(7 of 7)
At Covent Garden, Peter Grimes is still the favorite opera in the repertory, but it doesn't make money because of its huge chorus and 80-piece orchestra. Britten has since shrewdly trimmed his sails, produced two chamber operas, The Rape of Lucretia and Albert Herring, which use only a dozen musicians and even fewer singers. Some critics and musicians (like Aaron Copland) think The Rape, which is slated for a Broadway production this fall, is even better than Peter Grimes. Even so, says Britten, "I have to work hard between operas to make a living."
Beggar's Opera. English critics, having adopted Benjy Britten as a national hero, now insist on talking like Dutch uncles to him. Some complain that he is too intellectual, too facile, too fast (though Mozart wrote 22 operas, close to 50 symphonies, and more than 500 other works in his 35 years). Others say that Britten is not original enough, that his music runs the gamut from Schubert to Stravinsky. Says Britten: "I don't see why I should lock myself inside a purely personal idiom." He thinks music went wrong in the early 19th Century, and excepts only Tchaikovsky and Chopin. Though a childhood admirer of Beethoven, he now thinks Beethoven's music was too personal. "Let's face it," Britten says, "It was very sloppy music."
Britten has now moved from Snape closer to the beach at Aldeburgh in Suffolk, where the windows look out over a tangle of masts and rigging reminiscent of Peter Grimes. There he refuses to see visitors, doesn't answer letters, and works long hours. His next projects are a choral symphony for Koussevitzky and new accompaniments to The Beggar's Opera. Where will he go from there? Says he, with an off-center grin, "There's probably nothing I won't have the cheek to try."
* Peter Grimes, which is dedicated to Koussevitzky's late first wife, Natalie, was first performed in the U.S. at Koussevitzky's summer festival at Tanglewood, Mass. (TIME, Aug. 19, 1946).