MUSIC FROM "PETER GRIMES"

New Zealand Listener, Volume 15, Issue 390, 13 December 1946, Page 7

MUSIC FROM "PETER GRIMES"

Selections Will Be Heard Next Week From 2YA °

p.m. on Tuesday, December 17, of new BBC recordings of music from Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes will be for most listeners the first acquaintance with the sound of thi$ much-talked-about opera. In New Zealand, we have read about its production by the Sadler’s Wells Opera Company in June, 1945, seen photographs of the settings (published in England even months _ before the production); the pages of the newspapers have even carried short cables about its exciting reception in London. And E. M. Forster has been* heard from the BBC describing his excitement ‘after hearing the opera. Some excerpts from it were performed at the Summer School for Music at Cambridge last January, but the new BBC recording, although it presents only five purely. orchestral excerpts, will now bring more of the music to more listeners. g broadcast by 2YA at 8.12 Peter Grimes owes its origin in the very first place to the fact that Britten read ‘an article in the BBC Listener by E. M. Forster on George Crabbe. He then read Crabbe’s long poem "The Borough," which is about the daily life of a Suffolk fishing and shipbuilding town around the end of the 18th Century. Britten had always lived in Suffolk himself,

The tale of "Peter Grimes" comes into the section of the poem called "The Poor," and Britten saw in it the background for an opera. In 1941, while he was in America, Britten was commissioned by Serge Koussevitzky to write the opera he had in mind, and in 1942 he set to work with Montagu Slater, who wrote the libretto. "Discussions, revisions, and corrections took nearly 18 months," Britten has said. "In January, 1944, I began composing the music and the score was completed: in February, 1945." (In that month Picture Post printed photographs of the model stage settings.) The story, as it stood when Britten and Slater had finished their "discussions, revisions, and corrections,’ told of Grimes, the Suffolk fisherman, misunderstood by his fellows and eventually driven to death by their persecution. Britten has said: "My .parents’ house in Lowestoft directly faced the sea, and my I'fe as a child was coloured by the fierce storms that sometimes drove ships on to our coast and ate away whole stretches of the neighbouring cliffs. In writing Peter Grimes, I wanted to express my awareness of the perpetual struggle of men and women whose livelihood depends on the sea-difficult though it is to treat such a universal subject in theatrical form."

Grimes is a lonely soul, too poor and too proud to offer marriage to the woman he loves (Ellen Orford, the widowed schoolmistress). All day and every day he puts out in his fishing-boat, with "grey unresting, energy." He is accused of killing his apprentice and the opera begins with the inquest; his guilt is by no means established, but the tongues of the gossips wag. He is shunned, taunted, driven in upon himself. "The case goes on in the people’s

minds," he eries out. "O, let me thrust into their mouths the pity and the truth." But his broken pleas in the courtroom are overwhelmed by the relentless chorus of villagers, in whom honest indignation stifles compassion and reasonable judgment. Later, his new apprentice is accidentally killed in falling down the cliff by Grimes’s hut, in circumstances that will put Grimes under more suspicion. Finally, driven to madness by grief, Grimes goes out to sea with his boat. We know that he is going to sink it, and go down with it. And then, in the last scene, the village resumes its everyday life, its never-ceasing struggle for existence.