- Opera in 3 acts and a Prologue
- Composer: Benjamin Britten
- Libretto: Montagu Slater, derived from the poem of George Crabbe
- First performed: Sadler’s Wells, London, UK, 7th June 1945
Characters
| PETER GRIMES, a fisherman | Tenor | Peter Pears |
| BOY (JOHN), his apprentice | Silent | Leonard Thompson |
| ELLEN ORFORD, a widow, schoolmistress of the Borough | Soprano | Joan Cross |
| CAPTAIN BALSTRODE, retired merchant skipper | Baritone | Roderick Jones |
| AUNTIE, landlady of “The Boar” | Contralto | Edith Coates |
| NIECE 1 NIECE 2, main attractions of “The Boar” | Sopranos | Blanche Turner Minnie Bower |
| BOB BOLES, fisherman and Methodist | Tenor | Morgan Jones |
| SWALLOW, a lawyer | Bass | Owen Brannigan |
| Mrs. (NABOB) SEDLEY, a rentier widow of an East India Company’s factor | Mezzo | Valetta Jacopi |
| Rev. HORACE ADAMS, the rector | Tenor | Tom Culbert |
| NED KEENE, apothecary and quack | Baritone | Edmund Donlevy |
| Dr. THORP | Silent | Sasa Machov |
| HOBSON, carrier | Bass | Frank Vaughan |
| Chorus of townspeople and fisherfolk |
Setting: The Borough, a small fishing town on the East Coast.
Time: Towards 1830
Benjamin Britten (1913–76), born exactly 100 years after Verdi and Wagner, is considered Britain’s most important opera composer since Purcell, three centuries before. Opera, he declared, was “the most powerful medium of musical communication that he knew”. His major operas – Peter Grimes (1945), Billy Budd (1951), The Turn of the Screw (1954), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1960), and Death in Venice (1973) – are among the very few since Strauss, Puccini, and Janáček to have entered the international repertoire. He was a household name in Britain. (Listen, for instance, to Flanders & Swann or Dudley Moore’s parodies.) To give an idea of his international standing, I will quote the French musicologist Kaminski:
“He was an eclectic composer, both supremely original and unafraid to draw from the influences of his time, spanning from Debussy, Puccini, and the Russians to the serialists (although he never strictly adhered to their methods). However, he managed to meld these influences into a distinctive musical language, thanks to his exceptional technical training. His operas combined a remarkable understanding of vocal expression with a mastery of English prosody, making him one of the few post-1950 composers to create a convincing vocal style.
“His extraordinary ability as a colourist enhanced the smaller instrumental ensembles he favoured, and his keen dramatic instinct allowed him to choose libretto subjects wisely from a wide array of sources, with very few exceptions. He could compose wonderfully for both children and amateur performers without compromising the integrity of his musical language. In addition to his substantial body of work in other musical domains, he remains the pre-eminent lyrical composer of the latter half of the 20th century.”
Piotr Kaminski, Mille et un opéras, Paris : Fayard, 2003
Peter Grimes, a melancholy work, is his first opera [FN1], and, some argue, his best. In the opinion of John Bridcut (The Faber Pocket Guide to Britten), it is “possibly the greatest British opera ever written, and … certainly one of the world’s enduring operatic landmarks of the twentieth century… It shocks, it terrifies and it moves us, as the masterpiece it is.” For my part, I prefer Billy Budd and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, both of which I have seen live, and which are less bleak operas, but Grimes is undeniably powerful.
[FN1] Not counting the operetta Paul Bunyan (1941), performed at Columbia University, USA.
The opera is based on George Crabbe’s poem The Borough, set on the East Coast where Britten was born. It concerns a fisherman suspected of child abuse and murder, and his eventual death. It was, the composer said, “a subject very close to my heart – the struggle of the individual against the masses. The more vicious the society, the more vicious the individual.”
Peter Grimes premiered less than a month after the end of World War II in Europe, and featured Britten’s partner, tenor Peter Pears, in the title rôle. It marked the reopening of Sadler’s Wells Theatre, which had had been used since September 1940 as a refuge for people made homeless by air-raids.
The opening night was an important occasion, attended by the likes of Vaughan Williams, William Walton, and Yehudi Menuhin. Despite some misgivings, Grimes was an enormous success. Beverley Baxter (Evening Standard) called Peter Grimes “an opera of transcendent skill and grim beauty. This new work Peter Grimes has an integrity, a sincerity and an arrogance which made the hearing of it one of the most exciting events of years.” The conductor Koussevitzky even thought it was the greatest opera since Bizet‘s Carmen, 70 years before. As for its popularity, Bridcut relates with relish the story of a bus conductor who passed the theatre: “Any more for Peter Grimes, the sadistic fisherman?”
The most famous pieces from Peter Grimes are the Sea Interludes, four of six in the opera, which depict the North Sea, storms, Sunday morning (with peals of bells, à la coronation scene from Boris Godunov), evening, and fog. The opera is haunted with the cries of gulls, the wind of the Suffolk coast, and the glint of light on the waves. But the pieces also evoke loneliness – the soul of Peter Grimes, fisherman and social pariah.
The opera opens with an inquest. Grimes has returned from a fishing voyage with a dead apprentice. (In Crabbe’s poem, The Borough, the apprentice is one of three to die under Grimes’s ‘care’; in the opera, this is the first.) The coroner returns an open verdict, but advises Grimes not to hire another apprentice, and the townsfolk shun Grimes. They hate him as much because he is an outsider (“Who holds himself apart / Lets his pride rise. / Him who despises us / We’ll destroy…”) as because they think he is a murderer. The only one who believes in Grimes’s innocence, or at least that he can be redeemed, is the schoolteacher, Ellen Orford, who loves him. But her hopes are misplaced, because Grimes, while a dreamer, is violent and prone to fits of rage. Persecuted by the villagers, he takes out his frustrations on the boy, who falls, accidentally, off a cliff, and dies. At the end, Grimes, half-mad, sails his boat into the sea, and sinks it. The fishing community resumes its everyday life.
Grimes is a drama about people; it is never symbolic or obscure or pretentious, as so much 20th-century German opera is. In its realism and bleakness, it’s almost like a Thomas Hardy novel. The little Suffolk fishing village feels real in its petty prides and hostilities: the respectable crime-obsessed old lady, like an opium-addicted Miss Marple; the drunken Methodist preacher; the blowsy publican with her two ‘nieces’; and the gruff old captain. Even the carter who refuses to pick up Grimes’s next apprentice. How English, too, is the social commentary: a hidebound community closes ranks against people who do not fit!
In Peter Pears’s opinion, Grimes was “neither a hero nor a villain”, but “an ordinary, weak person who, being 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. There are plenty of Grimeses around still, I think!” (Understandably, Grimes has come to be seen as a symbol for homosexuality; being gay was illegal in the UK until 1967.)
Critics commented on the work’s unconventionality: it was an opera without love-duet or hero, both The Daily Telegraph (8 June) and The Evening Standard (9 June) observed. Some contemporary reviewers found the music too harsh. Baxter (Evening Standard) found the first act “so harsh and relentless that the ear cries for mercy, but Britten’s retort is: ‘Did the people show mercy to Peter Grimes?’ In the whole of the long first act there is hardly a touch of beauty in the sore, and none at all of tenderness. The harmonies are modern and discordant, as if the composer were some kind of robot with a hatred of mankind. “There is no bodily pleasure in it,’ said a well-known operatic tenor to me as he went out for a breath of air. In the next two acts the cruelty remains, but beauty begins to emerge fitfully, reluctantly, and one’s senses become stirred to unusual excitement.”
But despite its grim story, Peter Grimes is at its heart a traditional opera, far more than anything by Busoni or Hindemith. Britten considered Verdi his operatic model (in his opinion, Verdi had “discovered the secret of perfection”), and Verdi would have recognised Peter Grimes as opera, and Grimes himself as a distant descendant of Rigoletto. It is through-composed, true, but in the way that Verdi’s last two operas, Otello (1887) and Falstaff (1893), are. While much of the opera is melodic arioso, one can identify arias, duets, and ensembles (and good ones, at that). It is also blessedly tonal for the most part; there are chromatic orchestral passages, and the Prologue and Mrs. Sedley’s scene in Act III, for instance, are in no fixed key, but Britten is never a slave to theory or technique; he uses chromaticism to achieve an effect.
William Glock (The Observer, 24 June), for one, recognised that. Writing a fortnight after its opening, he poked fun at claims that Grimes was “a fierce and challenging work. What spoiled babies we have become! I should have thought that the most noticeable thing about Britten was his gift for making statements of undoubted originality in terms which everyone could understand. There are no technical advances in Peter Grimes. It is, in fact, an entertainment of the highest class, in which broad inspirations are worked out with an entirely traditional sagacity.”
Throughout Grimes, Britten shows an instinct for theatre and dramatic effectiveness that just about every other opera I’ve heard lately has lacked. Listen, for instance, to the end of Act I, where Grimes takes charge of his new apprentice, to the horror of the villagers (“Home? Do you call that home?”). The first scene of Act II is masterly. A church litany offers ironic commentary on Ellen’s discovery that Grimes is beating his new apprentice (“As it was in the beginning is now…”). “Such simple effects belong to genius; and despite a few derivative phrases, I think that this whole scene would stand its ground anywhere,” Glock (The Observer, 10 June) remarked. There follows a superb crowd scene: the neighbours, who have watched Grimes strike Ellen, gossip (“Grimes is at his exercise”), then, whipped up to excitement, march on Grimes’s cottage, to the beat of a drum. The scene ends with a melancholy women’s quartet (“From the gutter, why should we…”). Act III contains a powerful mob scene (“Who holds himself apart”), which ends with the villagers facing the audience and shouting “Peter Grimes!”. The opera finishes with what is effectively a mad scene for tenor (“Grimes! Grimes!”), although more in the line of Boris Godunov than Lucia di Lammermoor. Baxter found the scene “the best of the whole work … where Peter, hunted like a rat, sings of what might have been. In the distance there is the fog-horn, and the manner in which the composer brings the singer’s voice into unison with the horn is intensely dramatic. And I am still haunted by the deep chords of the orchestra, as if the sea were waiting for its human sacrifice, knowing that it could afford to wait.”
Peter Grimes was soon performed throughout Europe and America; it was the first English opera ever performed at the Paris Opéra and at La Monnaie in Brussels.
“History,” Dent remarked, “records no first opera by any composer, except [Humperdinck’s] Hänsel und Gretel, which met with such an immediate and incontestable success, and no British composer except Balfe had ever achieved such a conquest of Europe… When a modern English opera, and that, too, a work in the most uncompromisingly modern style, can stand up at the box office to Carmen and Trovatore, Rosenkavalier and Turandot, we may justly feel that a new chapter in English operatic history has really begun.”
Recordings
Listen to: Peter Pears (Peter Grimes) and Claire Watson (Ellen Orford), with the Covent Garden Orchestra and Chorus, conducted by Benjamin Britten; London, 1958. Decca.
Watch: Peter Pears (Peter Grimes) and Heather Harper (Ellen Orford), with the London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Benjamin Britten. BBC, 1969.
Works consulted
- F. B., “‘Peter Grimes’ Opera”, The Daily Telegraph, 8 June 1945
- Beverley Baxter, “One Man Against the Mob”, Evening Standard, 9 June 1945
- W. McN., “Peter Grimes”, The Guardian, 9 June 1945
- William Glock, The Observer, 10 and 24 June 1945
- Edward J. Dent, Opera, 1940, revised 1949, Penguin, 1953
- John Bridcut, The Faber Pocket Guide to Britten, London: Faber & Faber, 2010
- See also Phil’s Opera World
The Opera Scribe 
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