Word: petered
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...soon as the curtain is up (there is no overture), it is clear that Peter Grimes, although he has committed no crime, is as doomed as a character in a Kafka novel. The opera opens with Peter facing an inquest-indeed a trial-in the village hall. He has just returned from a fishing voyage with his boy apprentice dead. The inquest absolves him, but with sinister warnings that it had better not happen again, and the townspeople gossip about him. Peter rages: "Charges that no court has made will be shouted at my head . . . let me stand trial. Bring...
Only Ellen Orford, the widowed village schoolteacher, gives him comfort. His ambition is to live down his unpopularity, make money (to buy respectability), and marry Ellen. Sings Captain Balstrode, a retired merchant seaman: "Man-go and ask her. Without your booty, she'll have you now." Sings Peter: "No-not for pity!" Balstrode replies: "Then the old tragedy is in store: new start with new 'prentice, just as before...
...apprentice, a weak young boy from the workhouse, is brought to the pub through a magnificent storm (Britten lets his furious storm music in each time the pub door is opened). The second act finds Ellen sitting beside the boy in the Sunday sunshine; she discovers that Peter Grimes has already cuffed and bruised him. This is Britten at his musical trickiest: as she sings to the boy, a church choir nearby is chanting words from the Book of Common Prayer; first the soprano's voice, then the choir, fades in & out like music in a radio play...
There the boy cowers in fear, while Peter rages. As they head out the cliffside door to go fishing, the boy slips and falls, and Peter rushes after him. The townspeople find the hut empty...
...days later, the apprentice's sweater is found washed up on the beach. The townspeople, surex that Grimes has committed another murder, head offstage on a new hunt, chanting now near, now far: "Peter Gri-imes ... Peter Gri-mes." As Peter appears on stage, clearly out of his mind, the orchestra is silent; the only sound to be heard is an eerie foghorn. His friend Balstrode warns him to "sail out . . . then sink the boat," before the mob finds him, and Peter Grimes obeys...