Peter Pears in ‘Peter Grimes’, conducted by Kubelík

Peter Grimes
Libretto by Montagu Slater after the poem by George Crabbe, ‘The Borough’

From text to music

Work on Peter Grimes, first performed at Sadlers Wells in June 1945, had begun four years earlier, in America. Benjamin Britten had lived there since 1939, and his first extended stage work, the operetta Paul Bunyan (to a libretto by W.H.Auden) had been premièred in New York in May 1941.That same month, Britten read an article in The Listener by E.M. Forster about the Suffolk poet George Crabbe that vividly evoked those East Coast locations around Aldeburgh so close to Britten’s heart. Even before they left America, in March 1942, Britten and Peter Pears had got hold of Crabbe’s long poem ’The Borough’, set around the year 1830,and telling the story of Peter Grimes.

Beginning work on a possible scenario, they made the crucial decision that Grimes should be less the wholehearted villain depicted by Crabbe and more the kind of flawed yet visionary outsider standing for oppressed minorities in contemporary culture – including, in the 1940s, the gay community to which both Britten and Pears belonged. Britten himself was strongly drawn to Grimes’s deeply divided personality, and his dramatic depiction of the fisherman’s alternating tenderness and aggression, especially with his apprentices, reflected his own anxieties as an adult with a strong attraction to boys. Even though there seems to have been nothing predatory about Britten’s friendships with the likes of David Hemmings, who as a treble created the role of Miles in The Turn of the Screw in 1954, it is clear that he had no compunction about ending such friendships when the boy’s voice broke.

Having failed to persuade Christopher Isherwood, then living in California, to provide a libretto, Britten chose Montague Slater, a left-wing poet he had worked with in the 1930s. Slater’s text was complete by the end of 1942, but it was early 1944 before Britten began on the music, and there were many arguments and adjustments to the text before the composition itself was completed in February 1945: even then, there were further revisions when a definitive vocal score was published later that year. The opera’s American origins are evident in the fact that it was Serge Koussevitsky, the Russian-born conductor resident in Boston, who actually commissioned it, mainly on the strength of his admiration for the Sinfonia da Requiem (1940).

Britten’s experience of recent American music theatre, notably Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, with its vivid storm scene, also helped to shape the work. Britten was also a wholehearted admirer of such radical earlier 20th century operas as Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex and Berg’s Wozzeck. Nevertheless, it is his powerfully original rethinking of more traditional operatic conventions associated particularly with Verdi that does most to account for the early impact of Peter Grimes.

© Arnold Whittall, 2009

Peter Grimes with an international twist

The occasion

For half a century ‘the 1958 recording of Peter Grimes’ meant the Decca LP version, conducted by Britten himself, made in December under studio conditions in London’s Walthamstow Assembly Hall. It was planned by John Culshaw, produced by Erik Smith, and released in 1959. It was a stressful occasion for Britten, who for all his operatic experience had never conducted the work before, and the sheer physical strain involved meant that Reginald Goodall, conductor of the 1945 world première, had to be called in to help with the final stages. The result was, and remains, a document of the first importance. It is nevertheless very different from a live, unedited performance, in a large theatre, with a conductor of vast experience in the ’standard’ operatic repertory. The present recording, from the collection of Lord Harewood, enables such comparisons to be made. But it also stands on its own as an outstanding memento of a rare event – the only recording of a Britten opera conducted by Rafael Kubelík.

Kubelík (1914–1996) became music director at Covent Garden in 1955, and moved on after only three years, not least because he was subjected to a good deal of often chauvinistic sniping from those who should have known better – Sir Thomas Beecham, for example. But during that brief period Kubelík’s work on a wide range of operas from the romantic and post-romantic repertoires, including Die Meistersinger, Otello, Les Troyens and Jenufa, gave ample evidence of his versatility and imagination. Britten knew and admired him, and Kubelík’s expansive yet highly expressive approach to Grimes was evidently one to which all involved responded positively.

Not surprisingly, there are many similarities between the casts in the theatre in January–February 1958 and in the recording studio ten months later. Both contained regular Royal Opera artists with considerable experience in the Britten canon, especially in the two operas first performed at Covent Garden – Billy Budd (1951) and Gloriana (1953); and both had two notable survivors of the opera’s première: Peter Pears and Owen Brannigan. The major difference is that Covent Garden had Sylvia Fisher as an imposingly intense Ellen Orford. She was then approaching the summit of her career, having already made a great impression there as the Kostelnicka in Kubelík’s Jenufa and as Sieglinde in Rudolf Kempe’s 1957 Ring cycle, issued on CD for the first time in 2008.

© Arnold Whittall, 2009

Recorded 6 February 1958, Royal Opera House, London

Original recording from The Harewood Collection