During Welsh National Opera’s Spring 2024 Season, it was thrilling to see the new production of the rarely performed and last of Benjamin Britten’s operas, Death in Venice. It garnered superb critical reviews, performed to sell-out audiences and went on to win the SKY Arts Award for Best Opera. More thrilling still, is the prospect of another new Britten opera production, Peter Grimes, one of his earliest operas, as part of WNO’s Spring 2025 Season. 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 orchestral and choral 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, Benjamin Britten 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 relationship and collaborative partnership. By 1944 Britten began work on his first large scale opera, Peter Grimes. One can only imagine the bravery it took Britten to create such a dark and questioning opera as Grimes: he was a pacifist who had fled to America as war was declared, and a homosexual in a society which considered such relationships to be criminal. The opera was premiered in 1945 at Sadler’s Wells in London, for its re-opening after wartime closure, in a city and country still battered and reeling. Inspired by the story of a fisherman on the Suffolk coast in George Crabbe’s epic poem The Borough (1810), Peter Grimes was a remarkable work. Framed by the majesty and power of the sea, it has some of the most heartfelt and vulnerable music, but also a harshness and brutality. The opera portrays, without apology, the full spectrum of humanity.
During rehearsals some in the Sadler’s Wells Company had questioned the ‘cacophony’ of Britten’s groundbreaking 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. Grimes was a distinctly English opera, with sharp, almost Dickensian characters. 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 it is arguably one of the greatest English language operas ever written.
Often the recurring theme in Britten’s operas, from Peter Grimes onwards, is of the isolated individual, often ostracised and misunderstood, at odds with a hostile society, usually combined with the theme of corrupted innocence. Most consider these themes to be reflective of Britten’s own struggles and personal life. Britten himself when speaking of Grimes described it as ‘a subject very close to my heart – the struggle of the individual against the masses. The more vicious the society, the more vicious the individual.’
Peter Grimes remains his most famous and performed operas. The opera offers astonishing, distinct and complex music that highlights Britten’s development as an extraordinary and remarkable opera composer. Peter Grimes displays Britten’s exceptional gift for setting the English language to music so powerfully and reflects the brilliance of a titan of 20th-century opera.
Opera is often regarded as elitist, an old-fashioned and irrelevant art form. Experiencing the live performance of a great opera makes us feel and think. Opera is a prism through which all life and emotions, dark and light, can be seen. No other art form comes close, and Britten’s Peter Grimes is without doubt, great opera.
