It is with great pride that music lovers in San Diego County can point to the sun-baked, inland city of Escondido as being the place where the first seed of an idea for Peter Grimes took root in the imagination of Benjamin Britten. The composer and his lifelong companion, the tenor Peter Pears, had left England for the United States at the outset of the war in 1939. Their status as conscientious objectors during a time of great peril for England was a source of some criticism in the British press; undaunted, they followed the poet W.H. Auden and others into self-imposed exile. They spent much of their time on the east coast but in 1941 they were invited by the duo-piano team of Ethel Bartlett and Rae Robertson, who were summering in Escondido, to join them in California. Britten, who had cut his composer’s teeth scoring documentaries for the GPO (General Post Office) Film Unit, hoped for work in Hollywood but nothing came of it. He did receive and fulfill a commission from Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge to write a string quartet for a Los Angeles premiere which took up much of his time. A letter dated July 29th, however, gives us a clue that much more was going on in the deep recesses of his composer’s imagination: “We’ve just re-discovered the poetry of George Crabbe (all about Suffolk!) & are very excited—maybe an opera one day--!”
The reference to Suffolk relates to his childhood home at Lowestoft, overlooking the North Sea where storm, wind and ocean combine to wreak havoc on the rocky coast. But the poetry of George Crabbe relates to the Suffolk native poet whose work The Borough contains the pivotal characters that were eventually to populate the opera Peter Grimes. Crabbe (1754-1832) was a poet and clergyman who was widely regarded during his time, a friend of William Wordsworth, Walter Scott and greatly admired by Lord Byron for his unsentimental verse. The Borough was published in 1810 while he was chaplain to the Duke of Rutland in Leicestershire. It is a collection of 24 ‘letters’ which describe various inhabitants of the town in which Crabbe himself was born, Aldeburgh, Suffolk, about an hour’s drive south of Britten’s hometown of Lowestoft. Letter XXII is the story of Grimes, told in heroic rhyming couplets, about a stubborn, brutal fisherman haunted by his own rough upbringing who perpetuated the abuse on three of his young apprentices. At the end of the poem he dies, haunted by his father and the ghosts of the boys who died under his rough treatment.
Here is an excerpt from the poem which most parallels the situation of the boy apprentice in the opera:
“Some few in town observed in Peter's trap
A boy, with jacket blue and woolen cap;
But none inquired how Peter used the rope,
Or what the bruise, that made the stripling stoop;
None could the ridges on his back behold,
None sought his shiv'ring in the winter's cold;
None put the question,--"Peter, dost thou give
The boy his food?--What, man! the lad must live:
Consider, Peter, let the child have bread,
He'll serve thee better if he's stroked and fed."
None reason'd thus--and some, on hearing cries,
Said calmly, ‘Grimes is at his exercise.’”
Britten and Pears cobbled together a synopsis of the proposed opera on the ship back to England in the spring of 1942. One of the first things Britten did on his return to the UK was to contract Montagu Slater, playwright, poet and journalist for whose theatrical work the composer had written music some years before, to be the librettist for Grimes. The main character went through a number of transformations, from cold brute through repressed homosexual to victim of societal judgment. Slater presumably worked from the Britten-Pears synopsis, but opened up the libretto to a raft of characters suggested by other sections of Crabbe’s Borough, creating a kind of community within which Grimes’ actions receive a context. Even after demanding some changes from Slater and accepting them, Britten continued to tinker with the libretto as he wrote the score, finally coming up with a text that pleased him. During this evolution the main character became more complicated, more generously textured than before; Grimes became, in Pears’ words,
“…‘an introspective, an artist’, a sensitive and gifted individual who is misunderstood and rejected by society.” (Benjamin Britten: A Biography by Humphrey Carpenter, Charles Scribner’s Sons-New York, 1992)