the unit’s kingpin) and such other writers as Christopher Isherwood and Montagu Slater. Many of the people involved were left-wing pacifists and several were as close to being openly gay as was possible at the time. In March 1937, Britten met a young tenor named Peter Pears, and within a year they had moved in together, beginning a relationship that lasted to the end of Britten’s life.

(Following the death of Britten—by then Lord Britten of Aldeburgh—Queen Elizabeth II sent a formal letter of condolence to Pears.) In 1939, Britten and Pears left for America to wait out the war. While in the United States, Britten composed his first opera, Paul Bunyan, a collaboration with the similarly expatriate Auden. It was produced at Columbia University in 1941 and was received with chuckling amusement by the audience but derision from the critics. Though a far cry from Britten’s ensuing operas, it represented an important first step toward the lyric stage. Also during his American years he became engrossed in the works of the British poet George Crabbe (1754-1832). He was first alerted to Crabbe by an article E.M. Forster published in May 1941 in the magazine The Listener, and then that summer Britten and Pears stumbled across a volume of Crabbe’s poetry in a Los Angeles bookshop.

Crabbe’s lengthy poem “The Borough” included the skeleton of the tale of Peter Grimes, an unsavory East Anglian fisherman who took on pauper lads as helpers and mistreated them. The people of the borough turned a blind eye: Some few in town observed in Peter’s trap A boy, with jacket blue and woolen cap; But none enquired how Peter used the rope, Or what the bruise, that made the stripling stoop . . . None reason’d thus—and some, on hearing cries, Said calmly, “Grimes is at his exercise.” The apprentice died, and so did his successor, and also the one after that. Finally Grimes was hauled in to the town court and forbidden to enlist further boys. He grew even less stable than he already was, and eventually died insane, haunted by the ghosts of the boys who had perished in his service. Britten later reported that when he read this tale, “I suddenly realized where I belonged and what I lacked.” Where he belonged, one surmises, was England. He and Pears returned home in April 1942.

It was a perilous move at that point in war, and they were carefully scrutinized as potential servicemen. Eventually a judge ruled that, instead of carrying out non-combatant war-related service, the greater national benefit lay in their continuing to work as musicians. What he lacked, one infers, was a serious opera, and most likely a serious opera on a topic deeply rooted in his native land. The first step would be to develop Crabbe’s bare-bones narrative into a full-fledged operatic libretto. Britten and Pears began by presenting the scenario to Isherwood, who felt certain it wouldn’t work as an opera and accordingly declined the offer to serve as librettist. They then approached Slater, another Film Unit colleague, and he accepted the challenge. Slater’s libretto was in place by the end of 1942 and Britten undertook the composition between January 1944 and February 1945.

At the end of three years’ work, Peter Grimes emerged as a compelling tale bursting with what would become “Brittenesque” fingerprints: sympathetic portrayal of a social outcast, undertones of sexual ambiguity and abuse, suggestions of the corruption of innocence, an uneasy awareness of moral haziness as part of the human condition, the hypocrisy of an intolerant community given to scapegoating, and a leading tenor part crafted specifically for Pears. The score was a panoply of the possibilities open to a mid-century composer, modernist in its idiom yet not of the twelve-tone school, using harmony both to suggest horror and to offer comfort. It was not an opera in the Wagnerian lineage but rather a piece more in the mold of nineteenth-century “number operas,” with defined expanses of arias, ensembles, and choruses, all balanced into a compelling dramatic flow. It was, furthermore, an opera rooted in place. The fictional village in which it is set is redolent of Aldeburgh, which became Britten’s home, its claustrophobia scarcely relieved by the omnipresent ocean.

The villagers are English to the core, not just dramatically but also musically; when, near the end of Act One, Grimes bursts into the pub and astonishes everyone with his outburst of “Now the Great Bear and Pleiades”—the revelation of a visionary or the raving of a maniac, or both—the locals restore normalcy by singing a tune that anchors them in their everyday reality, the folkish sea shanty “Old Joe has gone fishing.” A commission for the opera arrived from conductor Serge Koussevitzky, who had recently set up his Koussevitzky Music Foundation in memory of his departed wife, Nathalie. His plan was to introduce the resulting opera with the Boston Symphony at Tanglewood during the summer of 1944. When the war upset the festival’s planning, Koussevitzky relinquished his claim on the piece in favor of the Sadler’s Wells Opera Company in London, which was able to promise a quicker premiere. (When Tanglewood was able to mount it, in 1946, Koussevitzky assigned the conducting to his protégé Leonard Bernstein.) Sadler’s Wells had managed to remain active throughout the war.

Although its theater in London was requisitioned by the British military, its director, Joan Cross, kept the company going through six years of touring around the country. As the war crept toward what was dimly perceived as its inevitable conclusion, she committed to mounting Britten’s opera to mark her company’s return to its theater. A soprano, she cast herself in the role of the exorbitantly charitable schoolmistress Ellen Orford, the first of five Britten roles she would create, the ensuing ones being the Female Chorus in The Rape of Lucretia (1946), Lady Billows in Albert Herring (1948), Elizabeth I in Gloriana (1953), and Mrs. Grose in The Turn of the Screw (1954). Pears, of course, took on the title part; he would become the standard tenor of Britten’s future operas, but at that point he was not yet famous among British operagoers. In a BBC speech crafted for student listeners in 1946, Britten observed of that inaugural production: “I had a first-rate young producer [Eric Crozier] to work with who criticized every detail of the work relentlessly.

I had first-rate young singers to sing the opera, and I attended every single rehearsal and learned from this an enormous amount about what not to write in opera in the future. Some of these things, of course, I was able to alter in rehearsal.” The premiere took place under trying circumstances, with the opening night following VE Day by less than a month. The Sadler’s Wells chorus and orchestra approached open rebellion over the difficulties of the music (“a piece of cacophony” is how they described it in one of their protests), and they directed particular hostility toward Cross for casting herself in a leading role, and toward Britten, Pears, and Crozier for being conscientious objectors. Quite a few people felt that, after a time of national duress, audiences should have been treated to something frothy, or at least something familiar, rather than a challenging and far-from-optimistic new work. The antagonism reached such a height that, once Peter Grimes had been accomplished, Cross and Pears both disassociated themselves from Sadler’s Wells and joined with Britten, Crozier, and designer John Piper to found the English Opera Group, which would be the face of progressive British Opera in the 1950s.

Even under the circumstances, the premiere of Peter Grimes was a watershed event and, notwithstanding some glitches, the performers pulled it off worthily. Among famous faces spotted in the audience were those of Vaughan Williams, William Walton, and Yehudi Menuhin. Leonard Thompson, who played the part of Grimes’s apprentice, later described the audience’s reaction: When the curtain came down, for I imagine something like—well, it seemed like minutes, but it must have been about thirty seconds—there was nothing. Absolutely nothing. And then it broke out. And it went on and on. I think there were something like fourteen curtain calls. And Ben, of course, came on immaculate, in white tie and tails, looking like a matinee idol. And he just folded in the middle. That’s the only way I can describe it—the deepest bow I’ve ever seen from anybody! The opera played to full houses for eight further performances. Britten’s old teacher John Ireland attended one and was very pleased. “In some respects he could twist every other composer in this country round his little finger,” he remarked. “It was not pleasant or uplifting—rather Satanic, I thought.” His reaction was not unique.

The critic Eric Blom, reviewing for the Birmingham Post, found the opera “gloomy, harrowing, and depressing in the extreme,” and Frank Howes, in The Times, described the orchestral writing as displaying “diabolical cunning.” This did not prevent either from finding a great deal to appreciate, and the overall critical response was very positive indeed. By the end of 1948, the piece was presented in nineteen staged productions and two radio productions, in Great Britain, Belgium, Italy, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, the United States, Austria, Switzerland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, France, and Australia. Several of the opera’s orchestral passages, recurrent reminders of the critical role that the sea plays in the lives of the characters of the wretched borough, took on independent life as the Four Sea Interludes, unveiled as a standalone suite only a week after the opera’s premiere and quickly adopted into the symphonic repertory (The San Francisco Symphony will perform the Four Sea Interludes, with video by artist Tal Rosner, on June 28).

Ten further operas lay in Britten’s future, but Peter Grimes, his first serious effort in the genre, remains the most securely ensconced in the repertory, the one against which all his future operatic endeavors are measured. —James M.

Keller More About the Music Recordings: Of obvious authority and historical interest is the classic recording with Britten conducting the Chorus and Orchestra of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, with tenor Peter Pears as Grimes and soprano Claire Watson as Ellen Orford (Decca) │ Anthony Dean Griffey and Vivian Tierney, with Mark Wigglesworth conducting the London Philharmonic Orchestra and Glyndebourne Festival Chorus (Glyndebourne Festival Opera) │ Philip Langridge and Janice Watson, with Richard Hickox conducting the City of London Sinfonia and London Symphony Chorus (Chandos) │ Jon Vickers and Helen Harper, with Colin Davis conducting the Chorus and Orchestra of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden (Philips) Britten's Unquiet Pasts: Sound and Memory in Postwar Reconstruction, by Heather Wiebe (Cambridge University Press) │ Reading: Benjamin Britten: A Biography, by Humphrey Carpenter (Scribners) │ Benjamin Britten: A Life in the Twentieth Century, by Paul Kildea (Allen Lane) │ Benjamin Britten: A Life for Music, by Neil Powell (Henry Holt) │ Benjamin Britten: Peter Grimes,

 compiled by Philip Brett (Cambridge Opera Handbooks) │ The Cambridge Companion to Benjamin Britten, edited by Mervyn Cooke (Cambridge) │ The Music of Benjamin Britten, by Peter Evans (Clarendon Press, Oxford) │ The Operas of Benjamin Britten, by Claire Seymour (BOYE6) │ The Operas of Benjamin Britten: An Introduction, by Patricia Howard (Praeger) │ Music and Sexuality in Britten, edited by Philip Brett (University of California Press) (June 2014) Peter Grimes - Benjamin Britten - Opera - The New York Times The New York Times Music |In Pursuit of Britten’s Hated Outsider Search In Pursuit of Britten’s Hated Outsider By PETER G.

DAVIS Photo The Metropolitan Opera production of Peter Grimes will open on Thursday. Credit Andrea Mohin/The New York Times THE game is constantly afoot in Benjamin Britten ’s “Peter Grimes.” Everyone, it seems, is hunting for something or someone in this opera, most spectacularly in the third and last act, when the entire little fishing community on the harsh North Sea coast of England transforms itself into a vicious mob on the track of Grimes himself, “the borough criminal” who must be caught and destroyed. One of the most terrifying scenes in opera, it is likely to chill audiences once more when the Metropolitan Opera unveils its new staging on Thursday evening. This is the company’s third production since it introduced this compelling work in 1948, just three years after the world premiere at the Sadler’s Wells Opera in London. Before that final manhunt drives Grimes into the sea to find peace at last, many other searches have been under way, among them his own clumsy attempts to find acceptance in a suspicious society that shuts him out because he lives alone, has odd habits, looks a bit wild and talks strangely. “His song alone would sour the beer,” his neighbors comment.

Then there is the prying inquest into the death of his last apprentice, followed by the wretched Grimes’s search for a new young helper that inevitably sends him down a path to fresh tragedy. Ellen Orford and Captain Balstrode, the only two souls in town who harbor a measure of sympathy for Grimes, constantly look for ways to ease his pain, remove barriers and clear up misunderstandings. They fail, and the community continues its relentless pursuit. These people are fisher-folk by nature as well as by trade, and the metaphor turns up in countless guises. The opera’s last questing image is that of an anonymous fisherman scanning the horizon with a telescope as he spots Grimes’s sinking boat. Nobody cares, life goes on, and no doubt a new hunt will soon begin. Continue reading the main story “Peter Grimes,” most would agree, is opera’s classic study of the isolated, misunderstood, rejected individual: a man who is feared, even hated, because he is different and doesn’t fit in. It’s a recurrent theme in Britten’s operas, but he never explored it with quite the explicitness and precision that he does in “Peter Grimes,” nor within a social environment so startlingly realistic.

Advertisement Continue reading the main story Exactly why Peter is so totally rejected by his peers has always been a subject of conjecture, and the answers have changed over the years. “Who is Peter Grimes?” many early critics of the opera asked, and few had definitive answers. Nearly all of them were familiar with the opera’s source, a long poem by George Crabbe, “The Borough,” written in 1810. There Grimes is unequivocally depicted as a villainous brute, “untouched by pity, unstung by remorse and uncorrected by shame,” with “a mind so depraved and flinty.” Britten and his librettist, Montagu Slater, softened the character considerably. Instead of mirroring the dark underside of his society, their Grimes became the victim of its oppression, a man who is “neither a hero nor a villain,” according to Peter Pears, Britten’s lifelong partner and the creator of the role. And so he remains in a cursory reading of the libretto, a rather ordinary figure whose “dreams and fiery visions,” as far as we are told of them, amount to little more than a yearning for bourgeois respectability and social rehabilitation.

This hardly made Grimes a tragic hero in the eyes of some music critics in 1945. “Is there not something shocking,” Desmond Shawe-Taylor wrote in his review of the first performance, “in the attempt to win our sympathies for a character simply because he is an outlaw and an enemy of society — and no more questions asked?” As the opera became more familiar and more frequently performed, this nagging question pretty much evaporated, rendered more or less irrelevant by the sheer evocative power of Britten’s music. It is fascinating to follow the opera’s genesis, from the time Britten first encountered the Crabbe poem in 1941 (he and Pears were living in Southern California at the time, seriously considering permanent immigration to the United States) through the three-year labor on the text and score before that triumphant first night on June 7, 1945. Although Mr. Slater was the nominal librettist and the words are mostly his, the shape of the drama, the characters’ actions and language, were choices entirely made by Britten, a classic example of a strong-willed opera composer fully in charge of the creative process every step of the way.

Clearly Britten meant Grimes to be an ambiguous character; whatever unrevealed facets there might be in his personality and motivations would be supplied by the music, and audiences could draw their own conclusions. There are dozens of examples of how the score tells us exactly what we need to know. One of the most overwhelming arrives when Grimes completely cracks in Act II after Ellen utters the despairing words “Peter! We’ve failed, we’ve failed!” He cries out as if in agony, strikes her and storms off singing, “So be it, and God have mercy upon me!” The words are spare on the page, but as a bone-chilling musical statement, a ferocious cadence descending from high B flat to the octave below, Grimes’s outburst falls like a hammer blow, and the phrase haunts him for the rest of the opera. In one frightening musical stroke Peter seems to become the monster that the community always thought he was. In some circles it has become fashionable to identify Grimes with Britten himself, even to the point of interpreting the fisherman’s hang-ups and his persecution by the community as an allegory of a closeted gay man living at a time when homosexual behavior was a criminal offense in England.

Although he never spoke about it openly, Britten was undoubtedly aware that Grimes might be interpreted in that light, and he removed several phrases of the original text that might be considered homoerotic. Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. Invalid email address. Please re-enter. You must select a newsletter to subscribe to. Sign Up Privacy Policy As a gay young composer unsure of his place in society during those days, “muddled, fed-up and looking for work, longing to be used,” as Britten said in Colorado upon receiving the first Aspen Award in 1964, he would be strongly drawn to a character wounded by alienation, social oppression and professional frustration. And his own experiences inevitably gave his treatment of the subject an added edge, tension and sense of pain. But it seems clear that Britten never intended to write a “gay” opera, even if that had been possible in the England of 1945.

As the critic Andrew Porter once put it, “Peter Grimes” is “a presentation of a general human plight — that of the outsider at odds (for whatever reason) with those around him.” From advance indications, the new Met production, by the British director John Doyle, does not aim to explore any controversial alternative interpretations of the piece, let alone take a deconstructionist tack. Instead it will allow the opera to speak for itself. Mr. Doyle has gained fame here for his boldly minimalist reimaginings of two classic Broadway musicals, “Sweeney Todd” and “Company.” Advertisement Continue reading the main story For “Peter Grimes” he plans to show “the Jekyll and Hyde in all of us when we’re misunderstood and can’t express ourselves,” he said in an interview, by taking a straightforward narrative approach that will, he hopes, keep singing and acting in perfect balance. “It’s an opera without an ounce of fat in it,” he added, “and the characters walk a tightrope all evening.” Anthony Dean Griffey will sing Grimes. His distinguished predecessors have all found different ways to play the role.

Pears was an almost ethereal creature not quite of this world, a dreamer and inarticulate poet who stammered out phrases like “the truth, the pity, and the truth” but could not communicate their meaning. Jon Vickers saw far more rage, violence and conflict tearing inside Grimes in a performance that was positively terrifying in its sheer physical force: too much for Britten, who appeared to hate Vickers’s Grimes. Mr. Griffey, who saw neither tenor in the role, said he feels free to go his own way. There may well have been a lot of Peter Grimes in Britten, but he seldom showed that side of himself to the world. The most striking parallel between the fictional character and the composer was that they both passed their lives in Aldeburgh, the small fishing community on the bleak but strangely beautiful Suffolk coast northeast of London. Crabbe also lived there, and that is the town he wrote so bitterly about in “The Borough.” But it is the one spot in the world where Britten always felt he belonged, and once he returned home from America in 1942, he remained “firmly rooted in this glorious country,” as he later wrote.

I had an opportunity to see for myself how contentedly situated Britten was when, on a two-week assignment in 1967, I reported on Decca’s recording sessions of his parable opera “The Burning Fiery Furnace” for High Fidelity magazine. Seen in retrospect, that may have been one of the happiest periods in Britten’s life. He still had his health and composed prolifically, honors rained down on him, he was enjoying a settled domestic life with Pears at the famous Red House just outside town, and he busily made music everywhere. The Aldeburgh Festival, which he and Pears founded in 1948, was flourishing and had just acquired a state-of-the-art concert hall: the Snape Maltings, a renovated brewery with magnificent acoustics. Recording sessions on the opera proceeded smoothly, a BBC crew had arrived to film a television documentary on Britten’s life and work, and the queen was scheduled to open that year’s festival and dedicate the new hall. Unlike Grimes, Britten seemed to fit easily into the community despite his natural reserve.

The townspeople I met, many of whom could have stepped right out of “Peter Grimes,” might have been slightly in awe of their famous neighbor, but everyone seemed proud he was among them, and they all looked forward to the free preopening concert Britten was giving just for them at the Maltings. Watching Britten at work recording his music was endlessly fascinating. As a conductor he could have coaxed music from a stone. The small children’s chorus clearly adored him and rehearsed their part in the opera until they sang like angels. Pears was having trouble with one tricky ascent to a high C flat until Britten said, “A new edition, immediately,” and penciled in a few changes to accommodate a voice he knew like no other. John Culshaw, the legendary producer of Decca’s Wagner “Ring” cycle, was in charge of the sessions, and Britten worked closely with him to devise the elaborate stereophonic movement heard on the finished disc. No, Britten was hardly Peter Grimes, although he had full knowledge of the darker side of the society he lived in and the darker side of his own nature, and he wrote it all into his music.

Leonard Bernstein once remarked that a piece by Britten may often seem decorative, positive and charming until you really hear it. Then “you become aware of something very dark,” he added. “There are gears that are grinding and not quite meshing, and they make a great pain.” No words better describe “Peter Grimes,” which for Britten turned out to be more of a purge and a letting go than an autobiographical statement. After writing that masterpiece he was free to live with himself and his neighbors in a society where he knew he belonged, and to make his incomparable contribution to 20th-century music. A version of this article appears in print on , on Page AR38 of the New York edition with the headline: In Pursuit of Britten’s Hated Outsider.

Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe Benjamin Britten - Peter Grimes - Opera The Borough, a fishing village, East Coast of Anglia, towards 1830 Synopsis At an inquest into the death of William Spode, apprentice to the fisherman Peter Grimes, coroner Swallow calls various witnesses, including Grimes himself, but the verdict of death in accidental circumstances does not satisfy the bulk of the villagers, who regard Grimes as a violent criminal. Their attitude becomes one of open antagonism when his only friend, the schoolmistress Ellen Orford, collects another apprentice from the workhouse for him. In the pub that evening Grimes claims his new boy, to a reception from his fellow townsfolk that is openly and almost universally hostile. Ellen befriends the new boy, John, but is horrified to find evidence on his body of mistreatment. Challenging Peter with this, she is struck in her turn, and while the pub landlady Auntie and her dubious nieces find some sympathy for her the men of the village march in deputation to Grimes's hut to tackle him.

They find it empty — minutes before the new apprentice had fallen to his death over the cliff edge and Peter had climbed down after him. Grimes now disappears, and the local gossip Mrs Sedley stirs the village worthies once more into action, this time with the entire Borough (minus Ellen and the retired sea captain Balstrode) forming a manhunt. While they chase after him, Grimes, completely unhinged by his experiences, turns up on the shore, to be sent by Balstrode to sink himself and his boat at sea. As the village returns to life the following morning, a report of a ship going down is dismissed as a rumour. Repertoire Note In 1942, Britten, then living in America, came across an article by the novelist E.M.Forster on the Suffolk poet George Crabbe, an encounter that was a decisive factor in Britten’s resolve to return to England for good. It was Crabbe’s poem ‘The Borough’ which subsequently served as the basis for Britten’s first full-scale opera, Peter Grimes, the work that launched him internationally as the leading British composer of his generation and which almost single-handedly effected the renaissance of English opera.

The composer’s self-avowed aim in the opera was ‘to express my awareness of the perpetual struggle of men and women whose livelihood depends on the sea’ and anyone who has visited the coastline around the composer’s home town of Aldeburgh will recognize the uncanny certainty with which Britten has captured that land- and seascape in Peter Grimes. Perhaps more importantly, the opera also introduces many of the fundamental dramatic themes which characterise Britten’s entire operatic output: the individual against the mass, and the corruption of innocence. Reproduced by kind permission of the Britten-Pears Library Moods The Music of Peter Grimes Britten as a composer can be difficult to categorize, as each of his operas is unique in their musical approach to the solving of quite different dramatic problems. He was certainly eclectic, pulling from a broad palette of compositional techniques, forms and styles in order to express himself. Yet his music is easily identifiable because of its strong personality. With regard to Peter Grimes we can readily hear that we’re dealing with a composer with a considerable amount of experience in film music and scoring for radio plays.

There are a number of instances in the opera where one experiences the musical equivalent of a ‘cross-fade’, moving from one scene into another seamlessly with the music constantly thrusting forward. In other words, the physical set changes from one scene to the next while the orchestra bridges the visual gap with music that moves us from one environment to another. This takes some compositional ingenuity. The music from the previous scene must come to a satisfactory close without a sense of completion, and the music for the new scene must enter almost imperceptibly and establish the new ‘feel’ quickly and forcefully. An obvious example of this musical cross-fading occurs at the end of the Prologue, set in the borough’s Moot Hall where an inquest into the death of Grimes’ boy apprentice is being held. After it is found that the boy died in ‘accidental circumstances’, Peter and Ellen the schoolmistress are left alone. Peter complains that he will always be under suspicion by the gossips in the borough, and Ellen tries to comfort him. This is all sung in an unaccompanied recitative for the two voices, singing in distinctly opposite keys (this helps to establish Grimes’ isolation from the village).

As soon as their phrase comes to a quiet close the first violins in the orchestra introduce the First Interlude. The curtain closes on the Moot Hall then opens on the scene outside the Hall, a street by the sea. This orchestral interlude perfectly sets the tone of early morning as the borough awakens to the sounds of seagulls and the calm ocean lapping gently against the dock. This technique is obviously cinematic and occurs a number of other places throughout the opera. The whole score is built in order to constantly remind the audience of Grimes’ “otherness”, his role as an outcast in the village. Britten often gives his title character wide interval leaps in the vocal line, as in the soliloquy “What harbour shelters peace, away from tidal waves, away from storms”. It begins with a leap of a major ninth, seeming to symbolize the wide gap that exists between himself and the rest of society. His first utterance (in the Prologue during the inquest), as he is sworn in to testify, is typical. Mr. Swallow, the mayor and coroner of the town, reads the oath (“I swear to almighty God…”) in quick, short note values.

Peter repeats the oath with longer, more deliberate note values an octave above Swallow’s pitch level. Again the separation between Peter and other beings is emphasized as the two voices begin to overlap each other with complete independence one from the other. When the villagers take shelter from a storm at the local pub, someone begins singing a round in order to perk up their spirits: “Old Joe has gone fishing”. The round is taken up enthusiastically by everyone gathered but when Peter enters the rhythm is ‘wrong’, the timing ‘off’. The tuneful round falls apart. He can’t keep step with any other human being in his acquaintance. His very existence seems to be an affront to the well-ordered universe within which he finds himself. Something else that sets Grimes the character apart from the villagers is that most of his solo utterances are monologues or soliloquies, not true arias. They are closer to the tradition of the great Verdi ariosos from Rigoletto, Falstaff or Otello. They are freer in shape than a closed aria (which has a clear beginning and end) and have far more resonance in the drama than a formal set-piece. That’s not to say that there are not real tunes in the opera.

Some of the choral melodies in particular are quite memorable, from the opening “Oh hang at open doors the net” to “Old Joe has gone fishing” and “Grimes is at his exercise”. Britten, like other great composers of theatre music, is a painter of text and scene. The so-called Sea Interludes from Peter Grimes (often performed by orchestras in concert outside the context of the opera) draw quite specific and literal portraits of the time and place. The first, evoking dawn on a street beside the sea, has already been alluded to. The second interlude moves us from Act I, scene i into the storm which drives the inhabitants to the pub for protection. It is certainly one of the most musically exciting storms in all opera. The third takes us into the scene on the beach with Ellen and the boy; it is Sunday morning and in the music we hear allusions to the ringing of church bells and their overlaying of sonic elements associated with the sea.

These interludes hearken to the influence of Berg’s Wozzeck (one of Britten’s favorite works), similar in length, ‘feel’ and purpose, not just providing for movement from one scene to another but providing an emotional or psychological context for the upcoming scene. All in all, Peter Grimes is a remarkable statement from a young composer just beginning his operatic career.

Question: Who composed the opera ‘Peter Grimes’?
Answer: Benjamin BRITTEN