Britten’s Peter Grimes: Man vs. Society vs. The Sea
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BENJAMIN BRITTEN’S LANDMARK opera Peter Grimes premiered in London on June 7, 1945. It offered a fresh hope for English opera which had really waned significantly since the time of Henry Purcell who lived and died in the 17th century. Opera in England, during the 18th and 19th centuries, had been dominated by the Italian composers, not to mention Mozart, Beethoven and Meyerbeer. Britten brought homegrown opera back to Britain.
Indeed this musical restoration was an important motive for the composer. “One of my chief aims is to try and restore to the musical setting of the English language a brilliance, freedom and vitality that have been curiously rare since the death of Purcell,” wrote Britten of his opera.
Peter Grimes was born, quite by chance, with a throb of nostalgia. During the summer of 1941, Britten had been working in California when he stumbled upon an article about the poet George Crabbe (which happened to have been written by E.M Forster). The composer fell in love with this quintessentially English poet, who lived from 1754 to 1832. In particular, Britten was drawn to the lengthy poem "The Borough," which painted a realistic, sometimes brutal picture of his hometown, the poor fishing-town of Aldeburgh in Suffolk.
The poems inspired Britten’s romantic longing for provincial English life, and in particular for Suffolk where he’d also grown up. It was a moment of revelation. "In a flash I realized two things: that I must write an opera, and where I belonged,” Britten said later. The composer outlined a rough plan and asked Montagu Slater to write the libretto - and the score was finally ready in February 1945.
Having grown up by the sea Britten said, “In writing Peter Grimes, I wanted to express my awareness of the perpetual struggle of men and women whose livelihood depends on the sea - difficult though it is to treat such a universal subject in theatrical form.”
Musically, Peter Grimes captures the majestic and monstrous power of the sea which serves as a backdrop to the tragedy. Britten’s music, which has so often been underrated, offers up everything from catchy melodies, to orchestral interludes, to big choral set pieces, to folksy tunes. Like all great opera, its musical score is intimately tied to the characters and the mises-en-scene, to use a cinematic term, for this work aspires toward tragic epic.
Peter Grimes tells the story of an outcast man - a rough and ready fisherman, a misfit with romantic yearnings - on the outside of his little community by the sea. He is not necessarily an admirable man; he takes his anger out on some of the homeless apprentice boys who work for him, which damns him in the eyes of the borough. In a broader sense, it’s an elemental story of man versus society, a man unable to temper his passions who is a victim of cruel fate.
Grimes is a complex character and has always proved a challenge for tenors, not just musically. Britten originally conceived the role for his longtime partner, the tenor Peter Pears who understood the character as “an ordinary weak person…at odds with the society in which he finds himself, tries to overcome it and, in doing so, offends against the conventional code, is classed by society as a criminal, and destroyed as such.”
Other tenors have emphasized Grimes’ operatic villainy, playing up his brutality. In the 1967 Metropolitan production, the tenor Jon Vickers portrayed Grimes, according to New York Times critic Anthony Tommasini, “as volatile, wild and craggy, one moment lost in vague reveries, the next erupting with brutality.”
Anthony Dean Griffey in the title role of The Met's Peter Grimes - photo Nick Heavican/Metropolitan Opera
The Metropolitan Opera saw fit to introduce a new production in 2008, starring Anthony Dean Griffey, whose nuanced performance and vocal grace offers poetic glimpses of Grimes as a dreamer, albeit one with a dark side. “The tenor doesn’t so much suppress the character’s violent urges as ingest and absorb them, letting the toxic exhalations of his psyche mingle with the sweet breeze of his voice,” wrote Justin Davidson is his review of the production for New York Magazine.
Peter Grimes is undoubtedly a masterpiece. It was a milestone for Benjamin Britten, a commercial success which quickly entered the standard repertoire. (The Met first produced it in 1948.) He followed its success with a series of English operas, including Billy Budd (1951) and The Turn of the Screw (1954) and, later, Death in Venice (1971-1973). Moreover, Peter Grimes was a homecoming for the composer. It led to the establishment of the Aldeburgh Festival in 1948 - another one of Britten’s great musical legacies - which continues to thrive in that little town by the sea.
If you like Benjamin Britten, you might enjoy these free videos from Classical TV’s library:
Britten’s is derived from the ritualism and simplicity of the Noh drama, Sumidagawa. This highly-acclaimed production was staged by the Japanese actor and director Yoshi Oïda for the Aix-en-Provence Festival.
When BBC commissioned this opera of Benjamin Britten, he based the work on Henry James's ghost story about the son of a military family whose conscience will not permit him to remain a soldier. Starring Gerald Finley, with Kent Nagano conducting.
Watch The Metropolitan Opera's Peter Grimes on Classical TV - $9.99 for 72 hours
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