Peter Grimes: the opera that broke England’s duck

In 1904, the German music critic Oscar Schmitz notoriously declared that Great Britain was “the land without music”. These days, many would rightly contradict that – think Stanford and Parry, think Elgar, Vaughan Williams, Holst and Bax – but it might be harder to dispute England’s track record when it came to homegrown opera. That’s not to say opera didn’t happen – privately run companies put on everything from Mozart to Verdi and Wagner – but apart from perennial favourites Gilbert and Sullivan, nothing written by a British composer in the English language seemed to get taken up overseas.

Part of the reason lies in the aptitudes and predilections of front runners. The inherently un-dramatic Parry preferred oratorio, as did Elgar. Stanford had a certain success as an opera composer, but the inspiration at the heart of works such as Shamus O’Brien and The Travelling Companion feels thin. Of the late-Victorians, Ethel Smyth was the most operatically inclined. Composer of the first opera by a woman to be mounted at New York’s Metropolitan Opera – Der Wald, written in German and yet to receive a recording – she hit form with The Wreckers, a blood-and-thunder three-acter set in Cornwall. But Smyth could be her own worst enemy. Stubborn and prone to badgering, she was a tricky collaborator whose quirky ideas frequently failed to come off.

Of the younger generation, Bax showed no interest in opera while Delius’s off-kilter dramatic instincts made for heavy going. Holst and Vaughan Williams both gave it their best shot, but the former chose his subjects poorly and the latter never found a commercial champion despite the appeal of Hugh the Drover, Sir John in Love and The Poisoned Kiss. As a result, when Benjamin Britten started to become known in the 1930s, he had the field pretty much to himself.

The Rise of Britten

Born in the English fishing port of Lowestoft on St Cecilia’s Day (22 November) 1913, you could say that Britten had both music and the sea in his blood. Naturally rebellious, his youthful enthusiasms included Mahler and especially Berg. Unhappy at school, and under pressure as a young gay man to keep any emotional baggage out of sight, he was also something of an outsider. Brilliant but guarded, he blazed a path through the Royal College of Music under the thoughtful guidance of Frank Bridge and soon found himself with a reputation for edgy, thought-provoking music.

Applying to the BBC’s director of music Adrian Boult, Britten wound up scoring documentary films of a distinctively socialist slant for the GPO Film Unit. Not only was it good training for telling stories though words and music, he had the good fortune to fall in with the literate, left-leaning circle that revolved around the poet WH Auden, a devil-may-care out and proud gay man who was keen to help his young colleague get comfortable with his sexuality. That was something Britten was not prepared to do, though he met his life partner, the tenor Peter Pears, around that time. When war broke out, as pacifists the two men followed Auden to New York, preferring to sit out the conflict rather than face the music back home.

It was in the US that Britten wrote his first opera. Paul Bunyan was a collaboration with Auden about the gigantic lumberjack of American folklore. Witty, urbane, and rather too clever by half, it bears all the hallmarks of the mature composer’s musical style and contains the earliest example of the classic Britten outsider in Bunyan’s self-torturing intellectual bookkeeper Johnny Inkslinger.

Around the same time, Britten became acquainted with the work of the Aldeburgh-born 18th-century poet George Crabbe. The Borough, a collection of 24 poems set on Britten’s beloved Suffolk coast, rendered him sufficiently homesick to return to England with Pears where they signed on as conscientious objectors.

Peter Grimes

Over the following two years Britten took up the challenge of writing an opera centring on one of the poem’s darker characters: the fisherman Peter Grimes. Seen through Crabbe’s eyes, the brutish Grimes has few redeeming qualities: “With greedy eye he look’d on all he saw; He knew not justice, and he laugh’d at law; On all he mark’d, he stretch’d his ready hand; He fish’d by water and he filch’d by land.”

When three apprentices rounded up from orphanages in London die in his care, Grimes is cast out by the Borough (though he’s never found guilty of murder or even manslaughter). Finally, on the advice of an old seadog, he sails his boat out to sea where, we presume, he drowns himself.

Somewhere in this grim tale, Britten detected a glimpse of humanity (that is after Pears, whose dramatic instincts were inevitably sound, steered him away from turning the title role into a triple child murderer). Between them, they drew on Crabbe for a salty cast of characters. The impoverished schoolteacher Ellen Orford (in The Borough, she ultimately goes blind and loses her school) becomes Peter’s redeeming spirit. The Boar and “Auntie” are extracted wholesale (though the publican’s earthy kindness is more Britten than Crabbe): “There dwells a kind old Aunt, and there you see some kind young Nieces in her company; Poor village nieces, whom the tender dame Invites to town, and gives their beauty Fame.”

And then there’s the rapacious lawyer Swallow: “By Law’s dark by-ways he had stored his mind with wicked knowledge, how to cheat mankind.” Most of the remaining motley collection of fishermen, gossips and religious fanatics are carefully repurposed to create a close-knit community whose characters appear in varying degrees of sympathy with the opera’s main protagonists.

Armed with a $1,000 commission from the conductor Serge Koussevitzky, Pears helped work up the synopsis we know today and, after Christopher Isherwood turned it down, Britten persuaded the novelist Montagu Slater to produce a singable libretto.

Peter Grimes opened in June 1945 at Sadler’s Wells Opera Company in London with the company’s artistic director, the soprano Joan Cross, casting herself as Ellen and with Pears in the title role. It wasn’t a happy rehearsal period. Britten fell out with Slater, whose text he revised high-handedly when the words sat awkwardly with the singers. Worse, there were suggestions of homophobic slurs against these two barely concealed gay men who seemed to be getting their own way in everything. Indeed, Britten, Pears and Cross would ditch Sadler's Wells later that year to found what was to become the English Opera Group.

Nevertheless, the opera was an enormous hit, hailed by audiences, critics, and fellow composers from Vaughan Williams to William Walton. Ironically, Lord Harewood (Queen Elizabeth II’s cousin who served as director of the Royal Opera House from 1951 to 1953) would reinforce Oscar Schmitz’s “land without music” barb when he described Peter Grimes as “the first genuinely successful British opera, Gilbert and Sullivan apart, since Purcell.”

One thing was certain, however. Opera in England would never be the same again.

La Scala’s Australian Connection

If proof were needed that Peter Grimes broke free of English opera’s parochial constraints, a new production at Italy’s premiere opera house is it. Milan’ La Scala is presenting a new production by acclaimed Canadian director Robert Carsen, and three Australians are making important house debuts: conductor Simone Young, soprano Nicole Car and mezzo-soprano Margaret Plummer.

Chief Conductor of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra Simone Young has an impressive track record when it comes to Britten, and Peter Grimes in particular (I greatly admired her way with the orchestral Four Sea Interludes back in 2020 when she was conducting the New York Philharmonic). Last year she scored another hit helming the Vienna State Opera production with Jonas Kaufmann making his role debut as Grimes. “Simone Young shaped enormous peaks and valleys of sound in the orchestra,” wrote The New York Times.

Now an acknowledged international star, in 2022 Nicole Car added the role of Ellen Orford to her stage repertoire, earning plaudits for her performances under Australian conductor Nicholas Carter at New York’s Metropolitan Opera. “Nicole Car might have been the vocal standout of the night, delivering a complex portrayal of Ellen Orford,” wrote OperaWire.

“Nicole Car offered an unusually forthright Ellen, ripe with persuasive goodness,” declared the Observer. “Her horrified interrogation of the traumatised apprentice revealed a touching singing-actress, and Car’s exquisite ‘Embroidery’ aria offered a lovely and much-appreciated oasis amidst Grimes’s spiralling self-destruction.”

Finally, Margaret Plummer will make her debut as the gutsy publican Auntie. Back in 2014, the Australian-born mezzo won the Vienna State Opera Award from Opera Foundation Australia. Relocating to Europe, she spent eight seasons as a fulltime member of the Wiener Staatsoper ensemble where roles – performed or covered – have included Hänsel, Massenet’s Charlotte, Siebel in Faust, Octavian in Der Rosenkavalier and Waltraute. Now La Scala will get to see what all the fuss is about.

Clive Paget

Clive Paget is well known to Australian music lovers. He is currently Editor at Large for Limelight and was formerly Editor. In these roles Clive has met and written about leading classical music artists around the world, and he has extensive knowledge of Mahler’s music. His professional background includes five years as Sir Nicholas Hytner’s music theatre consultant at London’s National Theatre.

RELATED TOUR

Opera & Song in Northern Italy

13-27 October 2023

Travel with Limelight’s Editor-at-Large Clive Paget to the home of opera, and enjoy seven performances in Venice, Milan, Bologna and Vicenza, including classics of the Italian repertoire.