Peter Grimes

With his first full-scale opera, Peter Grimes (1945), the Lowestoft composer Benjamin Britten scored his first big international success. The fisherman Grimes, guilt-wracked and virtually a social outcast because of the death of an apprentice, longs for something more than social respectability: “Who can turn skies back and begin again?” is his cry for redemption. Ultimately, he is trapped not so much by his anger issues (a symptom of his being an outcast), nor by his impractical dreaming (his way of coping with his hostile environment), but by his internalising the borough’s judgment of himself—as irredeemable and unworthy to be an accepted part of the community. Britten’s sympathetic treatment of Grimes and his associates, and above all his keen ear and instinct for atmosphere, is evident from the very opening scene—the inquest into the death of Grimes’ apprentice: staccato woodwinds reflect its officials’ would-be brisk and businesslike manner; yet when Grimes steps into the dock, soft, long-breathed string cadences suggest not only his dreamy nature but also the rise and fall of waves on the beach outside. Then the first sea interlude takes us outdoors and we hear the bright, keening sound of high strings, while the swell of low brass suggests the power of the sea itself. This, and the chorus, forged from individuals at the village dance into an alarming, blood-lusting beast, are the ever-present “elemental forces” which seal Grimes’ fate.