Word: petered
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Punch & Power. Peter Grimes is 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...
...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...
...real challenge for the Met, with its stable of posturing actors who sometimes make opera more gross than grand, would be to project the power and punch Composer Britten has packed into his Peter Grimes. One top Met official admitted: "If it flops, it'll be our fault." The Met, like most conservative opera houses, still stages its operas like any smalltime Italian company, with every singer's steps and gestures stylized, so that a substitute can step into any role on a moment's notice. The stylizing makes for convenience, but hot for conviction...
...rehearsal for the London première of Peter Grimes, Composer Britten was all over the stage, his enthusiasm overcoming his shyness, begging his singers to act their parts instead of grimacing and posturing. There were few in the Met's cast who didn't realize what they were up against. Soprano Regina Resnik is a Britten veteran: she had sung in his Rape of Lucretia in Chicago last year (TIME, June 9). But Tenor Frederick Jagel, who sings the leading role, was worried: "This is so tough dramatically that it becomes tough musically...
Crude but Sympathetic. Peter Grimes is no conventional operatic hero. Britten found him in a poem written by Parson Poet George Crabbe (1754-1832) and added a few hints of Freud. Crabbe's Grimes was an uncouth and unsympathetic ruffian; to Britten and Librettist Montagu Slater he is still crude but somehow sympathetic-a character who, by his uncontrollable rages, continually puts himself at swords'-points with society, which Britten represents with the massive chorus. Sings Peter Grimes: "They listen to money, these Borough gossips. I listen to courage and fiery visions...