Word: petered
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Those who have seen Benjamin Britten find it hard to believe that he could conceive so violent a play as Peter Grimes: it is almost like Baby Snooks reading lines from Medea. He is the kind of person no one remembers meeting at a party. Usually to be seen in a loose tweed coat, slacks and sweater, his hands habitually stuffed into his pockets, he has a rather tight, lean, nosy face which wrinkles easily into a vinegarish smile under a widow's peak of crinkly hair. He has a very English embarrassment about expressing emotion about anything...
Benjy and Peter Pears (for whom he wrote the leading tenor role of Grimes) arrived in the U.S. in 1939, moved in with Auden, in an arty household at 7 Mid-dagh Street in Brooklyn. It was a ramshackle, remodeled four-story brownstone whose architecture had fascinated Auden and his friends: from the street it looked something like a Swiss chalet. It was there that Negro Author Richard Wright later wrote Black Boy, and Novelist Carson Me Cullers wrote Reflections in a Golden Eye. Composer Paul Bowles worked at his Mexican ballet on the parlor piano (until Benjy quietly asked...
...found it difficult to compose while Beth's children played trains under his feet, or left sticky traces of jam on the piano. Then he and Librettist Slater moved to Snape in Suffolk, to a windmill which Britten had remodeled as a house. There they plunged into Peter Grimes. Slater would work up in a bedroom, and shout down to Benjy, lolling on the grass, "How do you like this line?" They took long walks over the bleak Suffolk downs, saying nothing to each other, each busy with his own ideas. Britten gets his themes...
Harsh & Helpless. When Britten finally got the surging dissonances and powerful choruses of Peter Grimes on paper, England had its biggest homegrown musical event since the Edwardian era triumphs of Sir Edward Elgar. The London Times pronounced Peter Grimes "a great opera ... its success is deserved and inevitable...
...Literary Critic Edmund Wilson, dragged unwillingly to Peter Grimes, came away as enthusiastic as everyone else. Wrote he (in his Europe Without Baedeker) : "The opera seizes on you, possesses you, keeps you riveted to your seat during the action and keyed up during the intermissions, and drops you, purged and exhausted, at the end. . . . This opera could have been written in no other age, and it is one of the very few works of art that have seemed to me, so far, to have spoken for the blind anguish, the hateful rancors and the will to destruction of these horrible...