Voices that Will Not Be Drowned

An essay on Benjamin Britten’s 1945 opera Peter Grimes
by HGO Music Director Patrick Summers

"Art is a lie that makes us realize truth” – Pablo Picasso (1881-1973)

Is history truly a record of what happened, or is it simply an agreement as to how we choose to remember? Once the facts of a particular part of history have been established — no mean feat — contemporaneous works of art, fiction, can sometimes be the most accurate way to take the emotional pulse of the era. Genius creators — those few blessedly gifted dramatists, novelists, painters and composers — can feel the seismic shifts of culture as they happen; the merely “gifted” react later. The harrowing opera Peter Grimes was created most decidedly by a genius, British composer Benjamin Britten (1913–76) and its title character is driven to a madness perfectly mirrored by the years of the opera’s conception, the era of World War II, the early 1940s. Houston Grand Opera has performed the work twice before, in 1979 and 1983, which both times starred Jon Vickers, the Canadian tenor who exemplified the role for a generation. Now, a generation later, the opera returns in a new co-production with Opera Australia, West Australian Opera and the Perth International Arts Festival. Directed by Neil Armfield, the production stars an American tenor known internationally for his unique and personal interpretation of the enigmatic and haunted Grimes, Anthony Dean Griffey, leading an impressive and rigorous cast.

The genesis of Peter Grimes can be traced to the United States. Committed pacifists, Britten and tenor Peter Pears left their homeland on the eve of the European war, in 1939, and settled for a time on our east coast, once even sharing a house in Brooklyn with novelists Paul Bowles and Carson McCullers, poet W.H. Auden, and, improbably, the stripper Gypsy Rose Lee. Britten earned a modest living as a composer during those years and in the early 1940s he and Pears traveled to Canada and across the US to California, during which time their relationship deepened and evolved into a lifelong artistic and personal partnership.

It was in southern California that the germ of an idea came to Britten upon reading a magazine article sent to him by E.M. Forster (who would later be Britten’s librettist for his 1951 Billy Budd) about Suffolk poet George Crabbe, (1754–1832). Crabbe, the Vicar of Aldeburgh Parish for the last eighteen years of his life, wrote the extended poem The Borough, which includes a chapter called Peter Grimes, about a lonely and sadistic fisherman who is responsible for the deaths of several young boys. Britten, a Suffolk native himself, always credited this chance encounter with Crabbe through Forster to be not only the direct inspiration for his opera Peter Grimes, but also the reason for his decision to leave the United States and return to wartime Britain. “I suddenly realized where I belonged and what I lacked,” he said many years later. Looking back from 2010, with our divisive and simplified public discourse about nearly everything, it’s tempting to soften the complexity of 1940s attitudes towards conscientious objectors like Britten and Pears; they faced war tribunals and even imprisonment in their home country. Popular support for World War II was extraordinarily high; men like Britten, novelist Christopher Isherwood and Auden were given scathing treatment in the British press for leaving when they were most needed. They were inevitably branded as effete and, by a few, even traitorous. Britten planned to extend his self-imposed exile in the United States indefinitely, until the Roosevelt Administration declared in 1942 that all resident aliens must register for the draft. Britten and Pears sailed back home a few weeks later. The accepted lore about Britten’s return home, his reading of the Forster article, finding a volume of Crabbe in an LA bookshop, and the subsequent homesickness, does not quite add up to a credible reason to cross the Atlantic with German U-Boats regularly sinking ships. Still, artists make art, and Britten’s pacifism, however naive and dichotomous it may seem now, was genuine. Britten’s contribution to the war effort, settled by a compulsory tribunal once he got home, was to concertize in his England with Pears. Not all of his pacifist colleagues were so lucky: fellow composer Michael Tippett was jailed.

Auden and Isherwood were very influential on Britten. Isherwood, author of one of the perfect cultural vignettes of the Weimar Republic, I am a Camera, which became the 1966 Broadway musical Cabaret, was the first to be approached to write the libretto of Peter Grimes, a task he later claimed to be sorry he turned down, though he said, “I didn’t see any way it could work.” The violent and anti-heroic ruffian in Crabbe’s poem was transformed into essentially a new character by the eventual librettist Montagu Slater, who was carefully guided, some might say hemmed in, by the meticulous scenic outline of Britten and Pears that they prepared on their Atlantic crossing home.

In the midst of all of the above, Britten was commissioned to write an opera in memory of the deceased wife of Boston Symphony Music Director Serge Koussevitsky, a conductor whose tireless championing of new music has been consistently underrated. The planned Tanglewood premiere stalled out because of the war, so Peter Grimes was launched in the summer of 1945 by the London’s Sadler’s Wells Opera Company only a month after the European Armistice and six weeks before atomic bombs brought the entire war to a close. Peter Grimes ignited the postwar cultural recovery of England, which led to the foundation of the Arts Council of Great Britain, their now-controversial funding body for the arts, and most importantly, it resurrected grand opera as an art form, becoming the only work since Puccini’s Turandot, premiered twenty years earlier, to enter the world repertoire. The Gershwin’s 1935 Porgy and Bess, having been written for Broadway, had a circuitous journey to the world’s opera stages; it was not until Houston Grand Opera’s 1976 presentation that it was heard in the way George Gershwin envisioned it, which enabled its subsequent debut at New York’s Metropolitan Opera only twenty-five years ago, in 1985. 

Everyone is aware that 2010 is a challenging time for the arts all around the world, but it is surely not more so than was the summer of 1945. London was weary and battered from six years of bombings and rationing. By 1944, even the legendary British stoicism had begun to fray, with the appearance late in the year of Germany’s gruesomely destructive V-2 bombs, pilotless airplanes that shattered on impact, and impervious to the warning system Londoners had so perfected in the earlier Blitz. Victory against the Third Reich had never been assured, even after the entry of the United States two years into the conflict. The British government, taking precautions against a possible German invasion, even buried the famous Stone of Scone, the rock upon which every British Monarch for a thousand years has been crowned. Only Winston Churchill and Mackenzie King, the Prime Minister of Canada knew its whereabouts. Paintings from the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square were hidden away in a mountainside in Wales. Other art treasures, like the Elgin Marbles and the effigies of Britain’s monarchs in Westminster Abbey, were scuttled into unused tube tunnels of the London Underground. Over here, on April 14 of 1945, President Roosevelt died: this was the end of a long and emotional era for Americans, and a blow to the morale of the allies. The worldwide economic climate could not have been more risky. London theaters had been closed for the war; the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden was made into a troop dance hall, the Sadler’s Wells Theater was being repaired from earlier bomb damage, and their eponymous opera company toured the provinces of England, homeless for the war years but still working. Upon receiving notice that the Sadler’s Wells would reopen in 1945, Joan Cross, the enterprising soprano who headed the company, advocated opening with a new opera by Benjamin Britten, then a relatively unknown composer with one inchoate opera to his credit, Paul Bunyan. Despite these formidable obstacles, Peter Grimes appeared and, it was hoped, a new renaissance of English opera would arrive with it.

There were only a few popular and acclaimed English opera composers in history; the island nation had never had the depth of compositional tradition enjoyed by the continental countries, Italy, France, and particularly Germany and Austria. No Anglo composer since Henry Purcell (1659-1695) had written an opera in English that matched the timeless beauty and dramatic depth of his Dido and Aeneas. Much more popular than Purcell at the time was Thomas Arne (1710–78) whose rousing “Rule Britannia,” originally written as the finale of his opera The Masque of Althred, remains an unofficial second national anthem of Great Britain. Stephen Storace, a friend of Mozart’s, and brother to one of Mozart’s favorite sopranos, Nancy Storace, the original Susanna in The Marriage of Figaro, was a much-admired figure of the age; he was one of the first box-office-draw composers in England. In the more recent past, Edward Elgar (1857–1934), whose music was, in the unforgettable imagery of the travel writer Jan Morris, an “orchestration of the British Empire” wrote beautiful and dense operatic-style concert music, memorable symphonies, and, of course, the ubiquitous and fervent Pomp and Circumstance Marches, but no opera. Dame Ethel Smyth (1858–1944) wrote six operas that have not remained in the public’s affections, and the brilliant Frederick Delius also composed a half dozen, one of which, A Village Romeo and Juliet, is beautiful, dramatic, and revivable, but you’re unlikely ever to see it. Gustav Holst, well known in concert halls for his mystical suite The Planets, wrote several interesting operas, particularly his brief Savitri (1908), based on a Hindu legend; it remains popular with colleges and was performed by Houston Grand Opera in 1995. Holst’s daughter Imogen became Britten’s closest musical assistant in 1952, and she remained an integral part of Britten’s Aldeburgh circle until her death in 1984. Her gravestone in Aldeburgh churchyard, neighboring Britten’s and Pears, is touchingly inscribed with a Gnostic text her father had set to music, “The Heavenly Spheres make Music for us; All things join in the Dance.” Ralph Vaughan Williams wrote a few operas now heard almost exclusively in conservatories. Britten’s direct contemporary, William Walton (1902–83) wrote a beautiful 1954 opera on Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, now, unfortunately, known only by connoisseurs. Walton was so esteemed that he was entrusted with the official music of the last two English coronations, Edward VIII’s in 1937, and Elizabeth II’s in 1953, for which the duration of his commissioned work, Orb and Sceptre was specified to last the same length of time as Her Majesty’s coach ride from Buckingham Palace to Westminster Abbey, to accompany the first televised event of its kind. But though Walton was highly regarded in musical circles, and his music is often played by British orchestras, he has not had the lasting international appeal of Britten. The most influential native composer for Britten was the now obscurely known Frank Bridge, with whom Britten studied as a youngster, and to whom he dedicated an astounding set of string orchestra variations on one of his mentor’s themes.  

Though Britten felt a sense of musical legacy with his English past, and his literary passions were almost exclusively British, his most important musical mentors were foreign: Alban Berg, with whom he hoped to study and whose opera Wozzeck was a prototype for Peter Grimes. The music of Austria’s Gustav Mahler, Hungary’s Zoltan Kodaly, and Finland’s Jean Sibelius, all certainly shared qualities with Britten’s orchestral music, the most obvious being an enriching connection to their respective folk music. One also hears the influence of the titan Richard Strauss in Peter Grimes’s sublime second act quartet for four women. Verdi’s structural influences are all over this opera, as Britten made a conscious effort to avoid Wagner’s type of “continuous melody.” Britten admired the “extraordinary personality” of Stravinsky. Janácek and Prokofiev, both major figures in Britten’s time, seem not to have exerted the influence on him that they did on others.

Improbably and indirectly, the aforementioned Porgy and Bess exerted structural influence on Britten’s Peter Grimes: each has three acts of two scenes each, and the colossal choral round which closes Britten’s act one, “Old Joe has gone fishing,” is clearly based on Gershwin’s closing of act two, “Oh we’re leavin’ for the promised land.” Both operas are tuneful, decorative, are enormously experimental on a number of levels, and both have remarkable orchestral energy, even if their languages are diverse. The characters of Porgy and Bess are, like Ellen and Peter, both outsiders. Within the drama, Bess is judged harshly, and falsely, as a character of loose morals, and Porgy suffers woeful discrimination based solely on a physical handicap, though the society of Porgy and Bess is ultimately much more forgiving than that of Peter Grimes.

Britten was also influenced and fascinated by Dmitri Shostakovich, and he enormously admired America’s Aaron Copland, who at the time of Peter Grimes was crafting his own artistic statement on the end of WWII, also a commission from the Boston Symphony and Maestro Koussevitzky, his massive and exultant Third Symphony, which in its final movement fully develops his Fanfare for the Common Man into a roof-raising expression of hope. A young and then unknown composer/conductor led the American premiere of Peter Grimes at Tanglewood in 1946, Leonard Bernstein. Five decades later, conducting the last concert of his historic career, also at Tanglewood, Bernstein chose Britten’s Four Sea Interludes to open the program.

Peter Grimes is a visceral parable of how communities can isolate and persecute outsiders. For patrons who are content to stay on the surface of a work, Peter Grimes can be fully enjoyed on that level, as it is melodic and gripping, and composed in forms recognizable to all opera lovers, ensembles, solo scenes, stirring choruses and evocative orchestral music. It is even, occasionally, very humorous. Peter Grimes is actually several operas in one, capable of being explored and felt on several simultaneous levels. It is at once confronting and indicting, majestic, eloquent, and very disturbing; it touches on the origins of human conflict, and how the prevailing winds of opinion can be used for persecution. Taking the long view of history, the one thing humans can never claim to have mastered is the ability to be consistently compassionate.

The Grimes of Crabbe’s poem is a two dimensional monster, “untouched by pity, unstung by remorse, and uncorrected by shame”, making him an unlikely leading character for an opera. By contrast, the operatic Grimes, transformed by Montagu Slater and illuminated by Britten, is a ruffian, to be sure, but he is also poetic, lonely, distrustful, and misunderstood, in other words, very human. The man for whom the role was written, and for whom fate would assure an enormous role in how the entire opera was conceived, Peter Pears, said of the title role, “He is not a sadist nor a demonic character, and the music quite clearly shows that. He is very much of 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. There are plenty of Grimeses around still, I think!”

Britten did not admire Jon Vickers’s legendary interpretation of Peter Grimes, as Britten’s tastes ran to the very lyrical and dramatically understated. The role was written Pears, a tenor who comfortably sang La traviata, The Magic Flute, and who excelled in Bach and Schubert. Vickers was a stentorian and visceral artist, a Tristan and Otello, a febrile and terrifying actor who emphasized Grimes’s inherent violence, the dichotomy between his public and private personas, and he played the character’s tragic fate from the outset. His charismatic performance undoubtedly brought many more people into the opera house for a “modern” work than might otherwise have taken the chance. The perfect proof of a masterpiece is its ability to survive and grow from differing interpretations; there are no “definitive” performances of truly great works.

What is ultimately so powerful about Peter Grimes is the profound dignity with which it captures the darkest and, sadly, universal currents of its time. Certainly one of the reasons the opera has been so popular with a wider public than most “modern” operas (can a sixty-five-year-old opera truthfully be called “modern”?) is that it is built around forms that opera audiences know well: arias, duets, quartets, choruses, interludes. Its structure, while intensely dramatic, is also familiar and thus comforting. Britten himself felt only that he wanted to express his “awareness of the perpetual struggle of men and women whose livelihood depends on the sea — difficult though it is to treat such a universal subject in theatrical form.” And Britten’s opera is suffused with the sea, “If wind and water could write music it would sound like Ben’s,” said violinist Yehudi Menuhin, though the composer also complained about productions which were too literal or extravagant in their physical depiction. The sea is metaphoric, as it often is, of death, and it is portrayed with an array of emotions in Peter Grimes, particularly in the Four Sea Interludes so familiar on the concert platform, each of which illuminates an emotional mirror of the sea as seen from land.

If the underlying dramatic themes inseparably link this opera to its wartime beginnings, it is Britten’s powerful score that has kept it in the world’s repertoire in subsequent years. As with all of Britten’s operas, it is filled with complex tonal relationships that can be felt even if they’re not initially understood; indeed, Britten often seemed surprised and delighted to be made aware of his own harmonic intricacies later. One obvious merit to Peter Grimes for American audiences is that the work is in our language. In his introduction to the work in 1945, Britten wrote that he hoped to “restore to the musical setting of the English language a brilliance, freedom, and vitality that have been curiously rare since the death of Purcell.” And he succeeded. Britten’s prosody: his setting of the language has such rare clarity that it’s impossible to imagine it being set any other way.

The score of Peter Grimes is rich, tuneful, and cleverly inventive that to point out most of its treasures within the confines of this article would be impossible. In all of his operas, Britten managed to avoid the clichéd “love duet.” Peter Grimes has two unique love scenes, the first being an unaccompanied passage which closes the prologue, each character in a different key, illustrative of two lost souls trying to find each other before they tentatively, touchingly, come together at the very end: “Your / my voice out of the pain is like a hand that you / I can feel and know. Here is a friend.” The score’s most poignant love music is for Grimes alone in his hut, dreaming of an idyllic life with Ellen, stable, accepted at last. The music here is of otherworldly beauty, gently wavering triplets in clarinets and flutes, joined by muted strings, broken only by dark memories that will not leave him alone, the music shifts utterly and heartbreakingly: “I hear those voices that will not be drowned.”

A hallmark of Peter Grimes is the elegiac second act quartet of the four souls in the drama who cannot bring themselves to join in the witch hunt, Ellen, Auntie, the jolly pub-owner, and the two nieces who work for her, “from the gutter.” Sometimes oddly dismissed as narrative-stopping, this ravishing and short ensemble is of paramount dramatic importance, it shows us four female hearts, united in diverse yearnings, each faced with simply trying to understand a totality of feeling at its most personal level. The music, with its downward cascades of flutes and horns contrast with the three climbing feminine phrases that sensuously weave in and out of each other, is as beautiful as anything Britten ever penned, and is an indispensably gentlewww moment of musical calm, a sea of peace before the final tragic storm.

The second-act Matins service, in five parts, is of special interest. It utilizes but also transcends a device long used in opera, the offstage “church scene.” Britten’s dramaturgy is particularly chilling here: the church text is stacked with the onstage drama as the congregation intones, “Now the daylight fills the sky,” and almost simultaneously Ellen sings to young John, “Nothing to tell me, nothing to say?” Each of Ellen’s scattered thoughts in this section is tellingly set within the liturgy. The next section is an intoned free chant. Ellen discovers the indicting tear in John’s coat exactly as the congregation sings, “We have erred and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep.” Listen particularly to Britten’s maniacal version of the benedicite, “O all ye works of the Lord, bless ye the Lord,” set by him in the rare time signature of 15 / 8, and sung at a breakneck pace; it is background to Ellen’s confrontation with Peter. One stunning feature of this scene: the ladies of the chorus begin the Credo on unison F naturals, “I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth…” and quickly fade away into the distance, their text taken over by the wordless horns in the orchestra, who continue their repeated F naturals, an astounding 231 of them, in an array of rhythmic permutations, all within about three minutes.

The most chilling and dramatic music of this opera may be the brilliant fourth interlude, the passacaglia. No musical form could be more potent for summing up this moment in the drama. Peter is beginning to unravel, his thoughts and fears are endlessly repeating. A passacaglia is multiple exact repetitions of a small musical cell, over or under which other material is developed; Pachelbel’s famous Canon in D is actually a passacaglia, though admittedly, that doesn’t trip so easily off the tongue. In Britten’s passacaglia, Grimes’ phrase “God have mercy upon me!,” which has, in the previous scene been transformed into the biting “Grimes is at his exercise!,” is played by pizzicato cellos and basses, and later on the harp, forty times: a sinewy and sad viola solo begins over it, and an energetic musical dialogue begins to terrace over the entire orchestra.

There is so much else! I haven’t the space to fully expound on passages like the velvety interlude that opens Act Three, perhaps the most beautiful evocation of nighttime in opera. And what of Mrs. Sedley’s Alban Berg-ian Laendler, or the filigreed flute and harp passage which accompanies Grimes’s tortured recollection of “that evil day,” or the angelic Ellen’s “Embroidery” aria, with its baroque texture and unpredictable blocked harmonies?

Also significant is the name of the protagonist: in the Biblical book of Matthew, the fisherman Simon Peter walks on water, but begins to sink when he doubts his faith. It is Peter who denies Jesus three times, and it is Peter who first enters Jesus’ tomb three days after his death. Peter Grimes frightens the townspeople with his ghostly, “Now the Great Bear and Pleiades, where earth moves, are drawing up the clouds of human grief ” (Another operatic seafarer, Verdi’s Otello, also sings about the Pleiades). This is one of the opera’s most affecting and profound passages, sung as it is on repeated E-naturals, almost never a comfortable note for tenors, while the orchestra plays, largely, a hushed Lydian mode beneath him. The Lydian reference, one of the Gregorian chant modes, is very striking, allowing us to sonically connect to the cosmos to which Grimes’ mind has drifted, and thus to the deeper metaphoric significance of a “fisherman.” The constellation known in Englishspeaking nations as “the big dipper” is part of the “Great Bear,” the more common name of the constellation Ursa Major. Successful seafaring is never certain, and knowledge of the heavens was quite literally a life or death matter; fishermen seek their livelihood within a vast nothingness, a void which is also teaming with life and which can easily consume them, as it eventually does Peter.

Britten’s works, and the totality of his life, constantly searched for roots of the lack of compassion, for the frustrating need to isolate and corrupt weakness or eccentricity, for our inability to protect the weak. His art delved into the most profound subjects facing the postwar world, and his sensitivity was such that he could, like any great creator, feel what was not necessarily then known. British critic Edmund Wilson wrote in 1947 that Britten succeeded “in harmonizing, through Peter Grimes, the harsh helpless emotions of wartime,” and, “the blind anguish, the hateful rancors and the will to destruction of those horrible years.” In 1944 and ‘45, as Peter Grimes was being written, beyond the war, which was bloodiest single conflict in all of human history, was the soon-to-emerge specter of the Holocaust — a series of events so shameful and horrifying that no work of art could ever address anything but a sliver of it. Britten never directly tried, though he did constantly attempt to dramatize the strange human impulses that create hatred and a lack of empathic compassion, obsessive artistic preoccupations that culminated in the central work of his life, his 1962 War Requiem, written for the reopening of Coventry Cathedral, which had been closed since its 1942 bombing. He refused several requests to write a work to memorialize President Kennedy’s assassination, claiming he needed temporal distance to do it justice, but which ultimately his life didn’t provide him. On the frontispiece of the War Requiem is written, in the words of the World War I poet whose texts form the basis of the work, Wilfred Owen, “All a poet can do today is warn.”

In May of 1945, only a month before Peter Grimes premiered, a young Royal Air Force widow, her husband killed in action, elected to leave grief-stricken London to start a quieter life in a village in country England. “I have tried everything I know to get a little cottage,” she wrote to a friend, “Other people get them round here, but they are all locals. Londoners like me are not wanted, and all I seek is to make up to my little boy for the home he has lost while his father was fighting for these people.”

Peter Grimes is a warning about a kind of cruel indifference. While it is comforting that we can sometimes look back into history onto prevailing goodness, or that we can often take grateful pride in extraordinary heroism, particularly in the generation that fought WWII, we must also look back onto the fearful origins of hatred and on the harshness of neglect. Near the dénouement of Peter Grimes, we witness a historically repetitive cycle: on the individual level, each citizen of the borough is peaceful; no single person in the borough instigates violence. Yet collectively, in a herd, they are murderous. The dissonant crowd rabidly pursues Peter: “him who despises us we’ll destroy!” Yet that same group calmly returns to consonant life in the opera’s final moments. The opera doesn’t end in the traditional sense. Rather, it quietly falls away, as though interrupted by our presence, and we are left with the chilly realization that we are looking in a mirror.

“All I have is a voiceto undo the folded lie…
…There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.”

From September 1, 1939, W.H.Auden

Patrick Summers
September 6, 2010
Completed in the Rothko Chapel, Houston, Texas