Certainly the greatest single composer of opera in England since Handel, Benjamin Britten was born in Lowestoft, Suffolk in 1913. His was a solidly middle-class upbringing in the seaside town where early piano lessons stimulated a natural inclination to composition. Early connections and lessons with Frank Bridge and John Ireland (the latter at the Royal College of Music which Britten attended) were influential, although Britten’s strong musical personality and intense curiosity about contemporary styles led him to eventually leave his mentors behind. After a trip to Europe with his mother after graduation and experiencing the musical excellence in foreign centers such as Vienna and Basel left him desperate on the subject of the current state of musical and cultural life in England. Meanwhile early compositions such as the Phantasy, Sinfonietta, Simple Symphony and A Boy Was Born raised the awareness of the British public, leading to a BBC broadcast, his lifelong association with the music publishing firm of Boosey & Hawkes and work at the GPO Film Unit scoring documentaries. At GPO he met the poet W.H. Auden who was to have an influential role in his life at this time. It was during this same period, in 1937, that he met his eventual life partner Peter Pears at a rehearsal of the BBC Singers for one of his choral works. Pears, a tenor, was to provide important emotional and creative support for Britten’s works, not only creating (and inspiring) most of the tenor roles in the composer’s operas but helping to form and ‘birth’ the works as well.
Britten’s homosexuality and association with left-wing politics made his continued presence in England at the beginning of the Second World War tremendously difficult. His pacifism was particularly problematic, especially for a public person in a country rallying its people to form a united front against encroaching Fascism. Britten, Pears and poet W.H. Auden all left the country in 1939, first for Canada, and then the United States. It was there, in Escondido (cf. “The Literary Source for Peter Grimes: George Crabbe’s The Borough,” the companion article in Operapaedia), that the first idea for an opera on the subject of Peter Grimes, a character from George Crabbe’s The Borough, came to him. Upon mentioning the subject to Serge Koussevitsky during a visit to Boston, the conductor offered $1,000 (a tidy sum at the time!) in order to fund the completion of the work. Composition didn’t actually begin until Britten was fully satisfied with the libretto but he began in earnest early in 1944, knowing that Koussevitsky had promised a performance at the Berkshire Music Festival in Massachusetts that summer. As it turned out, the festival that year was postponed until the end of the war. So a British production by the Sadler’s Wells company was considered for the summer of 1945.
Quotes from Britten’s letters to Pears (to be found in Humphrey Carpenter’s excellent biography on the composer, Benjamin Britten: A Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1992) give a glimpse into the compositional process. Very early on, he writes: “Well, at last I have broken the spell and got down to work on P.G. I have been at it for two days solidly and got the greater part of the Prologue done. It is very difficult to keep that amount of recitative moving, without going round & round in circles, I find—but I think I’ve managed it.” On the 9th of April he writes: “Grimes is being such a brute at the moment. Still, I am over the worst now, and I can at least see ahead.” But in June he writes: “My bloody opera stinks, & that’s all there is to it. But I dare say that I shall be able to de-odorize it before too long.” Working at Snape was difficult for him that year as his home was not terribly far from an air base. The constant comings and goings of Royal Air Force fighters into the European theatre provided not-so-welcome sonic accompaniment. The opera’s first sketch was finally finished in the fall of 1944 when he immediately began on the orchestration.
While the composition process was coming to a close, Britten had to engage Sadler’s Wells’ board in order to get a final commitment on the production. It was certainly not a ‘done deal’ as speculation as to the subject matter varied widely, depending on whom one was talking to. But a sing-through by Britten for the directors convinced them that the piece was worth doing and they began to search about for the best physical venue (the Sadler’s Wells company, because of the war, was constantly searching about for different theatres in which to present their seasons). Rehearsals began in Manchester, where the company was on tour, and continued to be rehearsed in cities that the company happened to be visiting. It was on this tour that Pears, already chosen for the title role, helped Britten re-write much of the title role in order to help fit his voice more perfectly, and where other parts of the libretto, particularly the mad scene in Act III, were re-written with the help of Ronald Duncan. (The official librettist, Montagu Slater, was infuriated by these changes and eventually published his original libretto on his own). As the date of the premiere came closer, nerves and tempers ruled the company until June 7th, the night of the opening at the Sadler’s Wells’ home theatre in Islington in the North of London. The production of Peter Grimes was to mark the official re-opening of their theatre.
The opera was an enormous success, winning over those inside and outside of the company who were finally convinced that Britten was a composer to be dealt with and that he had created a masterwork. The curtain calls at the first performance were endless and much praise was given to Pears in the title role. Britten wrote to Imogen Holst about a month after the premiere: “I must confess that I am very pleased with the way that it seems to ‘come over the foot-lights,’ and also with the way the audience takes it, & what is perhaps more, returns night after night to take it again! I think the occasion is actually a greater one than either Sadler’s Wells or me, I feel. Perhaps it is an omen for English Opera in the future.” An omen, indeed.
The first American performance of Peter Grimes occurred, appropriately enough, at Koussevitsky’s Berkshire Festival in Tanglewood, August 1946, with his illustrious student Leonard Bernstein conducting.