It has been thrilling to see WNO’s new production of the rarely performed and last of Benjamin Britten’s operas, Death in Venice, garner such superb critical reviews and perform to sell-out audiences. More thrilling still, is the prospect of WNO’s new production of Peter Grimes, one of his earliest operas, in 2025.
Both operas offer an insight into Britten as a composer and his life, as they mark the beginning and the end of his long career. Although he composed many works, Britten’s operas are considered to be the most important and substantial part of his musical legacy.
Born in Suffolk in November 1913, on the eve of the First World War, he began his musical education with piano lessons from the age of seven, then continuing at the Royal College of Music in London under the tutelage of the composer Frank Bridge.
In 1937 Britten met the tenor Peter Pears, with whom he formed a lifelong bond and collaborative partnership. By 1944 Britten began work on his first large scale opera, Peter Grimes. Inspired by the story of a fisherman on the Suffolk coast from George Crabbe’s epic poem The Borough (1810), Grimes was premiered in 1945 at Sadler’s Wells for its re-opening after wartime closure, with Peter Pears in the titular role. During rehearsals some in the Sadler’s Wells Company had questioned the ‘cacophony’ of Britten’s ground-breaking music but Peter Grimes was a huge success with both audiences and critics. Britten’s music in Grimes was progressive and new, but not so avant-garde to be inaccessible. He always defined his mission as a composer simply ‘to please people as seriously as we can’. His contemporaries were divided: Tippet described Britten as ‘simply the most musical person I have ever met’; Bernstein considered him ‘a man at odds with the world’. Peter Grimes has gone on to enjoy regular performances and interpretations and is considered to be one of the greatest English language operas ever written.
It is often noted that the recurring theme in Britten’s operas, from Peter Grimes onwards, was of the isolated individual, often ostracised and misunderstood, at odds with a hostile society, combined with the theme of corrupted innocence. Most consider these themes to be reflective of Britten’s own struggles and personal life.
Over the 28 years between Peter Grimes and his final opera, Death in Venice (1973), these recurrent themes were developed further. Britten’s musical style also evolved, as he introduced elements of atonalism and eastern music influences, particularly gamelan percussive sounds and eastern harmonies. Death in Venice is one of the most psychologically intense operas ever written and boasts a range of exploratory, haunting and evocative music. It focuses on the troubled inner monologue of the writer Aschenbach and is an example of a ‘through-composed opera’ in which the music flows without interruption from beginning to end, with no overture, and without repeating musical themes, motifs or arias for characters, chorus or orchestra.
Death in Venice became arguably Britten’s magnum opus, andPeter Grimes remains his most famous and performed operas. Both operas reflect stories of the outsider, misunderstood and ostracised by an unfriendly society, which in many ways, reflect Britten’s own personal struggles. Both operas offer extraordinary, distinct and complex music that highlights Britten’s evolution and development as an opera composer from the beginning to the end of his career. Both operas display Britten’s exceptional gift for setting the English language to music so powerfully, and reflect the brilliance of a titan of 20th-century opera.
Don't miss your last chance to see Death in Venice in Bristol on 27 April 27 in Birmingham on 11 May. Tickets are now on sale for our brand new production of Peter Grimes next year, opening in Cardiff on 5 April 2025.
