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On stage, the beefy Wagnerian gods of Gotterdämmerung snorted and bellowed in their Valhalla. In the wings, a huge Siegfried, mounted on a ladder, sagged his 230 Ibs. down onto waiting shoulders to be borne on stage. "I'm getting too fat for this," grumbled hefty Heldentenor Lauritz Melchior. A warrior-god charged into musty corners, looking for his sword; bored spear carriers fumbled through a prop basket full of hunting horns. Behind the backdrop a ragged army of stagehands lounged on the rocks of the Rhine (out of use for the moment), gulping coffee from paper cartons and jeering at a stableboy who was trying to direct a sorrel horse on stage.
Though no one in the red plush seats out front knew it, there was also hammering, hurrying and rehearsing going on all over the block-square Metropolitan Opera House. High above Valhalla, craning for an occasional amused glance at the tiny gods on stage below, painters swashed away at new scenery of an English fishing village. In rehearsal rooms, catacombed through the six-story building, singers agonized over the strange notes of a new score. On a rooftop stage, conductors and stage directors exhorted another cast fully as large and glamorous as the one before the audience.
All this work in progress would culminate this week in the Met's first new opera of the year. The new work is Benjamin Britten's Peter Grimes, and no opera written since the days of Puccini has had so much advance praise.
In Purcell's Steps. In an age when even opera's best friends are calling it decadent, bright young Benjamin Britten's admirers acclaim him as the wonder boy who will restore the glitter to opera's tarnished tiara. In England, which has never produced a composer to match its poets and playwrights, critics call him the likeliest English opera discovery since Henry Purcell composed Dido and Aeneas for a girls' boarding school 250 years ago.
The composer himself, who at 34 looks like an overworked undergraduate, will not be in the audience when the Met's gold curtains part this week. He will be off on a concert tour of Italy and Holland. A shy fellow, but sure of himself, Britten wasn't worried about how Peter Grimes would fare in Manhattan. Since London first heard Peter Grimes at Sadler's Wells in June 1945, it has been cheered 115 times, in Stockholm, Copenhagen, Milan, Berlin, Budapest, translated into eight languages, and praised in all of them.
Punch & Power. Peter Grimes is more than a new opera; for the Met it is a new kind of opera. Dissonance has been heard in the Met's hallowed halls before—in Strauss's Elektra and Salome. Bernard Rogers' The Warrior, which was flashed on & off last year, was nonsensically dissonant. Britten's music runs from perky jigs in the woodwinds to forceful, discordant barkings in the brass. The Met's soggy chorus would need a shot in the arm to handle some of the rounds, which sound like sea chanties and are as complex as a Bach fugue. Singers found themselves singing one duet written in different keys. There were none of the arias that most Italian operas hand out like a free lunch—but the audience would find at least a few things to hum.