Peter Grimes: how the Second World War spawned Britten's moral masterpiece

Launched barely a month after V-E Day in June 1945, Benjamin Britten’s first full-blown opera is a work of intense moral urgency as well as one of high drama and musical genius, infused with deep human concerns raised by the war and its aftermath. As the critic Edmund Wilson wrote, Peter Grimes speaks “to the blind anguish, the hateful rancours and the will to destruction of these horrible years”. Once regarded as forbiddingly modern in musical idiom, it enjoys great box office success today, and is established globally as a cornerstone of the 20th-century repertory.

Plot

In a Suffolk village (modelled on, but never named as, Aldeburgh), the fisherman Peter Grimes – a lonely and tortured individual – is ostracised after his boy apprentice dies in mysterious but possibly accidental circumstances. The sympathetic schoolteacher Ellen Orford and retired skipper Balstrode try to help Grimes when he takes on a new apprentice, but when the latter vanishes too, the village assembles a mob to lynch him. Ellen and Balstrode find Grimes, now deranged, and instruct him to sail his boat out to sea and sink it.

Background

In 1941, Britten, then 27, was in California with his new partner Peter Pears when he stumbled on an essay by E M Forster about the 19th-century poet George Crabbe, who had lived in Aldeburgh. The essay made Britten homesick for his native Suffolk and he decided to return to England, where he began to compose an opera based on an episode in Crabbe’s narrative poem The Borough. A Communist playwright called Montagu Slater was engaged to write the libretto, and the American-based conductor Serge Koussevitzky commissioned the work for his festival in Tanglewood, near Boston.

When the war led to the festival’s cancellation, the honour of the first performances passed to Sadler’s Wells.

Commentary

Mostly composed in Britten’s house near the Suffolk coast, this is an opera resonating with the sounds of the sea – the vivid orchestral interludes, painting the sea’s various moods, later became a popular concert piece – and rich in its depiction of a tight-knit, inward-looking fishing community. The score is remarkable at several levels. Peter Grimes can be labelled a “folk” opera, inasmuch as it embodies a distinctly English culture in the same way that Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov embodies Russianness and Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess is shaped by the African American experience – something most evident in all three operas through the magnificent choruses that incorporate traditional tunes.

Peter Grimes is also marked by the sharp, Dickensian characterisations of village types – the priggish snob Mrs Sedley, the Methodist preacher Bob Boles, the easy-going chancer Ned Keene, the publican Auntie and her two silly chattering “nieces” – all these and others are depicted through sung dialogue in which Britten shows a talent (unmatched since Purcell) for setting the English language with expressive inflection that never distorts or obscures sense.

None of the arias for Grimes or Ellen Orford is an obvious showpiece: instead, they emerge as spontaneously lyrical outbursts that flow in and out of the action, as in Grimes’s visionary meditation on the calm after the storm, “Now the Great Bear and the Pleiades”, and Ellen Orford’s incandescent plea for tolerance, “Let her among you without fault”. Other highlights include a rapturous quartet for female voices, emulating the shimmeringly celestial effect of the trio at the end of Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier (although Strauss was not a composer Britten admired); and the brilliantly witty scenes set in a noisy pub, inspired by similar episodes in Berg’s Wozzeck.

But Britten’s timing is consummate throughout – there’s not a flaccid or redundant patch in the entire opera, and the drama rises to a stunning climax as the lynch mob gathers, Grimes goes mad and, after a brief spoken exchange with Ellen Orford and Balstrode, accepts that he must kill himself. The opera ends as the rhythms of the village’s daily routine quietly resume.

Why it matters now

Beyond its purely musical qualities, this is an opera that poses questions still burningly relevant today. How much licence can society grant to a nonconforming outsider who is potentially violent? At what point does compassion become a culpable failure to take responsibility? Its answers are disturbingly ambiguous: whether or not Grimes is what we would now call a child abuser, there are no clear rights or wrongs in his case.

Recordings

Although Britten’s absolute mastery of his own score gives his 1958 recording with Peter Pears (Decca) unique authority, for sheer beauty of tone Pears is surpassed by Anthony Rolfe Johnson on a fine recording conducted by Bernard Haitink with Felicity Lott as the most touching of Ellen Orfords and Thomas Allen a redoubtable Balstrode (EMI Classics). Another safe recommendation is the version conducted by Richard Hickox (Chandos), with Philip Langridge vividly moving in the title role.

Three fascinating DVD performances present different approaches. One is a film of a “site-specific” performance given on Aldeburgh beach by Opera North (Arthaus); another is copied from a 1981 BBC transmission from Covent Garden and, although the result is inferior in sound and picture quality, it has great value for showing the immensely powerful and disturbing performance of the Canadian tenor Jon Vickers in the title role (an emotionally raw interpretation that Britten is said to have deplored); a third is a production staged in 2012 at La Scala, Milan (Opus Arte), directed by Richard Jones and located in a modern environment reminiscent of gritty television series such as Broadchurch.