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To the Met's foreign-born conductors, Britten's English idiom was new, at first forbidding and finally fascinating. Said white-haired, Russian-born Conductor Emil Cooper, who will conduct the first performance of Grimes: "For 40 years I am a conductor, but I do not know English opera before. There is no difficulty in doing Italian opera; when you start you know what you are doing. French and German the same. This is somehow different . . . the rhythms and inflections of English speech which Britten gets into his music. . . . But I am excited!"
Once in rehearsal, when the orchestra stumbled on some of Britten's rocky rhythms, Conductor Cooper slapped his score with his baton, cried out: "No, no, it is not wrong. I am like you, gentlemen. At first I thought it was wrong . . . you will change your minds." Most already had. Muttered one violinist, tapping his temple: "It's good, it's very good."
But the real challenge for the Met, with its stable of posturing actors who sometimes make opera more gross than grand, would be to project the power and punch Composer Britten has packed into his Peter Grimes. One top Met official admitted: "If it flops, it'll be our fault." The Met, like most conservative opera houses, still stages its operas like any smalltime Italian company, with every singer's steps and gestures stylized, so that a substitute can step into any role on a moment's notice. The stylizing makes for convenience, but hot for conviction.
In rehearsal for the London première of Peter Grimes, Composer Britten was all over the stage, his enthusiasm overcoming his shyness, begging his singers to act their parts instead of grimacing and posturing. There were few in the Met's cast who didn't realize what they were up against. Soprano Regina Resnik is a Britten veteran: she had sung in his Rape of Lucretia in Chicago last year (TIME, June 9). But Tenor Frederick Jagel, who sings the leading role, was worried: "This is so tough dramatically that it becomes tough musically. If I don't watch my step, I end up with my tongue on my chest."
Crude but Sympathetic. Peter Grimes is no conventional operatic hero. Britten found him in a poem written by Parson Poet George Crabbe (1754-1832) and added a few hints of Freud. Crabbe's Grimes was an uncouth and unsympathetic ruffian; to Britten and Librettist Montagu Slater he is still crude but somehow sympathetic—a character who, by his uncontrollable rages, continually puts himself at swords'-points with society, which Britten represents with the massive chorus. Sings Peter Grimes: "They listen to money, these Borough gossips. I listen to courage and fiery visions. . . ."
As soon as the curtain is up (there is no overture), it is clear that Peter Grimes, although he has committed no crime, is as doomed as a character in a Kafka novel. The opera opens with Peter facing an inquest—indeed a trial—in the village hall. He has just returned from a fishing voyage with his boy apprentice dead. The inquest absolves him, but with sinister warnings that it had better not happen again, and the townspeople gossip about him. Peter rages: "Charges that no court has made will be shouted at my head . . . let me stand trial. Bring the accusers to the hall. . . ."