There are so many staggeringly good scenes in Benjamin Britten’s opera of 1945 — scenes that are particularly well-staged in the 1969 production starring Peter Pears. Some of them feel like stand alone treats: wonderments of music and drama that provide bursts of heightened arousal as we are witness to some of the deepest, scariest pockets of human nature. At times, there’s an inclination to look away. Yet everything that happens is so absorbing and psychologically penetrating that we remained fixated. And there’s another kind of irony: Peter Grimes is utterly illuminating and utterly perplexing at the same time. It’s an opera that leaves one with a host of uncomfortable feelings, lingering questions, and a realization that you, me, and everyone we see on the street has within them the same emotions and drives as the characters we see on stage.
Britten and his phenomenal librettist, Montagu Slater, adopted a poem from George Crabbe’s The Borough to create this astounding piece of art. The opera’s central character is Peter Grimes, an inhabitant of a small fishing village. In the Prologue, in which an inquest occurs, the death of Peter’s young apprentice is deemed to have resulted from “accidental circumstances.” In the minds of the spectators, however, he is guilty. (Perhaps, we sense, he was deemed a guilty man before the tragic incident ever even took place).
Peter is castigated and shunned, and his only real supporters are Ellen Orford, a widow and passionate schoolteacher (whom Peter wants to marry), and an older sea captain named Balustrade. Peter is told by Swallow, the lawyer who presides over the trial, not to get another apprentice. But Peter, with the good-spirited help of Ellen, soon acquires one. A terrible incident involving the boy leads to further condemnation by the mob of villagers, leading to the drama’s thoroughly dismal end.
Despite this somber fact, Peter Grimes is an opera that feels as timely — and timeless — as just about any opera one can think of. It’s infused with incredible drama and exquisite music from beginning to end, as it explores salient facets of human nature — indeed some of which seem particularly hardwired. The story is about an outsider and everything that goes along with being an outsider, but it’s far more than that. Indeed, a well-trodden trope about an individual and community at loggerheads wouldn’t go terribly far in explaining how the opera achieves the level of transfixing power that it does.
Part of this power arises from the brilliant ambiguity that Britten and his librettist instill throughout the opera. The primary example of this is Peter’s role in the death of his first apprentice. One can try and try again to come to some determinate conclusion about his culpability; it’s a process that will have one rethinking certain scenes, which spawns a reason to rethink another scene. It’s a kind of mental tug of war when it comes to trying to figure out if Peter is guilty or innocent — or perhaps something in between.
All of this is part of the brilliance of Britten’s opera. Yet it’s only a fraction of what makes Peter Grimes such a riveting work and one worthy of much reflection.
Indeed, if there is considerable ambiguity in the character of Peter, then perhaps the nature of the mob — what it symbolizes, how it originated, what its deeper motivations are — isn’t as straightforward as it might be in, say, a drama in which we know the outcast figure is entirely innocent. To be sure, there’s no ambiguity in their minds about Peter’s guilt and character; that dilemma occurs only in us, the viewers. But the fact that many of us find the mob so disturbing, yet also carry some very uneasy feelings about the kind of person Peter really is, produces a more complicated set of feelings than simply rooting for a man who’s had the misfortune of attracting the ire of a mob. Watching Peter Grimes can be a very bleak experience, but it’s not solely due to the angry villagers. From quite early on, we sense, correctly, that more or less everything is askew in the milieu and characters that we’re watching, and that nothing but harshness and foreboding events are around the corner.
But to return to the nature of the mob. Despite their intense hatred for Peter, we don’t necessarily get the sense that the denizens of this small fishing village are a monolith of sentiments and outlooks. There are moments of squabbling, tension, and even scorn between them. This comes through to varying degrees depending on the aims of the director, but in the production mentioned at the outset, we see the elderly Mrs. Sedley (a busybody who has something bordering on a laudanum addiction), express clear disdain for the bawdy bar environment that is so popular among many of the villagers.
Moments like these may not be overly significant, but they do seem relevant in at least one sense: the village’s unified hatred of Peter seems not to stem from an one-mindedness about everything. Indeed, one never gets the sense that the village is a place of considerable happiness and harmony, and if only Peter were not there, everything would be full bliss. It seems reasonable to wonder, then, to what extent Peter’s role in the demise of his first apprentice is the actual reason for the mob’s behavior, or whether Peter has become an object onto which the mob can unleash and unburden themselves of pent-up feelings and myriad fears. Indeed, in Act 3 Scene 1, the chorus sings: “Who holds himself apart / Lets his pride rise. / Him who despises us / We’ll destroy.”
One of the many fine aspects of Slater’s libretto is that we see this kind of brutal treatment of Peter by the villagers, yet we always wonder just how, or when, such hatred began. Part of these questions stem from the fact that we know little about the past of either Peter or the village. Peter seems to have grown up there, since he refers to himself as “native,” and explains to Balustrade that the “familiar fields, / Marsh and sand, / Ordinary streets, /Prevailing wind” have deep significance for him. But has the relationship between Peter and the villagers always been the intenestly fractious one that we see just minutes into the drama? Presumably so — at least, there’s more reasons to think so than not — but there’s a kind of tantalizing intrigue in speculating about such issues.
Moreover, there’s much to wonder about Peter’s psychology. There are moments in this production where seeing Peter in certain scenes or postures might recall to one’s mind Caspar David Friedrich’s painting, The Wanderer above the Sea of Fog. As with the figure in the painting, Peter Grimes seems to be a man of rugged boldness: someone eager to explore the sublime and map his own destiny. At other times, however, he gets in his own way and expresses sentiments that are at odds with being a true visionary. For instance, he has the good will and attention of Ellen, yet refuses even to ask her to marry him until he’s become very wealthy, so that he can “answer the Borough / [and] win them over.” It’s an utterly foolish and distracted train of thought, not to mention incongruous with a man who otherwise prides himself on “fiery visions” and being his own person.
As with nearly everything in this opera, there are no easy answers or straightforward assessments. But some of these peculiar motivations — and Peter’s psychology more generally — seem to stem from a fixation on the past and an inability to move forward. And indeed, the idea of “new beginnings” can be found in various places in the opera. The warm-hearted Ellen, for example, expresses such positive, forward-looking sentiments to both Peter (Prologue) and his second apprentice (Act 2, Scene 1). There’s a terrible irony that for both of these figures — one a grown man, the other a mere boy — it is not new life, but death, that meets them in the confines of the story.
There’s much else to explore and experience in the incredible drama, music, and power that Britten and Slater achieved with Peter Grimes. Despite its somber tone, bleak representation of human community, and repeating images of storm and sea and loneliness, it’s a hauntingly beautiful and thoroughly rewarding opera.
Spectatio 