"Peter Grimes"

I had seen a large opera performed live only once before; some years ago Isaac and I went to Baltimore for a dress rehearsal of Strauss' "Elektra". It was a good experience, but it seemed much smaller than when Bill and I went to see "Peter Grimes" at the Metropolitan Opera House on 11 March 2008. That was a big experience.

Of the choices I had for seeing an opera at the Met, I'm quite happy that I chose to see "Peter Grimes". As I told my seat companions, it was written at a time in music history that is familiar to me, and I thought it was a work most likely to be performed in a style that would suit it and suit my taste at the same time. I was not disappointed in this expectation–although a number of critics clearly were, as we shall see.

Anthony Dean Griffey as Peter Grimes;
photo copyright © 2008 by Ken Howard (source)

Benjamin Britten wrote "Peter Grimes" to a libretto by Montague Slater, which was loosely based on a part of a poem by George Crabbe. The opera premiered in 1945 with Britten's partner Peter Pears in the title role. The action takes place in a prologue and three acts. (The Met's synopsis of the plot is good, and the page has links to other information related to the opera, including the cast list.)

The Met Opera House is a voluminous building, with seemingly an endless series of balconies and boxes; my seat was in the second balcony up from the orchestra level, a vantage point I found advantageous. The proscenium arch is an amazing 50 feet high. When we arrived there was no curtain, just the enormous facade of the set only slightly set back from the arch, filling the opening of the stage, leaving a relatively small space before it extended somewhat by the narrow apron.

The facade was imposing. It was covered in blue-grey clapboards, evoking the image of sea-side cottages long weathered by salt spray. To me it looked like a flattened-perspective image of the entire fishing village where the opera is set, as though in a photograph taken with a long, telephoto lens. In the face of this facade were a number of doors that would open now and then to reveal characters in the drama. At times the facade moved upstage and similar volumes moved in from the sides to create enclosed spaces that might represent the village pub or the interior of Grimes' cottage.

Our first impression was of the obvious: the set was meant to evoke the claustrophobic society of the Borough, the anonymous name of the sea-side village. But not only did it evoke the metaphor of the drama, it created feelings of restless anxiety in the audience as the drama progressed. Oddly, critics of the stage set all mention the sense of small-town, paranoiac claustrophobia it represents symbolically, but they largely seem to think they were immune to its effects in eliciting a visceral response from the audience to that claustrophobic representation. I thought the set was brilliant; others seemed put off by its psychological intimacy and emotional realism.

For some years now my feeling about much of Britten's music is that I'd like to like it more than I actually do. Fortunately, I have no reservations about my enthusiasm for his music in "Peter Grimes". It had some of the most amazing musical moments and I thought they suited the drama exceedingly well. It was really the first time that I'd seen and heard an opera where I felt that the music and the drama were truly integrated.

Often Britten accomplished this by having the music on stage curiously detached from what was happening in the orchestra pit; layers of music that gave us simultaneous insights about what one character was thinking, what the villagers were thinking at the same time, and what was really going to happen when they collided. As the program notes commented, to anyone who has heard the "Four Sea Interludes from Peter Grimes", a suite of orchestral excerpts, much of the musical material will sound familiar, but all that material takes on dramatic roles of amazing depth when heard as part of the opera.

There were amazing effects at times, too. Act I ended in a startling way, at full momentum from everything that came before. Grimes is in the village pub with the rest of the village. His new apprentice has arrived. He puts his arm around the youngster and says "Come boy, I'll take you home". As he goes out the door, the chorus huffs "Home! If you call that home!", the timpani punctuate the phrase with two loud strokes and–boom! boom!–the act is over, leaving the audience clutching their chairs to keep from falling off. I heard gasps of shock.

Nothing, though, was so chilling as near the end of Act III when Grimes is being hounded by the villagers, now a mob enraged at him for no good reason but convinced he is a murderer. They mill about on stage in some musical chaos that gradually resolves itself into a fortissimo tutti with the crowd shouting "Peter Grimes!"–"Peter Grimes!"–"Grimes!"–"Grimes!" The spaces of absolute silence that fell in between those shouts were bone chilling and blood curdling; I shiver just from the memory. There was no coughing or candy-wrapper disturbances from the audience during that moment.

Well, it's clear now that I have become an enthusiast, as least for this one opera, and this one production. And, what's the point of seeing a major production like this if not for the pleasure of talking endlessly about it? Of course, one then rushes to find reviews in order to 1) talk more about it; and 2) see whether the reviewers were right (agreed with me) or wrong (obviously dolts with no musical or dramatic sense whatsoever).

So, here are some of the reviews, perhaps with a little commentary by your humble Grimesophile.

Peter G. Davis wrote a sort of preview of the production in the New York Times ("In Pursuit of Britten’s Hated Outsider", 24 February 2008). He provides some nice history–this is the Met's third production since 1948–and useful character analysis. How nice, too, that he didn't even mention the set (although there is a very dramatic photograph)!

“Peter Grimes,” most would agree, is opera’s classic study of the isolated, misunderstood, rejected individual: a man who is feared, even hated, because he is different and doesn’t fit in. It’s a recurrent theme in Britten’s operas, but he never explored it with quite the explicitness and precision that he does in “Peter Grimes,” nor within a social environment so startlingly realistic.

He points out that we don't know why Grimes is so reviled by his fishing community. This may be what makes the opera so strong: each viewer is free to imagine the reason for their hatred. But the strategy works well because it is the hatred itself that is the focus of the drama and not its cause.

Davis asks the question, "Who was Peter Grimes?" The theme of social alienation is easy to project onto Benjamin Britten, a famously closeted homosexual, but that's too facile and not very compelling. This paragraph captures the mood of "Peter Grimes", and the music of Britten, very nicely:

No, Britten was hardly Peter Grimes, although he had full knowledge of the darker side of the society he lived in and the darker side of his own nature, and he wrote it all into his music. Leonard Bernstein once remarked that a piece by Britten may often seem decorative, positive and charming until you really hear it. Then “you become aware of something very dark,” he added. “There are gears that are grinding and not quite meshing, and they make a great pain.”

Alex Ross in the New Yorker ("Gale Force", 17 March 2008) wrote that "It’s a handsome-looking show, though it’s studiously, perhaps excessively, grim." On the whole, Ross seemed–better than many critics–to accept the symbolic expressionism of the stage set as appropriate to the psychology of the work. Here he points up some of its strong points, compared to a more realistic set of fishing nets and funny hats:

Still, “Grimes” profits from being seen without the usual quaint clutter. You come face to face with the opera’s darkest elements: not just the much analyzed psychology of Grimes, who may or may not be guilty of abusing his apprentices, but also the psychology of the crowd, which lustily passes judgment on the fisherman without having heard the evidence. And those walled sets serve as a superb sounding board for the chorus, which gave the performance of the night.

As he notes, Griffey's Grimes was undoubtedly different from the earlier interpretation of John Vickers at the Met, but it's still a great performance in its own right. Some of Ross' most interesting comments come at the end of his review where he wonders what it is with New Yorker's that they just won't come out to see "Peter Grimes" in the same numbers that they will for sell-out favorites.

For some more background, you might want to read Ross' blog entry where he excerpted from the article about Benjamin Britten in his book (The Rest Is Noise).

Justin Davidson for New York Magazine ("Inglese, Per Favore?") discusses Grimes in an essay about operas in English. He seemed to enjoy this production more than many of his dyspeptic colleagues, for many of the same reasons I enjoyed it.

Bruce Hodges provided a thorough review for MusicWeb International ("Britten: Peter Grimes (new production premiere)"), which also contains some outstanding photographs (credited to Ken Howard) of the set, of Anthony Dean Griffey as Peter Grimes, and of Patricia Racette as Ellen Orford. I think his discussion of the set and its undeniable psychological impact on the audience is quite accurate. More so than some of the other critics, Hodges seems to be describing the same opera that I saw. (There does, by the way, seem to be some confusion about the "catwalk" he mentions as part of the stage set seen at the end of the opera; other writers seems to indicate that it may only have been seen by the opening-night audience.)

Anthony Tommasini wrote the review for the New York Times ("The Outsider in Their Midst: Britten’s Tale of the Haunted Misfit", 1 March 2008). He liked the cast, thought the performances strong, commended Mr. Griffey's portrayal, commended Donald Runnicles' directing, commended the singing of the chorus, (all correct so far) and (predictably) hated the stage set. I suspect he blames the set for the feeling, in his words, "That the impact of Mr. Doyle’s production was not fully compelling is hard to explain, since many elements seemed so right." I find it odd that he can say

Still, after a while it becomes tiresome to look at that huge, dark set. It is a relief when the staging opens up now and then, as the creaking wall recedes to evoke public squares and scenes at a tavern.

and not realize that such a feeling was the intent. Perhaps he feels that the ideal opera staging would describe a dark, psychological abyss at the same time that it provides light, sparkling, digestible staging. I'm trying to imagine "Peter Grimes" as bel canto.

Joshua Kosman in the San Francisco Chronicle ("Review: Runnicles energizes Met's 'Grimes'", 17 March 2008) seems to be another of those who had some indigestion about the stage set, although he rightly praised the musical performances. However, I have to wonder what he was listening to when he wrote "Worst of all, [stage director] Doyle's sooty, hampered vision – an awkward transplant from the Victorian London of 'Sweeney Todd' – is at odds with the sparkling, expansive splendors of Britten's score." He makes it sound as though the musical depictions of the sea were some sort of log-flume ride at an amusement park! These musical invocations were not that of sparkling, expansive splendors but rather of an unforgiving, unrelentingly powerful force of nature. On the whole I think he was expecting to see the earlier Met production and was disappointed to be given something new and unfamiliar.

Some additional reviews that I found interesting to read, including their various, more or less obsessive complaints about the set:

Posted on March 29, 2008 at 15.57 by jns · Permalink
In: All, Music & Art, Personal Notebook

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  1. Written by Bill Morrison
    on Monday, 31 March 2008 at 13.53
    Permalink

    Since I've been home from our trip to New York, I've been reading, amongst other things, Rene Girard's "I Saw Satan Fall like Lightning" (Orbis Books, 2001). It's a book I acquired when I went to visit my former bishop, who was culling his library prior to a move.

    The translator describes Girard as "the world's premier thinker about the role of violence in cultural origins, and about the Bible's illumination of these origins and our present human condition." At the core of his thinking is the "scapegoat" mechanism by which a society at the point of exploding with the violence of "all against all" defuses the violence by turning "all against one." His principal focus, of course, is Jesus in the Bible.

    But I can't help seeing "Peter Grimes" on just about every page. Girard is not easy to quote, because he uses a specialized sui generis vocabulary. But this morning I came across a passage which can be excerpted. I think you will see why it makes me think of "Peter Grimes".

    "The victim may seem insignificant in relation to all the appetites for violence that are converging on him or her, but at this very moment the community desires nothing other than the victim's destruction. This victim thus effectively replaces all those who were in conflict just a little earlier in the thousand scandals scattered here and there and who now are all mustered against a single target.

    [Girard uses "scandal" in its root meaning as "stumbling block," the obstacles that get in the way of people fulfilling their desires. The obstacle is mostly other people standing in the way or having already got what I desire.]

    "No one in the community has an enemy other than the victim, so once this person is hunted, expelled, and destroyed, the crowd finds itself emptied of hostility and without an enemy. Only one enemy was left, one who has been eliminated [Full chorus: "Peter Grimes … Peter Grimes …. Grimes … Grimes"]. Provisionally, at least, this community no longer experiences either hatred or resentment toward anyone or anything; it feels PURIFIED of all its tensions, of all its divisions, of everything fragmenting it. [Britten expresses all this so well in the peaceful music of the last "sea scape" and the final scene of the opera.]

    "The persecutors don't know that their sudden harmony, like their previous discord, is the work of 'contagious imitation' [another Girard technical term which I'm not even going to begin to try to explain].They believe they have on their hands a dangerous person, someone evil, of whom they must rid the community. What could be more sincere than their hatred? Thus the mimetic ganging up of ALL AGAINST ONE, or THE SINGLE VICTIM MECHANISM, has the amazing but logically explicable property of restoring calm to a community so disturbed an instant earlier that nothing appeared capable of calming it down."

    [Think of the difference between the music at the end of Act 2 and that at the end of Act 3.]

    caps = italics in the text

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