The Faber Pocket Guide to Opera (66 page)

In performance

One of the most refreshing removals of this opera from the standard baroque or neo-classical context was made by the American choreographer Mark Morris.
His version was sung in the pit and danced on stage, Morris himself doubling as Dido and the Sorceress, with only the simplest of costumes and barest of settings.
The expressive power of this production reminded one that in Purcell’s conception of opera, dance played as important a role as song.

Recordings

CDs: Janet Baker (Dido); Anthony Lewis (cond.).
Decca 425 720 2

Anne-Sofie von Otter (Dido); Trevor Pinnock (cond.) Archiv 427624 2

Benjamin Britten

(1913–76)

Peter Grimes

Three acts. First performed London, 1945.

Libretto by Montagu Slater

Britten famously found a copy of George Crabbe’s long narrative poem
The
Borough
(first published in 1810) in a secondhand bookshop while he was in the USA during the early part of the Second World War.
Reading Crabbe made him feel homesick for his native Suffolk, where
The
Borough
is set, and introduced him to the characters of Peter Grimes and Ellen Orford.
The opera was largely written on the composer’s return to England and was first performed shortly after VE Day, thus making it the signal of a new era for English opera.

Plot

In a Suffolk village (clearly Aldeburgh, but referred to in the opera only as the ‘Borough’, perhaps because Aldeburgh is not an easily singable word), an inquest is held into the dubious circumstances behind the death of a boy apprenticed to the fisherman Peter Grimes, a man of poetic temperament, capable of great sensitivity as well as outbursts of rage.
A verdict of accidental death is upheld, but Grimes remains under suspicion.
Only the widowed schoolteacher Ellen Orford stands by him: Grimes hopes to prosper and marry her.
Ellen collects a new apprentice for Grimes from the workhouse and hands the boy over to Grimes in the local pub during a terrible storm.
The villagers ostracize and demonize Grimes, who is incapable of normal social communication.

Some weeks later, on a Sunday morning outside the church, Ellen discovers that Grimes has been ill-treating his new apprentice.
She confronts Grimes with his cruelty, and at the end of a terrible quarrel, he hits her and runs off distraught.
Villagers emerging from a service witness this scene, and set off in a grim posse to Grimes’s hut.
Meanwhile, in the
course of some over-hasty preparations for a fishing expedition, Grimes is party to another accident which causes the apprentice to lose his footing and fall to his death.
When the posse arrives at Grimes’s hut, they find it empty and assume he has gone out to sea.

Some days later, Grimes has not been seen again.
Ellen finds a jumper she had knitted for the apprentice washed up on shore and realizes that the boy must have drowned.
At night, Grimes’s boat is seen in the harbour: with renewed venom stimulated by the malicious gossip of the neurotic Mrs Sedley, the villagers gather and again set out to the hut, this time as a lynch-mob.
Ellen and Captain Balstrode, a kindly old merchant skipper, find Grimes wandering on the shore, out of his mind.
Balstrode gently orders him to take his boat out to sea and scuttle her.
Numbly, Grimes agrees.
As the daily routines of the village begin again at dawn, somebody spots a boat sinking on the horizon.

What to listen for

One of the elements which had crucially held English opera back since Purcell was its failure to find a form of dramatic recitative appropriate to the English language which did not sound merely ‘churchy’.
Already experienced as a song writer, Britten solves this problem brilliantly, and from the opening scene, one is aware of how ‘naturally’ the stresses fall, and how clearly every word can be articulated.

Which is not to say that the score lacks lyrical highlights – for example, Grimes’s eerie evocation of the night sky after the storm, ‘Now the Great Bear and Pleiades’, its opening pitched on a repeated E, a note which had a uniquely distinctive sound in the tenor of Britten’s partner Peter Pears, who created the role; or Ellen’s soprano outburst down a simple descending scale, ‘Let her among you without sin’, or her reverie over the abused apprentice’s jumper, ‘Embroidery in childhood’.
The slithering silken harmony of the quartet for women’s voices in Act II owes something to the final trio of Strauss’s
Der
Rosenkavalier.

Note also how sharply Britten characterizes individual members of the Borough: Ned Keene, the flirtatious apothecary; the hysterical Methodist preacher Bob Boles; the neurotic and snobbish widow, Mrs Sedley; the bluff pub landlady, Auntie, and her two silly nieces (who appear to act as the local prostitutes and duet in a style drawn on Gilbert and Sullivan).
The stunning choruses – indeed, the chorus’s central role in the whole opera – show the influence of Mussorgsky’s
Boris
Godunov.

The four richly coloured orchestral interludes depicting various moods of the sea (in the manner of Debussy’s
La
Mer
) are often played separately as a concert suite.

In performance

An opera of immense theatrical strength, which has been staged in several different idioms.
At Covent Garden, Elijah Moshinsky was inspired by the early Victorian photographs of the Suffolk coast taken by P.
H.
Sutcliffe to present the opera on an almost bare stage, animating it with evocative lighting and unsentimentalized, uncaricatured performances dominated by Jon Vickers’s Grimes, the embodiment of the visionary outsider turned maniac.
John Copley in Chicago and Trevor Nunn at Glyndebourne evoked the community with more naturalistic detail and architecture, bringing the opera close to the world of the Victorian novel.
Several productions, notably Willy Decker’s in Brussels, have made Grimes’s homosexuality explicit rather than implicit (showing him, for instance, repelled by Ellen’s affectionate physical advances), while at the Opéra Bastille, Graham Vick interpreted it in even more specific terms of modern tabloid-style hysteria about child abuse.
Tim Albery’s production for ENO was more expressionistic, setting the story in the context of the prejudices and anxieties which haunted British society at the end of the Second World War and showing the chorus acting
en
masse
like so many pre-programmed zombies.

Recordings

CD: Anthony Rolfe Johnson (Grimes); Bernard Haitink (cond.).
EMI 754 8322

Video: Philip Langridge (Grimes); David Atherton (cond.).
ENO production.
Decca 071 428 3

The
Rape
of
Lucretia

Two acts. First performed Glyndebourne, 1946.

Libretto by Ronald Duncan

Britten’s first chamber opera, a remarkable contrast in scope, mood and subject-matter from its precursor,
Peter
Grimes.
Superbly constructed in dramatic terms, it employs an instrumental ensemble of thirteen players to astonishing effect and offers fine opportunities for its eight vocal soloists.
Only some pretentious passages in its generally over-poetic libretto mar its haunting power and austere beauty.

Plot