Mob rule revived in Britten masterpiece
ALDEBURGH, England (Reuters) - Some people visit Aldeburgh on England's stony east coast to see where Benjamin Britten set his harrowing opera of mob vengeance "Peter Grimes."
Others are blissfully unaware it is the opera equivalent of visiting the Bates Motel from "Psycho."
"We don't hear a lot of Benjamin Britten," said Norma Condy of Bexley Heath, Kent, parking a bicycle near the beach on a windy day. "Is it heavy music?"
She and her husband walked to a 12-foot (four-meter) high scallop-shell sculpture, not knowing it is a tribute to Britten's masterpiece about a fictional mob from "the borough" (a town) that bays for the blood of fisherman Grimes after he loses two apprentice boys at sea.
Pierced through the steel scallop rim, a line from "Grimes" is readable against the grey sky over Britten's native Suffolk and the North Sea tearing at the shoreline:
"I hear those voices that will not be drowned."
It's a piece as dark as dark can be.
Revived this month in the fourth new production by the English National Opera (ENO), successor to the company that gave the premiere in 1945, "Peter Grimes" has lost none of its power to shock and entertain.
"It's the story of the outsider and the community, it's this terrible eternal struggle between someone who is different and who transgresses the laws of a community, and of a community that needs a scapegoat," said director David Alden, 58.
His production will make the opera even darker. The borough will be more clearly culpable in the death of Grimes's second apprentice, and the lady innkeeper who runs "The Boar" pub is a mannish cross-dresser, people in the production say.
"Grimes" was an instant success in post-war, culture-starved London, its influence so far-reaching that the story runs that a bus-driver -- of a class unlikely to attend the opera -- announced to passengers: "This stop for Peter Grimes."
First staged at Sadler's Wells, its impact was comparable to that of a seminal masterpiece like Alban Berg's dark and powerful "Wozzeck" (1925). In tunefulness it ranks with Leonard Bernstein's musical "West Side Story," for ghoulishness alongside Stephen Sondheim's operetta and film "Sweeney Todd."
One of the most terrifying moments in opera occurs when "the borough" turns on Grimes after he's lost his second apprentice.
The 72-strong chorus bellowing "GRIMES" at top volume "makes even my hair stand on end," ENO chorister David Dyer said.
SOUND OF THE SEA
The opera was inspired by the 18th-century poem "The Borough" by George Crabbe, a collection of sketches of Aldeburgh life and people, among them a sadistic fisherman named Peter Grimes. That Britten should have written it is no surprise.
He and his partner, the tenor Peter Pears, were pacificists and conscientious objectors who fled to the United States from wartime Britain in 1939, returning in 1942 partly because Britten had become fascinated with the Crabbe poem.
They toned down the rough edges, making Grimes poetic and visionary. But he is still very much an outsider. As one of the most famous semi-closeted homosexuals in mid-20th century Britain -- Queen Elizabeth sent condolences to Pears upon Britten's death in 1976 -- Britten knew what that meant.
Homosexuality was legalized between consenting adults by act of Parliament in 1967, and at first only in England and Wales.
Britten grew up in Lowestoft, not far from Aldeburgh, his home for much of his adult life. He knew the lay of the land and the sound of the sea, captured unforgettably in four orchestral interludes.
The places where the opera unfolds -- the Tudor-style Moot Hall of the opening trial scene, and pubs like The Boar -- are still there, a real-life version of a Hollywood back lot.
"Oh, I get it. I can completely see where this music came from, I can completely see where this story came from," Stuart Skelton, the burly Australian tenor who will sing Grimes for the ENO, said after visiting Aldeburgh.
Bearded fishermen dressed in slickers mend nets down on the beach: "like a time warp," Skelton said.
But Nicholas Clark, a librarian at the Britten-Pears Foundation which preserves their 80,000 items of correspondence in the unpretentious house in Aldeburgh where Britten and Pears lived to the end of their lives, says the autobiographical angle, especially the focus on homosexuality, can be overdone.
"Britten and Pears were outcasts -- conscientious objectors and pacificists during the war, they had a pretty difficult time and of course they were both homosexual," Clark said.
"But it was essentially a fictional representation. I think Britten himself said it's not just set in Aldeburgh, it's a universal, everyman sort of town. And it highlights the dangers of one man against the mob, or indeed the mob against one man."
Britten and Pears brought new life to a dying fishing village by founding the Aldeburgh Festival of music and the arts, which has been running for more than 60 years and draws thousands of tourists to the community of 3,500 people every summer.
"They came to a community which really did accept them," Clark said.
That said, with the real village and the fictional opera blurring so easily, it is hard not to think there's something deeply personal about the work.
SIDE BY SIDE
In the cemetery of St. Peter and St. Paul's Church where Britten's and Pears's matching grey grave markers stand side by side, resident Sarah Duerr, who grew up in Aldeburgh and had come to water a tree on a relative's grave, hinted at a more "borough-esque" reaction to the pair.
"Aldeburgh was built on seafaring people...who worked the beaches -- it was a hard existence, a world away from what Britten came from," she said. "He was a conscientious objector, and he was not so popular because of his political leanings.
"But if a small village has its difficulties it also has its joys," she added. "And he (Britten) did walk the beaches and he did love it. He really did love it."
(The new English National Opera production of Peter Grimes opens on May 9 and runs through May 30 www.eno.org)
(Editing by Sara Ledwith)
