Paul du Quenoy at The New Criterion:
“There are plenty of Grimeses around still, I think!” said the British tenor Peter Pears, the composer Benjamin Britten’s partner in art and life, of the title character he originated in Britten’s first full-length opera. Based on George Crabbe’s The Borough (1810), a long narrative poem about a bullying fisherman who dies of madness after several of his apprentices perish on the job, Peter Grimes was conceived during World War II, while Britten and Pears lived in America. It premiered at London’s Sadler’s Wells Theatre less than a month after the end of the conflict in Europe.
Unlike the monstrous tormenter of Crabbe’s poem, the title character of Britten’s opera is a morally ambiguous character. In Pears’s words, Grimes is “an ordinary, weak person who, being at odds with the society in which he finds himself, tries to overcome it and, in doing so, offends against the conventional code, is classed by society as a criminal, and destroyed as such.”
Peter Grimes is widely regarded as the first great modern British opera and was a huge, immediate success, though not everyone grasped its themes.
more here.
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