"Now the Great Bear and Pleiades" — a fisherman looks at the stars in a crowded pub and silences it (1945)
The Act 1 pub scene; the villagers mutter that he is mad or drunk
Opera · Opera in English
Peter Grimes
7 June 1945, Sadler's Wells Theatre, London
Benjamin Britten · libretto by Montagu Slater, after George Crabbe
A Suffolk fisherman, twice suspected of killing his boy apprentices, is hounded by his village until he takes his boat out and sinks it. Britten's first full-scale opera opened Sadler's Wells a month after VE Day and is generally credited with founding modern British opera; its orchestral interludes, four of them played as a concert suite, are the sea itself.
How to spot them
- ▸The Borough, a fishing village on the Suffolk coast, around 1830
- ▸Begins with an inquest, not an overture, and a coroner telling a man to take no more apprentices
- ▸Six orchestral interludes: Dawn, Storm, Sunday Morning, Moonlight, and a Passacaglia
- ▸A widowed schoolmistress who defends the outsider, and a village chorus that turns into a mob
- ▸A pub scene in a gale where a round is started to head off a fight
Arias & moments — listen
Four orchestral interludes — Dawn, Sunday Morning, Moonlight and Storm — lifted into a concert suite (1945)
The Four Sea Interludes, Op. 33a, among the most played British orchestral works
"Embroidery in childhood was a luxury of idleness" — a woman finds a drowned boy's jersey on the shore (1945)
Ellen Orford's Act 3 aria, the proof the mob has been waiting for
"Old Joe has gone fishing" — a round started in a pub to head off a brawl during a gale (1945)
The Act 1 round, in irregular seven-beat phrases
A retired sea captain tells the hunted man to sail out of sight of land and sink the boat (1945)
Captain Balstrode's advice in the final scene; the village then wakes to another ordinary morning
The manhunt sets off across the marsh chanting a single name over and over (1945)
The Act 3 mob chorus — 'Him who despises us we'll destroy'
Quick-fire facts
- •The source is the 'Peter Grimes' section of George Crabbe's 1810 poem The Borough; Britten found it in a 1941 essay by E. M. Forster while living in California.
- •The libretto is by Montagu Slater; the premiere was conducted by Reginald Goodall, with Peter Pears in the title role and Joan Cross as Ellen Orford.
- •The commission came from the Koussevitzky Music Foundation, and the score is dedicated to the memory of Natalie Koussevitzky.
- •It reopened Sadler's Wells Theatre after the war, a month after VE Day.
- •Britten and Pears were pacifists who registered as conscientious objectors on returning to Britain in 1942.
- •The Four Sea Interludes, Op. 33a, and the Passacaglia, Op. 33b, are published separately for concert use.
- •Other characters include Auntie and her 'nieces', Swallow the lawyer and coroner, Ned Keene the apothecary, Bob Boles the Methodist fisherman, and the laudanum-addicted Mrs Sedley.
- •Britten settled at Aldeburgh, the Suffolk town behind Crabbe's Borough, and founded its festival in 1948.
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Sources
- Grove Music Online (Oxford Music Online) — Britten, Benjamin: Peter Grimes
- Encyclopaedia Britannica — Peter Grimes: opera by Britten
- Humphrey Carpenter — Benjamin Britten: A Biography