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For a while, he lived with his married sister Beth, but found it difficult to compose while Beth's children played trains under his feet, or left sticky traces of jam on the piano. Then he and Librettist Slater moved to Snape in Suffolk, to a windmill which Britten had remodeled as a house. There they plunged into Peter Grimes. Slater would work up in a bedroom, and shout down to Benjy, lolling on the grass, "How do you like this line?" They took long walks over the bleak Suffolk downs, saying nothing to each other, each busy with his own ideas. Britten gets his themes in bed, on a bus or train, anywhere, believes strongly in letting them sort themselves out while he sleeps. "Usually I have the music complete in my head before I put pen to paper."
In the evenings, Slater and Britten cycled to the local pub to drink beer and play darts. Says Mrs. Slater: "I had to make a rule they should speak to me at mealtimes."
Harsh & Helpless. When Britten finally got the surging dissonances and powerful choruses of Peter Grimes on paper, England had its biggest homegrown musical event since the Edwardian era triumphs of Sir Edward Elgar. The London Times pronounced Peter Grimes "a great opera ... its success is deserved and inevitable."
U.S. Literary Critic Edmund Wilson, dragged unwillingly to Peter Grimes, came away as enthusiastic as everyone else. Wrote he (in his Europe Without Baedeker) : "The opera seizes on you, possesses you, keeps you riveted to your seat during the action and keyed up during the intermissions, and drops you, purged and exhausted, at the end. . . . This opera could have been written in no other age, and it is one of the very few works of art that have seemed to me, so far, to have spoken for the blind anguish, the hateful rancors and the will to destruction of these horrible years. . . .
"By the time you are done with the opera—or by the time it is done with you —you have decided that Peter Grimes is the whole of bombing, machine-gunning, mining, torpedoing, ambushing humanity which talks about a guaranteed standard of living, yet does nothing but wreck its own works, degrade or pervert its own moral life and reduce itself to starvation."
Almost overnight, an all but unknown 31-year-old was the talk of London.
It took 2½ years for London's enthusiasm to spread to Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera House. Why? For one thing, no one ever accused the Met of being progressive. General Manager Edward Johnson works on the theory that his customers like what they have been given, because they come back for more. Season-ticket holders buy out 85% of the house in advance, and take potluck. More than half of them have held seats for ten years; 10% of them for 40 years. Says Johnson: "Why should we force a new venture when we can sell out the house with Rigoletto?" And, unlike Broadway theaters which can play a hit nightly until it pays off, the Met plays each opera only four or five times a season. Even if Peter Grimes is a hit (as none of the ten most recent new operas has been at the Met), it would need a run of five years to break even.