Word: brittens
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...more than a new opera; for the Met it is a new kind of opera. Dissonance has been heard in the Met's hallowed halls before-in Strauss's Elektra and Salome. Bernard Rogers' The Warrior, which was flashed on & off last year, was nonsensically dissonant. Britten's music runs from perky jigs in the woodwinds to forceful, discordant barkings in the brass. The Met's soggy chorus would need a shot in the arm to handle some of the rounds, which sound like sea chanties and are as complex as a Bach fugue. Singers...
...this work in progress would culminate this week in the Met's first new opera of the year. The new work is Benjamin Britten's Peter Grimes, and no opera written since the days of Puccini has had so much advance praise...
...Purcell's Steps. In an age when even opera's best friends are calling it decadent, bright young Benjamin Britten's admirers acclaim him as the wonder boy who will restore the glitter to opera's tarnished tiara. In England, which has never produced a composer to match its poets and playwrights, critics call him the likeliest English opera discovery since Henry Purcell composed Dido and Aeneas for a girls' boarding school 250 years...
...composer himself, who at 34 looks like an overworked undergraduate, will not be in the audience when the Met's gold curtains part this week. He will be off on a concert tour of Italy and Holland. A shy fellow, but sure of himself, Britten wasn't worried about how Peter Grimes would fare in Manhattan. Since London first heard Peter Grimes at Sadler's Wells in June 1945, it has been cheered 115 times, in Stockholm, Copenhagen, Milan, Berlin, Budapest, translated into eight languages, and praised in all of them...
...foreign-born conductors, Britten's English idiom was new, at first forbidding and finally fascinating. Said white-haired, Russian-born Conductor Emil Cooper, who will conduct the first performance of Grimes: "For 40 years I am a conductor, but I do not know English opera before. There is no difficulty in doing Italian opera; when you start you know what you are doing. French and German the same. This is somehow different . . . the rhythms and inflections of English speech which Britten gets into his music. . . . But I am excited...