Accepting the first Aspen Award in 1964, Benjamin Britten described how he felt physically lost and aimless in Los Angeles in 1941. But then he read about Peter Grimes in The Borough, an early 19th century poetry collection by George Crabbe and “suddenly realised where I belonged and what I lacked,” he recalled.
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He and his partner, tenor Peter Pears, then had to figure out how to return home right away, in the middle of the war. As conscientious objectors, Britten and Pears gave concerts as part of keeping people’s morale up. All the while, Britten was hard at work on what would be his greatest success, Peter Grimes.
It would be the first new opera to be performed in England at the close of the European side of World War II.
Peter Grimes had its premiere at London’s Sadler’s Wells Theatre on June 7, 1945. Britten and Pears had worked hard with librettist Montagu Slater to make Grimes a far more ambiguous character than the monster of Crabbe’s poem. The main female role, that of Ellen Orford, was written for Joan Cross, who was manager of Sadler’s Wells at the time.
Despite the grimness of London immediately after the war, and the fact that guaranteed crowd-pleasers by Giacomo Puccini — La Bohème and Madama Butterfly — were on in repertory at the house, Peter Grimes did very nicely. The run was sold out before the first performance. And, according to accounts from the time, people kept tossing flowers at the stage throughout the opening performance.
It is, I believe, the most-performed 20th century opera in English. It made Britten’s career, ensured his place in posterity, and, most importantly, opened up the possibility of using opera to convey moral and psychological ambiguity, not just tales of love and betrayal and good versus evil.
Always happy to find a Canadian connection, I noticed that tenor Jon Vickers premiered the title role at Peter Grimes‘ at the opera’s premiere at the new Metropolitan Opera house at Lincoln Center in 1967.
The opera was a favourite of former Canadian Opera Company general director Richard Bradshaw — and Ben Heppner is scheduled to sing the role in the Opera Australia/Houston grand Opera co-production we’ll be seeing in Toronto in October (details here).
To put is as simply as possible, Britten had produced an opera true to his roots — Crabbe’s Borough is Aldeburgh, the village Britten would choose to call home — and that reflected the infinite instances of moral ambiguity that anyone living in extreme times would have to face sooner or later.
Britten insisted he wasn’t thinking of himself or posterity or Englishness but of something at once prosaic and daunting on an existential level.
“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,” he told a BBC interviewer.
In his Aspen Award address, Britten spends a bit of time talking about what we refer to today as authenticity — about writing specifically for a time, place and for specific people instead of for some abstract ideal, impressing someone or for one’s future reputation.
Judging from what I’ve read, there are many people who thought and continue to think that Britten was vain and that, over the course of his career, he let success get between some of his friendships. But in his public utterances and in the most important measure of all, his music, he is a modest, down-to-earth person.
I’ll quote Britten’s Aspen speech at some length:
There are many dangers which hedge around the unfortunate composer: pressure groups which demand true proletarian music, snobs who demand the latest avant-garde tricks; critics who are already trying to document today for tomorrow, to be the first to find the correct pigeon-holed definition. These people are dangerous — not because they are necessarily of any important in themselves, but because they are may make the composer, above all the young composer, self-conscious, and instead of writing his own music, music which springs naturally from his gift and personality, he may be frightened into writing pretentions nonsense or deliberate obscurity. He may find himself writing more and more for machines, in conditions dictated by machines, and not by humanity: or of course he may end by creating grandiose clap-trap when his real talent is for dance tunes of children’s piano pieces. Finding one’s place in society as a composer is not a straightforward job. It is not helped by the attitude towards the composer in some societies. My own, for instance, semi-Socialist Britain, and Conservative Britain before it, has for years treated the musician as a curiosity to be barely tolerated. At a tennis party in my youth I was asked what I was going to do when I grew up — what job I was aiming at. ‘I am going to be a composer,’ I said. ‘Yes, but what else?’ was the answer. the average Briton thought, and still thinks, of the Arts as suspect and expensive luxuries…
(Wouldn’t it be amazing if we could say that Toronto circa 2013 has different attitudes to the arts than London circa 1964. But that’s a discussion for another time.)
What we get from the composer-as-outsider (and the gay man-as-outsider) from a small seaside town on a dreary stretch of windblown, grey coast, is stuff so true to itself that it hits us in the heart and gut with perfectly planted metaphorical punches. And there would be more to come in later operas.
American writer Edmund Wilson described his experience in seeing Peter Grimes the first time in Europe Without Baedecker: “The opera seizes on you, possesses you, keeps you riveted to your seat during the action and keyed up during intermissions, and drops you, purged and exhausted at the end.”
Now that’s entertainment!
Here is a wonderful 1969 production from Aldeburgh considered the definitive interpretation, as conceived by the composer. It was conducted by Britten and starred Pears as Grimes. Ellen Orford is sung by Heather Harper. The accompanists are the London Symphony Orchestra. The chorus is the Ambrosian Oepra Chorus.
I ran across an interesting anecdote from a boy in the audience:
“I was there when the BBC recorded this — It is a mystery that they didn’t use any location shots — It was recorded at Snape Maltings in early spring with North Sea gales howling,” writes Bryan Drake. “I recall eating fish and chips in a beach shelter under the coastguard’s lookout in Aldeburgh as waves broke over it! My father sang the role of Balstrode. The recording had some hitches – Britten at one point lost his temper and threw his conductors stool to the ground, then turned to me, grinned and winked!
I’ve written on Britten’s Sea Interludes, assembled from instrumental passages in the opera before. They are some of the most powerfully evocative tone poems ever written. Here is Paavo Järvi leading the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra in crisply defined interpretations of Dawn, Sunday Morning, Moonlight and Storm:
John Terauds
- Classical Music 101: What Does A Conductor Do? - June 17, 2019
- Classical Music 101 | What Does Period Instrument Mean? - May 6, 2019
- CLASSICAL MUSIC 101 | What Does It Mean To Be In Tune? - April 23, 2019
