Peter Grimes - Opera. A far more detailed digest of the plot accompanies nearly every LP or CD set of the opera; Patricia Howard's Operas of Benjamin Britten presents a full analysis of the interplay of music, drama and characters. There have been four new productions at Covent Garden since then, directed by John Cranko (1953), Elijah Moshinsky (1975), Willy Decker (2004, a co-production with the Thtre Royal de la Monnaie, Brussels) and Deborah Warner (2022, a co-production with the Teatro Real, Madrid, the Teatro dell'Opera, Rome, and the Opra National de Paris). But when the Festival was postponed Koussevitzky generously ceded the premiere to Britain, where it was given on June 7, 1945. In the 13 years since the premiere, Pears had become indelibly identified with the character of Grimes, which he presents here with unique authority and even more nuance and maturity. Find The Metropolitan Opera on Facebook (opens new window), Find The Metropolitan Opera on Twitter (opens new window), Find The Metropolitan Opera on Instagram (opens new window). Peter Grimes . 13. he Royal Opera's new Peter Grimes is a co-production with Madrid's Teatro Real, where it was first seen, and hugely admired, last year. Inevitably doomed. Ethan Mordden considers the odd intervals in Britten's vocal lines as his unique signature, as contrasted with the English national vocal tradition of pious and patriotic chorales and folk songs. Britten and Pears were in Boston to hear him conduct Brittens Sinfonia da Requiem at the start of 1942 when he offered the commission (the piece would eventually be dedicated to the memory of Natalie Koussevitzky, Serges wife). Peter Grimes first appeared as one among a large cast of townsfolk in George Crabbes long epistolary poem from 1810, The Borough. Crabbe (who was also, incidentally, an acclaimed naturalist specializing in the study of beetles) depicts Grimes as a creepy, sadistic misanthrope, untouched by pity, unstung by remorse and uncorrected by shame. He is a tormenter rather than tormented, strikingly different from the central figure of Brittens opera. We are back outside the pub. Among operatic paradigms, two seem especially pertinent. [44][n 4] A production by Graham Vick was staged at the Opra Bastille in 2001, conducted by James Conlon, with Heppner as Grimes. [30] In revivals of the earlier productions, Grimes was played by tenors including Richard Lewis,[31] Richard Cassilly,[32] Robert Tear,[33] Langridge,[34] and Anthony Rolfe Johnson. Four Sea Interludes, consisting of purely orchestral music from the opera, were published separately and are frequently performed as an orchestral suite. Brett, ed. Her duet with the fisherman subtly illustrates their tragically illusory connection: Grimes sings in a key separated by a half-step but briefly, at the end, gravitates into her harmonic field. Slater was no great poet, he was better known for left-wing political journalism, but in some regards, this worked well for Britten and Pears. For Brittens Centenary in 2013, the Aldeburgh Festival, the festival Britten himself founded, staged a production of Grimes on the Beach at Aldeburgh. Keller, Hans: "The Story, the Music Not Excluded," in Philip Brett, ed. Grimes follows anyway, and when the mob arrives, they find the hut empty. [9], During the voyage back to England, Pears continued to work on the scenario of the opera while Britten composed A Ceremony of Carols and Hymn to St Cecilia. The town is dependent on the sea, fishing is how they make their living, but it is a dangerous bargain: they live by the sea and frequently die by it too, as we see with Grimess successive apprentices. [25], Sadler's Wells and its successor, English National Opera, staged new productions in 1963, 1990 and 2009. [45] A production by Richard Jones at La Scala, Milan in 2012 was conducted by Robin Ticciati, with John Graham-Hall as Grimes. The fee was $1,000, and the opera was to be dedicated to the memory of Koussevitzky's wife, who had recently died. Grimes demands a full trial and the right to employ another boy. Indeed the most dynamic images tend to be of the orchestra performing the interludes. As unifying devices, White points out the occasional use of repeated motifs to suggest parallels between characters and plot developments; at its most patent level, the music that began Act I reappears to end Act III, thus not only serving as a formal frame but affirming that nothing has changed, no lesson learned nor redemption earned from all that has transpired (and thus flouting the very essence of tragic drama). He drives John to prepare for the fishing trip but loses himself in memories of his last apprentice and his slow realisation that his dreams of happiness are never to be. Even though Peter Grimes was Britten's first true opera, it arose as he approached the mid-point of his life and reflected many influences and experiences. This led us to make Grimes a character of vision and conflict, the tortured idealist he is, rather than the villain he was in Crabbe, Britten explained. Lilienstein further points to Britten's background in scoring radio dramas in which he had to supply vivid musical prompts for what could not be seen. The town carrier. Far out at sea a boat is sinking. Although both agree that the production lacks forward motion and cumulative impact, overall the EMI set strikes me as a reasonable Grimes, even if it declines to match the more distinctive portrayals of its predecessors. Thus Peter interrupts his frenzied preparations to catch a shoal of fish to serenely dwell on "some kindlier home / Warm in my heart and in a golden calm / Where there'll be no more fear and no more storm;" and between finding the new apprentice's sweater washed up on shore and acting on her discovery Ellen summons a reverie of her childhood "dreams of a silk and satin life." 33 Passacaglia op. Join StageAgent today and unlock amazing theatre resources and opportunities. Whatever Brittens opinion, Vickers would have an enormous impact on how the role came to be sung, his heavier, less sympathetic portrayal now more common than the more poetic Pears. While reissues and further recordings presented typical appealing cover photos, the original album was notably austere, bearing only the title in block letters and the composer's autograph against a plain white background, as if to avoid suggesting a specific meaning or distracting from the gravity of the subject. [40], The American premiere of the work was given in August 1946 at Tanglewood, conducted by Koussevitzky's protg Leonard Bernstein, with William Horne in the title role. For Howard, that aria is the key to the entire work, assuring us of the inarticulate Grimes's essential good, its beauty making the opera a tragedy. She hides as Ellen and Balstrode discuss Grimess return from the sea. Ellen, Auntie and her nieces remain singing despondently of how women have to deal with men. Ellen is sitting on the beach with John, the new apprentice, while the church service begins. At the same time, Peter Grimes is hardly a simple parable of oppressors and oppressed. (And yet, at least as reflected in the LP booklet, the departures from the libretto are few and quite minor, mostly involving single words.) Peter Grimes is a psychological thriller. Even so, it avoids the danger of the BBC conception, whose characters and visuals are so compelling as to threaten to overwhelm the impact of most other productions and to hijack our imaginations with its specific imagery. Rather, judicious camerawork creates further levels of meaning that enhance the audio clues without calling undue attention to itself. (, Seymour, Claire: "Benjamin Britten: Peter Grimes" (, Smith, Eric: "The Recording," notes to the Britten, White, Eric Walter: "Britten's Peter Grimes," notes to the Davis, Zambello, Francesca: "Notes From the Director," notes to the. A sad, lonely, older woman who gossips endlessly in a rather unpleasant fashion. He notes that in Peter Conrad's analysis, "Grimes the boy-killer is the homosexual outcast, looking to Ellen Orford to effect his redemption, even his cure", and that for Philip Brett Britten's operas are "preoccupied with the social experience of homosexuality", but Hepburn concludes that Grimes can be seen in several different ways: In 2020 Rupert Christiansen wrote that Peter Grimes can be labelled a "folk" opera, to the extent that: Christiansen also remarks on "the sharp, Dickensian characterisations" of the various inhabitants of the Borough, showing the composer's exceptional gift for setting the English language to music. Koussevitzky arranged for the commissioning of the opera by the musical foundation he had recently set up. Shawe-Taylor similarly praised the naturalness of the music and the singers' "unusual happiness of singing a text that did not sound like a translation." Yet perhaps that was Montagu's and Britten's intention to impugn the inquest as a callous formality, and all the characters but Grimes and Ellen as too focused on the rigors of daily survival to be able to indulge in the refinement of poetry. Hes far from a hero, not even close, but hes no pantomime villain either. Grimes climbs down after him. Another major element is that of nature, the sea ever-present in the drama and no more so than in the incredible interludes (music that is frequently heard in concert halls as the 4 Sea Interludes). Peter Grimes, Op. A week before the premiere, Britten conducted in concert four of the interludes (ordered 1-3-5-2 so as to form a logical progression, opening with a languid depiction of dawn and ending with powerful storm music). [41] In The Boston Globe, Cyrus Durgin praised the young Bernstein for bringing out "the drive and dissonance of an opera which is far from 'tuneful' in the conventional sense" and rated the work "a step forward for opera in this country, and anywhere for that matter". Peter Grimes. The more vicious the society, the more vicious the individual. Later that night, the storm is raging, and we are inside the Boar where much of the community is holed up. The men enter to find the hut deserted. Of its over two dozen studio recordings (compared to four for the opera itself), one in particular has special emotional resonance Leonard Bernstein opened his final concert (DG, 1990) with the Four Sea Interludes, thus coming full circle from having led the American premiere of the opera 45 years earlier near the start of his career. Keene leaves her to her midnight ravings. His pleas are ignored and the court is cleared. What attracted him was the potent dynamic of "the individual against the crowd, with ironic overtones for our own situation," the composer wrote. Speaking of critics, two reviews in Fanfare serve to illustrate the extremely subjective nature of esthetic judgments (and reinforce my hesitancy to enter that fray): Ivan Katz called out Johnson's singing as "passionless," "characterless, without distinction or personality" and "devoid of feeling," whereas Marc Mandel in a later issue of the same publication found him to be "sympathetic," "movingly human" with "painstaking (and painful) delineation of Grimes's moment-to-moment mood swings" and "frighteningly unique." [n 2] Slater resented this, and insisted on publishing his original version in 1946, as Peter Grimes and Other Poems. Ivan Katz concludes: "There are as many views of the opera and the motivations of its characters as there are Freudians, Jungians and quacks, and the expression of one view will anger those who hold with equal heat the contrary position" (and then Katz himself proceeds to draw an extended parallel with the Parsifal legend, of all things). When the mob reaches the hut Grimes and the apprentice are not to be found, so they disperse, curious and suspicious. A boy apprenticed to the fisherman Peter Grimes has died at sea. She is horrified to find a bruise on his neck. Following the August 1946 American premiere, led by a budding Leonard Bernstein, Koussevitzky proclaimed it the greatest opera since Carmen, even though Britten scorned the presentation as an unprofessional student production (as indeed it unabashedly was, with all roles taken by students at the Berkshire Music Center). Ellen Orford, the local schoolteacher, assures Peter that with her help the future will be better. Featuring some of the most powerful and evocative music ever written, Britten 's Peter Grimes paints a vivid picture of a small community's descent into suspicion, gossip and mob mentality in the face of a tragedy. A single incident often provides the inspiration for a song. As a storm brews, Balstrode tries to dissuade Grimes from a course he fears will result in another tragedy, but Grimes is determined to get rich, marry Ellen and thus silence the Borough gossips. [50] Britten conducted the London Philharmonic Orchestra in the first performance of the suite at the Cheltenham Festival, a week after the opera's premiere; the London premiere was at the Proms, in August 1945,[51] and the five interludes were conducted by Sir Thomas Beecham in October 1945. Five of them have been published separately. Slater was a journalist, novelist and playwright. Grimes suddenly enters ("Now the Great Bear and Pleiades"), and his wild appearance unites almost the entire community in their fear and mistrust of his "temper". Britten homed in on Peter Grimes as the prospective opera's central character (he appears in just one section of Crabbe's poem). On his own, Britten became best known for several song cycles that attained a reputation for the sensitivity with which he set the English language to music. At once the protagonist and the anti-hero, Grimes is gruff and unpopular, but the character is crafted with a certain degree of ambiguity so the audience constantly questions whether he is truly a good or bad person. The borough, convinced that Grimes is a murderer, condemns him. Also addicted to Laudanum (mild opium). [18], Tyrone Guthrie, the general administrator of the Sadler's Wells company, appointed his assistant Eric Crozier to stage the piece, and the latter, together with Britten, made adjustments to the libretto during rehearsals when Slater's text proved unsuitable for singability or clarity. On the most basic level, Britten clearly signals characterization through associated music: simple scales to depict Ellen's moral rectitude, a sinuous phrase to underline Mrs. Sedley's suspicions, and Peter and Ellen at first singing in keys a half-tone apart as though to suggest distance and even a degree of friction, and then melding together so as to imply the chance of a harmonious future. Lamenting the world-wide demise of the genre since Turandot 20 years before, Shaw-Taylor proclaimed Peter Grimes an "all-conquering" work and "a fresh hope, not only for English, but for European opera." In Pears's words, Grimes is "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. Tags. Peter Pears originated the role of Grimes, but the Canadian tenor Jon Vickers would soon become one of the worlds leading performers of it. Balstrode thinks Grimes foolish, telling him to marry Ellen at once: but it is all for nought. Ellen recognises it as one she had knitted for John. Pears was already 35 when he created the role, and a quarter-century later his Grimes takes on added poignancy, as he clearly looks way too old to achieve his dream and thus seems doomed to fail. Koussevitzky commissioned the project, to be dedicated to his late wife, and provided a much-needed monetary advance, with the understanding that he would give the world premiere at his Berkshire Music Festival, with British performances to follow. The town apothecary (basically a medical quack). [41] The Metropolitan Opera first staged the piece in 1948 with Frederick Jagel as Grimes. (Although broadly couched, all such comments clearly can refer only to serious opera, as they deliberately (and perhaps snobbishly) ignore the dazzling brilliance and unflagging popularity of both lyrics and music of the Gilbert and Sullivan canon.) The different interpretation of the title character is evident from the very outset, as Grimes takes the oath at his inquest Pears is barely audible. He warns John to be careful climbing down the cliff to the boat. With nothing to be doing, the mob disperses into the night. Grimes has returned to his home with John and is fuming. Character description, analysis and casting breakdown for Bob Boles from Peter Grimes. ", or "Now the Great Bear and Pleiades". Peter Grimes is a tragedy from start to finish, but it's also a masterpiece of musical theatre. A retired merchant skipper who stands apart from the community in attempting to understand and help Grimes. I've always. Here he alluded explicitly to the scorn he and Pears faced as conscientious objectors upon returning to Englandbut also, implicitly, to their outsider status as a couple. The townsfolk sing of their daily grind with and against the sea. Ellen Orford provides a counterpoint to the harshness of the environment and town, a schoolmistress spinster who cares for Grimes. Gain full access to show guides, character breakdowns, auditions, monologues and more! While listening to an audio-only opera recording can (and, ideally, should) unleash one's personal imagination, even the best can preserve only part of the intended impact, and so perhaps the future of recorded opera properly lies in videos of live renditions. A curious note: the booklet to the original CD issue lists every vocalist having even a single solo line (e.g., 2nd Fisherman, 6th Burgess) and even the apprentice (whose sole audible contribution is an attenuated death-plunging yelp) but omits mention of any instrumentalist other than the player of Hobson's drum, although admittedly that does accurately reflect the weighting we assign to the predominance of singing to the exclusion of most other artists who contribute to the impression of an opera. Even so, Paul Reed hails the score as richly lyrical: "Its easy-going melodies appear as refreshing and seemingly spontaneous as anything written in his long career." Grimes calls for help to haul his boat ashore, but is shunned by most of the community. When the final curtain fell on June 7, 1945, at the old Sadlers Wells theater in London, silence followed by shouting filled the hall. At the hut, Grimes impatiently demands John changes out of his Sunday clothes and into fisherman's gear. He wrote it in a four-beat, half-rhymed, simply worded verse which expands at moments of heightened intensity into more formal verse-patterns and a richer vocabulary: the latter qualities are clearly recognisable in such climactic arias as Ellen's "Let her among you without fault cast the first stone", or "Embroidery in childhood was a luxury of idleness", and in Peter's "What harbour shelters peace? Taken to the other extreme, several of Grimes's passages are virtually unaccompanied, so as not to distract focus from his aspirations and delusions, and Balstrode's final directive is spoken dispassionately over a silent background, as if to ward off any need for elucidation of harsh reality. The townsfolk make it clear that they think Grimes is guilty and deserves punishment. A few nights later, a dance is in full swing at the Moot Hall. Peter, in a frenzy, hits out at her and rushes off with the boy. Captain Balstrode. Balstrode attempts to calm the place, particularly the drunk Bob Boles, who is trying to have his way with one of Aunties nieces. 33, is an opera in three acts by Benjamin Britten, with a libretto by Montagu Slater based on the section "Peter Grimes", in George Crabbe's long narrative poem The Borough. As the court is cleared, Ellen Orford, the schoolmistress whom Grimes wishes to marry as soon as he gains the Borough's respect, attempts to comfort Grimes as he rages against what he sees as the community's unwillingness to give him a true second chance. Grimes returns from fishing; only Captain Balstrode, a retired naval officer, and Ned Keene, the local apothecary, are willing to help bring in his boat. What attracted him was the potent dynamic of the individual against the crowd, with ironic overtones for our own situation, the composer wrote. After completing his formal education, Britten expanded the scope of his practical knowledge by working at the General Post Office Film Unit, where he produced background soundtrack music for a wide variety of moods, using diverse ensembles. Britten himself explained: As a general matter, Matthew Boyden notes that Britten shunned lushness he especially despised Puccini and that his sense of elemental austerity reflects an essentially pessimistic view of humanity. A pupil of Pears, Rolfe Johnson inherited his mentor's mantle of sweet, intelligent sensitivity, although his voice is far more mellow, creating a less assertive and more suave characterization, nicely paired here with Lott's rich, dreamy lyricism. He further expressed hope that "the return of the rough rhyme [e.g., using assonance (repeated vowels, as in "No more storm") and consonantal rhyme (repeated consonants, as in "Would you stop our storm for such as you")] is likely to help the return of poetic drama to the English stage.". Conducted by Mark Elder, directed by Deborah Warner . While he was an early advocate of Britten's work and a fellow pacifist, conductor Reginald Goodall hardly lived up to his surname. For Howard, though, the trial scene went too far, sacrificing spontaneity for "the turgid diction and ponderous sentence lengths of the choruses" and, indeed, some of the phrasing throughout the libretto does seem unduly strained. Peter Grimes is a rare exception. The Grimes of Crabbe's poem is an outright bully, "untouched by pity, unstung by remorse and uncorrected by shame". Britten's compositions from his years there include the song cycle Les Illuminations (1940), the Sinfonia da Requiem (1940) and his operetta, Paul Bunyan (1941). [57], After the American premiere, the critic Douglas Watt opened his review "Peter Grimes has greatness", and called the work "an opera for our time, brilliantly conceived and executed", with the "breathtaking pleasure" of the music matched by "the strong and lovely libretto", though he predicted that if an impresario succeeded in staging the piece on Broadway "it will be met with much intolerance and displeasure by audiences unprepared for its surprising magnificences". Peter Grimes . With the vast publicity surrounding release of the first installment of the Solti-led Decca Ring, producer John Culshaw drew audiophiles' attention to the facility of stereo technology to create in the studio a convincing spatial image of an actual staged opera performance (at least from an idealized center-orchestra seat). If you are using Internet Explorer or other browsers you may encounter problems with certain sections of our website. When Peter refuses, she tells him that their attempt to make a new start has failed. Peter Grimes vividly shows the decline from justice to vengeance. The coroner, Mr Swallow, determines the boy's death to be accidental so Grimes avoids a criminal trial. I gratefully acknowledge the following sources for the facts, quotations and attributions in this article, while accepting credit (and, alas, blame) for the other observations, assertions and opinions: "Gesture and Sympathy in the 1969 BBC Production of Benjamin Britten's 'Peter Grimes'", Blyth, Alan: review of the EMI reissue of the 1948. Thus freed from the need to constantly underscore the action with suggestive music, Britten instead uses his orchestra economically to complement the singing with suggestions of the characters' thinking. Day breaks and the Borough goes about its business. (Indeed, the operadis site lists 19 of Peter Grimes so far.) Grimes enters needing a new apprentice. In a probing analysis, Rosemary Harvey traces how camera angles and closeups intensify the dramatic and emotional impact by creating physical and psychological vantage points that are not possible from the fixed audience view in stage productions. Shortly after the premiere, Britten had expressed a wish that the occasion would transcend Sadler's Wells or even himself as an omen for the future of English opera and hoped that others would take the plunge. He's far from a hero, not even close, but he's no pantomime villain either. His former apprentice died at sea, and although Grimes was cleared of any wrongdoing, the village still believes that he was responsible and are ever suspicious of him. Scene 1 Outside the Moot Hall, a few days later. He drags him off into the night. Britten saw a 1942 production of George Gershwin's 1935 Porgy and Bess, which revolved around the social networks in a fishing community repressed by authority and used a storm as a powerful musical device with dramatic overtones. He is silent, unable to communicate with the adults around him. The first serious challenge to the monopoly of the Pears/Britten Grimes arose in 1967 with a new Met production starring Jon Vickers and led by Colin Davis. The credits make no mention of augmentation of the Sinfonia's standard 40 or so musicians, but it sounds far more like a full orchestra than a pit band, both lending a sense of intimacy to the proceedings where appropriate and conjuring riveting power in the storm interlude and other potent episodes, enriched by a deep and atmospheric recording. Character description, analysis and casting breakdown for Hobson from Peter Grimes. Descending further and further into madness as the mob approaches, Grimes sails his boat out to sea to sink it, never to return. [28] Grimes was played by, respectively, Ronald Dowd, Philip Langridge and Stuart Skelton; the conductors were Charles Mackerras, David Atherton and Edward Gardner. Peter Grimes - Opera. Britten would return more overtly to pacifist themes later in his life culminating in his great War Requiem for the rededication of Coventry Cathedral. Peter Pears, Claire Watson, Chorus and Orchestra of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, conducted by Benjamin Britten (Decca/London, 1958) ~ An artistic and commercial triumph, this still remains the model against which every subsequent recording of Peter Grimes is compared and often found wanting. The same, two days later, night in the Borough ("Moonlight" in the Sea Interludes). [13] By the time Britten and Pears returned home in April 1943 the shape of the work was not greatly different from the final version, and to turn the scenario into a libretto Britten recruited an old friend, the writer Montagu Slater.[14]. It is about a community in a small fishing village in the east of England in the 1820s. There are plenty of Grimeses around still, I think! No one could have expected that Brittens new work would single-handedly restore prestige to English opera. Peter Grimes takes place in a supposedly generalised The Borough, a small fishing town on the East Coast [of England], but in reality, it is set specifically in Aldeburgh, a real town that Britten grew up near and later lived by. He noted that the five-stress lines used by Crabbe had been traditional in English poetic drama but that their rotundity was "out of key with contemporary modes of thought and speech," as opposed to four-stress lines that have a "conversational rhythm" and "sense of naturalness." Most of the town is at church, but Ellen sits with John, Grimess apprentice. Perhaps the key takeaway here is that no masterpiece can properly be limited to a single interpretation, not even that of its creators, and that often it takes others to mine further, and potentially richer, veins. Take a look at images from our 2014 production of Britten's Peter Grimes with Stuart Skelton in the title role and featuring some of the talented ENO cast and chorus members. (The sixth interlude, not included in the concert version of the Sea Interludes, covers the change of scene. It didn't he completed the score on February 10, 1945, three months before V-E Day. A local review by Scott Goddard proclaimed it "an astonishing work," praised the singing and acting as "intensely moving" but found the music "fascinating as much when it fails" (which he declined to elaborate). A performance of Peter Grimes at the ENOs London Coliseum is roughly 3hrs 20 mins with two intervals. Grimes seems even less appealing as a suitably complex opera subject. Britten's vision for his protagonist (exemplified, of course, by Pears) was: "not too heavy, which makes the character simply a sadist, nor too lyric, which makes it a boring opera about a poet-manqu but [he] should have elements of both."