MUSIC CHRONICLE
"PETER GRIMES" AND THE FUTURE OF OPERA
The libretto of
Peter Grimes,
the opera composed during the
war by Benjamin Britten in England and presented at the Metropolitan
Opera House in February for the second time in America, has as its
central figure a sadistic, egocentric fisherman. Pursuing his calling with
pathological relentlessness, he works his apprentice boys to the point
where one of them dies from exhaustion. Persecuted by village gossip,
which calls him a murderer, he seeks to recover his reputation by amass–
ing a fortune-which would mean respectability. This leads him to
drive his apprentices even more mercilessly and another boy dies in an
accident. At this point Grimes bows to his fate and scuttles his ship.
Britten has described the story as that of "the struggle of the in–
dividual against the masses" and Edmund Wilson has written that the
opera gives one the situation of "the whole of bombing, machine-gun–
ning, mining, torpedoing, ambushing humanity which talks about a
guaranteed standard of living, yet does nothing but wreck its own works,
· degrade or pervert its own moral life and reduce itself to starvation."
If
this point is to be grasped at all-and successful projection of such
a social problem in
Peter Grimes's
limited libretto certainly requires a
great deal of sensitivity and imagination on the part of the audience–
it is solely in terms of Grimes's behavior. For Grimes is pitted against
society because he is pitted against himself in a vicious psychological
circle in which the correction of one neurotic act only leads by an in–
exorable chain to another, more neurotic, one.
The composer is concerned with projecting the drama faithfully,
and to do this he employs a melodic line that imitates, and is derived
from, speech inflection; this gives the work its fundamental musical style.
But when carried to the orchestra the prosody tends to sound static,
since the flexibility of the instruments is not exploited sufficiently. Mus–
ically, the great asset of the plot is its atmospheric quality which Britten
evokes by symphonic orchestral interludes in the manner of a Romantic
tone poem, and by the interpolation of authentic sea-chanties.
822
