Peter Grimes, Op. 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 (1810). The "borough" of the opera is a fictional small town that bears some resemblance to Crabbe's – and later Britten's – home of Aldeburgh, Suffolk, on England's east coast.
The work was conceived while Britten was living in the US in the early years of the Second World War and completed when he returned to Britain in 1943. It was first performed at Sadler's Wells in London on 7 June 1945, conducted by Reginald Goodall, and was a critical and popular success. It is still widely performed, both in Britain and internationally, and has become part of the standard repertoire. Among the tenors who have performed the title role in the opera house, or on record, or both are Britten's partner Peter Pears, who sang the part at the premiere, and Allan Clayton, Ben Heppner, Anthony Rolfe Johnson, Jonas Kaufmann, Philip Langridge, Stuart Skelton, Set Svanholm and Jon Vickers.
Four Sea Interludes, consisting of purely orchestral music from the opera, were published separately and are frequently performed as an orchestral suite. Another interlude, a passacaglia, was published separately and is also often performed, either together with the Sea Interludes or by itself.
Background US: 1941–1943 In the early years of the Second World War, Benjamin Britten and his partner Peter Pears were living in the US. 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).Brett, Philip, Heather Wiebe, Jennifer Doctor, Judith LeGrove, and Paul Banks. "Britten, (Edward) Benjamin", Grove Music Online, Oxford University Press, 2013 In 1941 Britten came across a transcript in the BBC's magazine The Listener of a talk by E.M.Forster about the 18th-century Suffolk poet George Crabbe. It began, "To talk about Crabbe is to talk about England". Britten was filled with nostalgic feelings about his native Suffolk. Pears found a copy of Crabbe's works in a second-hand bookshop and Britten read the poem The Borough, which contained the tragic story of the Aldeburgh fisherman Peter Grimes. He said later, "In a flash I realised two things: that I must write an opera, and where I belonged".Matthews, p. 61 He and Pears began sketching an operatic scenario drawing on The Borough.
From the outset the characters and story of the libretto were only loosely based on Crabbe's work. The Grimes of Crabbe's poem is an outright bully, "untouched by pity, unstung by remorse and uncorrected by shame". Three of his apprentices in succession have died before he is summoned to the Town Hall to account for his conduct, after which he is forbidden to employ another. He works alone until the ghosts of his victims begin to terrorise him and he sinks into madness and dies in bed.Crabbe, pp. 287–290 and 294–297 In Crabbe's poem, Ellen Orford's tale is completely separate from Grimes's and they are not mentioned as meeting each other. The Rector, Swallow, and the proprietress of the Boar inn, "Auntie", and her nieces derive from other sections of The Borough,Crabbe, p. 146Greenhalgh, p. 32 and 43 but other characters in the opera, including Balstrode, Boles and Ned Keene, are not in Crabbe's original.
While Britten and Pears were waiting for a passage back to England, the conductor Serge Koussevitzky asked the composer why he had not written an opera. Britten explained that doing so would necessitate putting all other work aside, which he could not afford to do. Koussevitzky arranged for the commissioning of the opera by the musical foundation he had recently set up. The fee was $1,000, and the opera was to be dedicated to the memory of Koussevitzky's wife, who had recently died.Brett, p. 148 Britten approached his friend the writer Christopher Isherwood, inviting him to write the libretto. Pleading pressure of work and some reservations about the effectiveness of the subject, Isherwood declined.Brett, p. 35
London: 1943–1945 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.Brett, p. 47 The story, and Grimes's character, underwent substantial changes in the early stages of drafting. For a long time during the gestation of the work Britten conceived Grimes as a baritone role. Pears persuaded Britten to play down any emotional tie Grimes might feel to the apprentice, and play up his position as an outsider in an intolerant society. At first, Britten had Grimes murdering his apprentices rather than being at worst negligent.Carpenter, p. 208 For some time the dénouement had Grimes on the marshes, going mad and dying there.Brett, p. 52 An episode with smugglers was dropped and several characters were gradually eliminated as work progressed on the story.Brett, p. 48 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.Carpenter, p. 169
Slater was a journalist, novelist and playwright. Before the war Britten had composed incidental music for two short verse-plays of his. Eric Crozier, who worked closely with Britten, comments that the whole of the original text of the libretto – "apart from six quatrains by Crabbe and the small phrase 'Grimes is at his exercise'" – is Slater's work. He abandoned Crabbe's rhyming couplets and allowed his text "to reflect the diverse speech-rhythms of the individual Borough characters":
In Crozier's view, Slater's "short interjectory sentences" in the recitatives and the "more expansive phrases" of the arias are ideal for musical setting. In Slater's hands the character of Grimes was further developed. 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. There are plenty of Grimeses around still, I think!"Brett, p. 152
Discussions between composer and librettist, revisions and corrections took nearly eighteen months. In January 1944 Britten started writing the music and just over a year later it was complete.Brett, p. 149 The premiere had been planned for Koussevitzky's Tanglewood Festival, but the festival had been suspended for the duration of the war, and Koussevitzky waived his contractual rights and gave his blessing to Sadler's Wells Opera to stage the first performances, saying that the opera – which he thought the greatest since Carmen – belonged not to him but to the world.Brett, p. 98
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. Slater resented this, and insisted on publishing his original version in 1946, as Peter Grimes and Other Poems.Carpenter, p. 217 Crozier brought in Kenneth Green to design the costumes and sets, the latter being naturalistic and based on Aldeburgh.Brett, p. 41
Performance history Premiere Sadler's Wells had been closed during the war, and the premiere of Peter Grimes, on 7 June 1945, marked the reopening of the theatre. When Joan Cross, director of the company, announced the plan to reopen the house with Peter Grimes − herself and Pears in the leading roles − there were complaints from company members about supposed favouritism and the "cacophony" of Britten's score.Gilbert, p. 98 Yet when Peter Grimes opened it was hailed by public and critics;See, for example, "Sadler's Wells Opera – Peter Grimes", The Times, 8 June 1945, p. 6, and Glock, William. "Music", The Observer, 10 June 1945, p. 2 its box-office takings matched or exceeded those for La bohème and Madame Butterfly, which were being staged concurrently by the company.Banks, pp. xvi–xviii.
Original cast
RoleVoice typePremiere cast, 7 June 1945(Conductor: Reginald Goodall)Peter Grimes, a fishermantenorPeter PearsEllen Orford, a widow, Borough schoolmistresssopranoJoan CrossAuntie, landlady of The BoarcontraltoEdith CoatesNiece 1sopranoBlanche TurnerNiece 2sopranoMinnia BowerBalstrode, retired merchant skipperbaritoneRoderick JonesMrs Sedley, a rentier widowmezzo-sopranoValetta IacopiSwallow, a lawyerbassOwen BranniganNed Keene, apothecary and quackbaritoneEdmund DonlevyBob Boles, fisherman and MethodisttenorMorgan JonesThe Rev Horace Adams, rectortenorTom CulbertHobson, carrierbassFrank VaughanDr Thorpsilent roleJohn, Grimes's apprenticesilent roleLeonard Thompson Source: Libretto.Herbert, p. 88
Later London productions Sadler's Wells and its successor, English National Opera, staged new productions in 1963, 1990 and 2009.Gilbert, pp. 595, 601 and 604 Grimes was played by, respectively, Ronald Dowd, Philip Langridge and Stuart Skelton; the conductors were Charles Mackerras, David Atherton and Edward Gardner.Gilbert, pp. 181 and 437; and "Peter Grimes", The Times, 9 May 2009, p. 32
Peter Grimes was staged at the Royal Opera House in 1947, in a production by Guthrie, conducted by Karl Rankl, with Pears, Cross and Edith Coates reprising their roles from the Sadler's Wells premiere. 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 Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie, Brussels) and Deborah Warner (2022, a co-production with the Teatro Real, Madrid, the Teatro dell'Opera, Rome, and the Opéra National de Paris). The conductors were, respectively, Goodall, Colin Davis, Antonio Pappano and Mark Elder, and the title role was sung by Pears, Jon Vickers, Ben Heppner and Allan Clayton."Peter Grimes" , Royal Opera House archive. Retrieved 23 March 2022 In revivals of the earlier productions, Grimes was played by tenors including Richard Lewis,"Peter Grimes, 1948" , Royal Opera House archive. Retrieved 23 March 2022 Richard Cassilly,"Peter Grimes, 1977" , Royal Opera House archive. Retrieved 23 March 2022 Robert Tear,"Peter Grimes, 1978" , Royal Opera House archive. Retrieved 23 March 2022 Langridge,"Peter Grimes, 1989" , Royal Opera House archive. Retrieved 23 March 2022 and Anthony Rolfe Johnson."Peter Grimes, 1997" , Royal Opera House archive. Retrieved 23 March 2022
Regional British productions Productions by other British opera companies include Colin Graham's 1968 staging for Scottish Opera, conducted by Alexander Gibson with Nigel Douglas as Grimes;"Peter Grimes" , Opera Scotland. Retrieved 23 March 2022 Glyndebourne Festival's first production of the work in 1992, directed by Trevor Nunn and conducted by Andrew Davis and, in revivals, Franz Welser-Most and Mark Wigglesworth;"Peter Grimes" , Glyndebourne performance archive. Retrieved 23 March 2022 a 1999 version by Welsh National Opera, directed by Peter Stein and conducted by Carlo Rizzi with John Daszak as Grimes;"Fishing vainly for English oddities", The Times, 17 February 1999, p. 35 and Opera North's 2006 production, directed by Phyllida Lloyd and conducted by Richard Farnes with Jeffrey Lloyd-Roberts as Grimes."Peter Grimes", The Independent, 5 November 2006, p. 99 In the summer of 2013, to mark the centenary of Britten's birth, the Aldeburgh Festival staged its first performance of Peter Grimes. It was played in its natural setting on the beach at Aldeburgh. Steuart Bedford conducted, and Alan Oke sang Grimes."Grimes on the Beach" , The Guardian, 18 June 2013
American productions