The Collins Guide To Opera And Operetta. Michael White

      Oberon’s exquisitely antique-style aria ‘I know a bank’ in Act I; in Act III the lovers’ quartet, the entire Pyramus and Thisbe Scene, and the final fairy chorus, ‘Now until the break of day’, with its serene and somehow ceremonial rhythmic lilt.

      Did You Know?

      

The libretto is Shakespeare’s own text, cut down by Pears and Britten to roughly half its original length. So skilful is the reduction that they had to invent only one line of new text to cover the joins.

      Recommended Recording

      Alfred Deller, Elizabeth Harwood, Peter Pears, Josephine Veasy, Owen Brannigan, London Symphony Orchestra/Britten. Decca 425 663-2. An unbeatable classic, not least for the spectral artistry of Alfred Deller, who effectively inspired this whole opera.

Peter Grimes

       FORM: Opera in a Prologue and three acts; in English

       COMPOSER: Benjamin Britten (1913–76)

       LIBRETTO: Montague Slater; after the narrative poem by George Crabbe

       FIRST PERFORMANCE: London, 7 June 1945

       Principal Characters

      Peter Grimes, a fisherman

Tenor

      Hobson, a carrier and the village policeman

Bass

      Swallow, a lawyer and village coroner

Bass

      Mrs Sedley, a widow

Mezzo-soprano

      Ellen Orford, a widowed schoolmistress

Soprano

      Auntie, landlady at the Boar Inn

Contralto

      Balstrode, a retired sea captain

Baritone

      Ned Keene, a ‘quack’ chemist

Baritone

       Synopsis of the Plot

      Setting: The Borough, a fishing village on the east coast of England

      PROLOGUE An inquest has been held on the death of Grimes’ apprentice, lost at sea in suspicious circumstances. In spite of the villagers’ doubts, Grimes has been exonerated, but advised not to take another boy.

      ACT I Keene comes to see Grimes to tell him that he has found him another apprentice. Several objections are raised to this and Hobson refuses point-blank to fetch the boy from the workhouse until Ellen Orford, who sympathises with Grimes, agrees to accompany him. As a storm approaches, the villagers retire to the Boar, leaving Grimes alone with Balstrode, who advises the unpopular fisherman to leave the village altogether. In a rare moment of optimism, Grimes confides to Balstrode his hopes of acquiring money, respect from the villagers and, eventually, Ellen Orford as his wife. Later, Grimes joins the villagers in the Boar as the storm lashes around them, but he makes them uneasy. Indeed they become positively angry when Hobson, Ellen and the new boy arrive, soaked and exhausted, and Grimes insists on taking the boy out again immediately.

      ACT II Ellen is disturbed to see a bruise on the boy’s neck and remonstrates with Grimes when he insists, on a Sunday, that the boy must work. Grimes’ response is to hit her, an act grimly noted by the villagers who are, at that moment, emerging from church. Feelings against Grimes are rapidly rising and a deputation is sent to his hut to find out the truth. Hearing the villagers approaching, Grimes hustles the boy out of the hut and on to the cliff path; minutes later he falls to his death.

      ACT III Grimes seems to have disappeared and the boy’s sweater has been found on the beach. Hysteria and suspicion dominate the atmosphere and a full-scale manhunt is launched. But it is Ellen and Balstrode who find the half-demented Grimes. Ellen wants to take him home but Balstrode advises him that he has no alternative but to take his boat out to sea and sink it. Grimes accepts the inevitable.

       Music and Background

      This is the opera that put Britten, and British opera, on the map; and it remains the most popular work in the composer’s stage catalogue. Using a big orchestra with Verdian force, and sometimes methods, it has all the ingredients of traditional grand opera (including a Mad Scene) recast in 20th-century terms. The chorus scenes can be electrifying, the central role (one of the great tenor parts of modern times) a fascinatingly ambivalent synthesis of lyric beauty and brute force, and there is a memorable sequence of ‘sea interludes’ which function as orchestral entr’actes but also, in the manner of Berg’s Wozzeck, chart Grimes’ descent into mental breakdown.

       Highlights

      The storm interlude and Grimes’ unnerving one-note soliloquy ‘Now the Great Bear and Pleiades’ in Act I. Ellen’s radiant and archetypally Brittenesque aria ‘Glitter of waves’, the manhunt chorus ‘Now is gossip put on trial’ and orchestral passacaglia in Act II. The second manhunt, with its devastating chorus cries of Peter’s name, and Grimes’ Mad Scene in Act III.

      Did You Know?

      

Peter Grimes is the product of homesickness. The setting is Aldeburgh, close to where Britten had been brought up, but he took the idea for the opera from a magazine item on George Crabbe that he read while he was living in America. The article was by E.M. Forster, and it began: ‘To think of Crabbe is to think of England’.

      Recommended Recording

      Peter Pears, Claire Watson, Geraint Evans, Royal Opera, Covent Garden/Benjamin Britten. Decca 414 577-2. Made in 1958 and now with a number of rival versions, including Jon Vickers in the title role for Philips, but still without equal.

The Rape of Lucretia

       FORM: Opera in two acts; in English

       COMPOSER: Benjamin Britten (1913–76)

       LIBRETTO: Ronald Duncan; after André Obey’s play, itself based on Livy and Shakespeare

       FIRST PERFORMANCE: Glyndebourne, 12 July 1946

       Principal Characters