Peter Grimes, Op. 33, is an opera in three acts by Benjamin Britten, with a libretto by Montagu Slater based on the section "Peter Grimes", in George Crabbe's long narrative poem The Borough (1810). The "borough" of the opera is a fictional small town that bears some resemblance to Crabbe's – and later Britten's – home of Aldeburgh, Suffolk, on England's east coast.
The work was conceived while Britten was living in the US in the early years of the Second World War and completed when he returned to Britain in 1943. It was first performed at Sadler's Wells in London on 7 June 1945, conducted by Reginald Goodall, and was a critical and popular success. It is still widely performed, both in Britain and internationally, and has become part of the standard repertoire. Among the tenors who have performed the title role in the opera house, or on record, or both are Britten's partner Peter Pears, who sang the part at the premiere, and Allan Clayton, Ben Heppner, Anthony Rolfe Johnson, Jonas Kaufmann, Philip Langridge, Stuart Skelton, Set Svanholm and Jon Vickers.
Four Sea Interludes, consisting of purely orchestral music from the opera, were published separately and are frequently performed as an orchestral suite. Another interlude, a passacaglia, was published separately and is also often performed, either together with the Sea Interludes or by itself.
Background
US: 1941–1943
In the early years of the Second World War, Benjamin Britten and his partner Peter Pears were living in the US. Britten's compositions from his years there include the song cycle Les Illuminations (1940), the Sinfonia da Requiem (1940) and his operetta, Paul Bunyan (1941).
In 1941 Britten came across a transcript in the BBC's magazine The Listener of a talk by E.M.Forster about the 18th-century Suffolk poet George Crabbe. It began, "To talk about Crabbe is to talk about England". Britten was filled with nostalgic feelings about his native Suffolk. Pears found a copy of Crabbe's works in a second-hand bookshop and Britten read the poem The Borough, which contained the tragic story of the Aldeburgh fisherman Peter Grimes. He said later, "In a flash I realised two things: that I must write an opera, and where I belonged". He and Pears began sketching an operatic scenario drawing on The Borough. In Crabbe's poem, Ellen Orford's tale is completely separate from Grimes's and they are not mentioned as meeting each other. The Rector, Swallow, and the proprietress of the Boar inn, "Auntie", and her nieces derive from other sections of The Borough, but other characters in the opera, including Balstrode, Boles and Ned Keene, are not in Crabbe's original.
While Britten and Pears were waiting for a passage back to England, the conductor Serge Koussevitzky asked the composer why he had not written an opera. Britten explained that doing so would necessitate putting all other work aside, which he could not afford to do. Koussevitzky arranged for the commissioning of the opera by the musical foundation he had recently set up. The fee was $1,000, and the opera was to be dedicated to the memory of Koussevitzky's wife, who had recently died. Britten approached his friend the writer Christopher Isherwood, inviting him to write the libretto. Pleading pressure of work and some reservations about the effectiveness of the subject, Isherwood declined.
London: 1943–1945
During the voyage back to England, Pears continued to work on the scenario of the opera while Britten composed A Ceremony of Carols and Hymn to St Cecilia. The story, and Grimes's character, underwent substantial changes in the early stages of drafting. For a long time during the gestation of the work Britten conceived Grimes as a baritone role. Pears persuaded Britten to play down any emotional tie Grimes might feel to the apprentice, and play up his position as an outsider in an intolerant society. At first, Britten had Grimes murdering his apprentices rather than being at worst negligent. For some time the dénouement had Grimes on the marshes, going mad and dying there. An episode with smugglers was dropped and several characters were gradually eliminated as work progressed on the story. By the time Britten and Pears returned home in April 1943 the shape of the work was not greatly different from the final version, and to turn the scenario into a libretto Britten recruited an old friend, the writer Montagu Slater.
Slater was a journalist, novelist and playwright. Before the war Britten had composed incidental music for two short verse-plays of his. Eric Crozier, who worked closely with Britten, comments that the whole of the original text of the libretto – "apart from six quatrains by Crabbe and the small phrase 'Grimes is at his exercise'" – is Slater's work. He abandoned Crabbe's rhyming couplets and allowed his text "to reflect the diverse speech-rhythms of the individual Borough characters":
In Crozier's view, Slater's "short interjectory sentences" in the recitatives and the "more expansive phrases" of the arias are ideal for musical setting.
Discussions between composer and librettist, revisions and corrections took nearly eighteen months. The premiere had been planned for Koussevitzky's Tanglewood Festival, but the festival had been suspended for the duration of the war, and Koussevitzky waived his contractual rights and gave his blessing to Sadler's Wells Opera to stage the first performances, saying that the opera – which he thought the greatest since Carmen – belonged not to him but to the world.
Tyrone Guthrie, the general administrator of the Sadler's Wells company, appointed his assistant Eric Crozier to stage the piece, and the latter, together with Britten, made adjustments to the libretto during rehearsals when Slater's text proved unsuitable for singability or clarity. Slater resented this, and insisted on publishing his original version in 1946, as Peter Grimes and Other Poems. Crozier brought in Kenneth Green to design the costumes and sets, the latter being naturalistic and based on Aldeburgh.
Performance history
Premiere
Sadler's Wells had been closed during the war, and the premiere of Peter Grimes, on 7 June 1945, marked the reopening of the theatre. Yet when Peter Grimes opened it was hailed by public and critics; its box-office takings matched or exceeded those for La bohème and Madame Butterfly, which were being staged concurrently by the company.
Original cast
thumb|upright=1.5|alt=stage scene, showing crowd in the open air with a church and a pub behind them|Scene from 1945 production
{| class="wikitable"
!Role
!Voice type
!Premiere cast, 7 June 1945<br>(Conductor: Reginald Goodall)
|-
|Peter Grimes, a fisherman
|tenor
|Peter Pears
|-
|Ellen Orford, a widow, Borough schoolmistress
|soprano
|Joan Cross
|-
|Auntie, landlady of The Boar
|contralto
|Edith Coates
|-
|Niece 1
|soprano
|Blanche Turner
|-
|Niece 2
|soprano
|Minnia Bower
|-
|Balstrode, retired merchant skipper
|baritone
|Roderick Jones
|-
|Mrs Sedley, a rentier widow
|mezzo-soprano
|Valetta Iacopi
|-
|Swallow, a lawyer
|bass
|Owen Brannigan
|-
|Ned Keene, apothecary and quack
|baritone
|Edmund Donlevy
|-
|Bob Boles, fisherman and Methodist
|tenor
|Morgan Jones
|-
|The Rev Horace Adams, rector
|tenor
|Tom Culbert
|-
|Hobson, carrier
|bass
|Frank Vaughan
|-
|Dr Thorp
|silent role
|
|-
|John, Grimes's apprentice
|silent role
|Leonard Thompson
|}
:Source: Libretto.
Later London productions
Sadler's Wells and its successor, English National Opera, staged new productions in 1963, 1990 and 2009. Grimes was played by, respectively, Ronald Dowd, Philip Langridge and Stuart Skelton; the conductors were Charles Mackerras, David Atherton and Edward Gardner.
Peter Grimes was staged at the Royal Opera House in 1947, in a production by Guthrie, conducted by Karl Rankl, with Pears, Cross and Edith Coates reprising their roles from the Sadler's Wells premiere. There have been four new productions at Covent Garden since then, directed by John Cranko (1953), Elijah Moshinsky (1975), Willy Decker (2004, a co-production with the Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie, Brussels) and Deborah Warner (2022, a co-production with the Teatro Real, Madrid, the Teatro dell'Opera, Rome, and the Opéra National de Paris). In revivals of the earlier productions, Grimes was played by tenors including Richard Lewis, Richard Cassilly, Robert Tear, Langridge, and Anthony Rolfe Johnson.
Regional British productions
Productions by other British opera companies include Colin Graham's 1968 staging for Scottish Opera, conducted by Alexander Gibson with Nigel Douglas as Grimes; Glyndebourne Festival's first production of the work in 1992, directed by Trevor Nunn and conducted by Andrew Davis and, in revivals, Franz Welser-Most and Mark Wigglesworth; a 1999 version by Welsh National Opera, directed by Peter Stein and conducted by Carlo Rizzi with John Daszak as Grimes; and Opera North's 2006 production, directed by Phyllida Lloyd and conducted by Richard Farnes with Jeffrey Lloyd-Roberts as Grimes. In the summer of 2013, to mark the centenary of Britten's birth, the Aldeburgh Festival staged its first performance of Peter Grimes. It was played in its natural setting on the beach at Aldeburgh. Steuart Bedford conducted, and Alan Oke sang Grimes.
American productions
The American premiere of the work was given in August 1946 at Tanglewood, conducted by Koussevitzky's protégé Leonard Bernstein, with William Horne in the title role. The Metropolitan Opera first staged the piece in 1948 with Frederick Jagel as Grimes. The house staged a new production in 1967, directed by Guthrie and conducted by Colin Davis, with Vickers as Grimes. A subsequent production, by John Doyle, was presented in 2008, conducted by Donald Runnicles, with Anthony Dean Griffey in the title role.
Continental Europe
One of the first productions of the work outside Britain was at the Royal Swedish Opera in March 1946, conducted by Herbert Sandberg, with Set Svanholm as Grimes. Productions in Basel, Antwerp and Zurich followed within weeks.