There has not been a first-rate and popular opera written since Richard Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier in 1911.* There have even been few good tries (Deems Taylor's Peter Ibbetson, two by Gian-Carlo Menotti). Last week U.S. critics got a first look and listen to a year-old English opera, Peter Grimes. They almost unanimously hailed frail, 32-year-old Benjamin Britten as the most promising operatic composer of the day.
Britten's Peter Grimes, first produced in London in June 1945, had already been sung in Swedish in Stockholm, in Flemish in Antwerp, in German in Basel and Zurich. Last week at Serge Koussevitzky's summer music colony at Tanglewood in the Berkshires, U.S. audiences heard three performances in English.
"A Lively Performance." Dr. Koussevitzky had commissioned Peter Grimes in memory of his late wife, and he proudly proclaimed it the greatest opera since Carmen. He did not conduct its U.S. première, but left it to his prize protégé, Manhattan's Leonard Bernstein. The crowd in Tanglewood's barnlike opera theater got three hours of violent and raw emotion, and agreed that in plot, at least, Peter Grimes had much in common with Bizet's lurid tale of smuggling and murder.
From a poem. by the Rev. George Crabbe, a 19th-Century English parson-poet, Librettist Montagu Slater had fashioned a psychopathic case history of a sadistic Suffolk fisherman. The first scene is an inquest into the murder of Peter Grimes's boy apprentice. Peter Grimes is exonerated, but the townspeople—fishermen, harlots and scowling drunks—still suspect him and set out to persecute him. Peter takes another apprentice to work for him, and the second boy dies in an accident. The villagers hold Peter responsible and drive him out to sea to drown himself. The score is Mozartian in its classical simplicity, Wagnerian in the way it jumps from recitative to aria without stopping the action of the story. The scenes are bound together by biting symphonic interludes.
Two student casts alternated on different evenings in singing Peter Grimes. Tenors Joseph Laderoute and William Home in the title role wrestled with the high notes which Britten had created for his good friend Tenor Peter Pears (pronounced Peers) whose coloratura-like soarings are a legend in England. The most unimpressed member of the Tanglewood audience was Composer Britten himself. Said he stiffly: "There's no use pretending it was professional. ... It was a very lively student performance."
Song for God. When he was eight years old Benjamin Britten revealed his unorthodox musical behavior by writing an angry song to be sung by God. He wrote a U.S. operetta named Paul Bunyan which got no place. At Tanglewood he glumly watched rehearsals wearing a pearl-grey jacket, a yellow tie and strap sandals.