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companion, the tenor Peter Pears, and the writer-director Eric Crozier, he
founded the Aldeburgh Festival, which featured his own music, contemporary
works from Europe and America, and favorite repertory of the past; it was a kind
of anti-Bayreuth, as intimate as Wagner’s festival was grandiose.
Above all, Britten wrote Peter Grimes, an opera of staggering dramatic force
that is soaked in Aldeburgh to its bones. First heard in June 1945, one month
after the end of the European war, it tells of a fisherman who causes the death
of his apprentices and loses his mind from guilt. The story comes from the poet
George Crabbe, who grew up in Aldeburgh in the later eighteenth century, and
apparently based the character of Grimes on a real-life case. Crabbe described
the estuaries thus:
The dark warm flood ran silently and slow;
There anchoring, Peter chose from man to hide,
There hang his head, and view the lazy tide
In its hot slimy channel slowly glide …
Here dull and hopeless he’d lie down and trace
How sidelong crabs had scrawl’d their crooked race;
Or sadly listen to the tuneless cry
Of fishing gull or clanging golden-eye …
The first orchestral interlude in Britten’s opera brings the coast to life. High
grace notes mimic the cries of birds; rainbowlike arpeggios imitate the play of
light on the water; booming brass chords approximate the thudding of the
waves. It is rich, expansive music, recalling Debussy’s La Mer and Mahler’s
more pantheistic moods. Yet it hardly ravishes the senses: the orchestration is
spare, the melodic figures are sharply turned, the plain harmonies flecked with
dissonance. The music is poised perfectly between the familiar and the strange,
the pictorial and the psychological. Like the tone poems of Sibelius, it gives
shape to what a wanderer feels as he walks alone.
In his Aspen speech Britten provocatively compared the regimentation of culture
in totalitarian states to the self-imposed regimentation of the avant-garde in
democratic countries. Any ideological organization of music, he said, distorts a
composer’s natural voice, his “gift and personality.” Everything about Britten’s
style—his deliberate parochialism, his tonal orientation, his preference for
classical forms—went against the grain of the postwar era. Luminaries of the
avant-garde made a point of snubbing him; at the Dartington Summer School in
1959, Luigi Nono refused to shake his hand. Much else about Britten was at
odds with Cold War social norms: his pacifism, his leftism, and especially his
homosexuality.
Nonetheless, Britten succeeded in becoming a respected national figure, a
focus of British pride. He was a little like Sibelius, a lonely, troubled man who
became a patriotic icon. Even closer in temperament was Dmitri Shostakovich,
whom Britten got to know in the 1960s. Despite the language barrier, the two
composers formed a lasting bond. What they had in common was the ability to
write elusive emotions across the surface of their music. Britten made his inner
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landscape as vivid as the rumble of the sea, the cries of the gulls, and the
scuttling of the crabs.
Young Britten
Homosexual men, who make up approximately 3 to 5 percent of the general
population, have played a disproportionately large role in composition of the last
hundred years. Somewhere around half of the major American composers of
the twentieth century seem to have been homosexual or bisexual: Copland,
Thomson, Bernstein, Barber, Blitzstein, Cage, Harry Partch, Henry Cowell, Lou
Harrison, Gian Carlo Menotti, David Diamond, and Ned Rorem, among many
others. In Britain, too, the art of composition skewed gay. The two young
composers who seized the spotlight in the early postwar era were Britten and
Michael Tippett, neither of whom made an effort to hide his homosexuality.
The nexus of classical music and gay culture goes back at least to the final
years of the nineteenth century, when aesthetes of the Oscar Wilde type
gathered at Wagner nights in London and wore green carnations in their lapels.
“Is he musical?” gay men would ask of an unfamiliar newcomer. As the century
went on, conservatories and concert halls filled up with introverted boys who
had trouble fitting in with their fellows. Classical music appealed to some gay
youngsters because of the free-floating power of its emotions: while most pop
songs explicitly address love and/or sex between modern boys and girls, opera
renders romance in an archaic, stylized way, and instrumental works give voice
to unspoken passions. Already in the first years of the century, this music had
the reputation of being a “sissy” culture—the association troubled Charles Ives,
for one—and its cultural decline in the postwar era may have had something to
do with the discomfort that the homosexual ambience caused in the general
population.
Gay composers of the early twentieth century seldom hinted at their sexuality in
their work, although Francis Poulenc, Henri Sauguet, and other composers
associated with the Ballets Russes inhabited a recognizably gay subculture.
One who trembled at the edge of disclosure was the Polish composer Karol
Szymanowski, whose output included an unpublished, now mostly lost novel of
pornographic tendencies, titled Ephebos. In the wake of sexually liberating
travels to the south of Italy and North Africa between 1908 and 1914,
Szymanowski fashioned a fiercely sensuous style that recalled Debussy at his
most turbulent and Scriabin in his high mystic phase. His 1914 song cycle The
Love Songs of Hafiz dives into the heady world of the fourteenth-century
Persian poet Hafiz, who used the allure of young men’s bodies as a metaphor
for religious ecstasy, or perhaps the other way around. Szymanowski’s Third
Symphony (1914–16), based on a similarly charged text by Rumi (“Oh, do not
sleep, friend, through this night …”), culminates in an orgasmic whole-tone
chord for voices, orchestra, and organ. And in the daring and strange opera
King Roger (1918–24), the royal hero struggles to resist the Dionysian
magnetism of a young shepherd who proclaims, “My God is as beautiful as I
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am.” The ending is ambiguous: the audience is unsure whether Roger has
succumbed to the shepherd or overcome him. In the wake of the shepherd’s
final orgiastic ritual, Roger is left alone, holding his arms to the sun of Apollo, C-
major harmony blazing around him.
The conflict between Dionysus and Apollo is a well-worn metaphor. Stravinsky
often mused upon the divide; in the Rite he sided with the Dionysian, in Apollon
musagète with the call to order. Britten understood the polarity much as
Szymanowski did, not as an intellectual problem but as an acute personal
dilemma, a choice between sexual exposure and sexual restraint. He ended his
operatic career by setting to music Thomas Mann’s novella Death in Venice, in
which Dionysus and Apollo battle for the soul of a middle-aged man looking at a
boy on a beach. What perplexed Britten was not his sexuality per se—he never
concealed himself in a sham marriage, and sustained a loving relationship with
Pears for more than half his life—but his longing for the company of underage
males. Although that predicament places him outside most people’s experience,
the disordering power of desire is a universal theme, and Britten’s music is a
searing diary of its repercussions.
Britten grew up in an ordinary middle-class home. His father made a good living
as a dentist, although he worried about money and took refuge in a late-
morning glass of whiskey. Mrs. Britten, a gifted singer and a host of musical
soirees, nurtured her son to excess, predicting that he would become “the fourth
B,” after Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. Benjamin needed little prompting in the
direction of the Bs; music was his native tongue, and he could harmonize before
he could spell.
At the age of fourteen Britten began studying with Frank Bridge, an imaginative
composer of Debussyish tendencies who quickly perceived the boy’s potential.
The first year of Britten’s studies yielded, among other things, the orchestral
song cycle Quatre Chansons françaises, which was not only amazingly
accomplished in technical terms but disconcertingly mature in theme. One
setting is of a Victor Hugo poem that depicts a five-year-old who plays outside a
window behind which his mother lies dying; the juxtaposition of a childlike
melody with shadowy harmonies prefigures many Britten works to come.
By the age of sixteen he was writing thorny, quasi-atonal pieces. The turn
toward Viennese expressionism may have had something to do with the
alienation he felt while at boarding school, where, according to ageless routine,
older boys bullied younger ones. Britten marked his departure from Gresham’s
School with an Elegy for Viola that traces anguished nontonal circles around a
tonal center of C.
Intellectual precocity often goes hand in hand with emotional immaturity. Into his
twenties and beyond, Britten held on to an exaggerated boyishness, indulging in
games, pranks, schoolboy slang, and baby talk. At age forty he was still writing
in a School Boy’s Diary. Adult realities scared him, most of all sex. As John
Bridcut observes, in a book about Britten’s relationships with children, the
composer was in some ways emotionally frozen at the age of thirteen.
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In 1930 Britten received a scholarship to study at the Royal College of Music in
London. He also gained an informal education courtesy of the British
Broadcasting Corporation, which, then as now, offered the finest classical radio
programming in the world. At a time when David Sarnoff’s NBC was playing
Beethoven and little else, the BBC gave generous attention to living composers.
Taking a dislike to Elgar and other mainstays of English music, Britten preferred
the sharp new sounds coming out of Paris, Vienna, and Berlin, all of which
could be sampled on the BBC’s far-ranging programs. A radio broadcast in April
1930 prompted an interest in Schoenberg; he proceeded to program
Schoenberg’s Six Little Pieces at a musical soiree at his parents’ home. A
broadcast of Berg’s Wozzeck in 1934 had him glued to his set, despite bursts of
static. (He hoped to study with Berg in Vienna, but the idea was quashed on the
grounds that Berg was “immoral” and “not a good influence.”) That same year
the BBC gave Britten his first national exposure by broadcasting his choral
piece A Boy Was Born.
In the semi-socialistic spirit of the time, various divisions of the British
government had their art and propaganda units, giving employment to artists
who had lost work in the wake of the collapse of the consumerist twenties
economy. The General Post Office had a film unit that was responsible for
telling the public about the many uses of mail. In 1935 Britten went to work for
the G.P.O. Film Unit as the house composer; his first assignment was to write
music for a film about King George V’s Jubilee stamp. Later projects included
Coal Face, Telegrams, Gas Abstract, Men Behind the Meters, How the Dial
Works, Negroes, and Night Mail.
Such English-style exercises in “music for use” sharpened Britten’s ability to
write on any subject and for any occasion, and they also brought him together
with the young poet W. H. Auden, who was contributing witty texts to Post
Office films. The two men went on to collaborate on a BBC feature, Hadrian’s
Wall; two song cycles, On This Island and Our Hunting Fathers; and the
experimental operetta Paul Bunyan. Auden made it his mission to bring Britten
out of his shell, socially, sexually, and intellectually. “Stand up and fold / Your
map of desolation,” he instructed, in a poem dedicated to the composer in 1936.
“Strike and you shall conquer.” Britten’s literary taste moved into the twentieth
century, and his political views veered toward socialism and pacifism (Bridge
having already nudged him toward the latter). There was an obvious Popular
Front flavor to such projects as the 1939 cantata Ballad of Heroes, dedicated to
fallen British fighters in the Spanish Civil War; the texts were by Auden and by
Randall Swingler, literary editor of the British Daily Worker. Auden had no
stomach for agitprop, though, and his slogans fell short of Hanns Eisler’s
standards for proletarian song: “I must take charge of the liquid fire, / And storm
the cities of human desire.”
Young Britten assembled a personal language out of whatever pleased his
uncommonly sharp ear. His harmonic vocabulary stemmed both from
continental models such as Berg and Stravinsky and from the more
adventurous British composers of the time, particularly Holst, composer of The
Planets. From Holst, Britten seems to have picked up the device of the
enharmonic change, in which one note holds steady while the harmony pivots to
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a distant chord—a trick much used by twentieth-century tonal composers,
notably Shostakovich. Britten also developed the habit of wavering bluesily
between major and minor modes by modifying the third degree of the scale.
Greatly impressed by a 1936 London production of Lady Macbeth of the
Mtsensk District, he mastered the Shostakovichian arts of parody and
grotesquerie, and also took inspiration from operetta, vaudeville, and popular
song.
Mrs. Britten died in 1937, and her will allowed Benjamin to purchase the Old
Mill, in the tiny village of Snape, outside Aldeburgh—an eighteenth-century
roundhouse with a view of the river and marshes and the sea beyond.
Britten was distraught by his mother’s death, but he also felt liberated from the
role of darling boy. For the first time he began seriously to explore his sexuality,
and immediately felt torn between relationships with gay men his own age—in
1937 he got to know Peter Pears, the future love of his life—and romantically
tinged attachments to teenagers. A friendship with the eighteen-year-old Wulff
Scherchen, son of the conductor Hermann Scherchen, teetered on the edge of
sexual contact. Eventually, Auden would confront Britten with his enthrallment
to “thin-as-a-board juveniles, i.e. to the sexless and innocent.” It was a way of
evading the disorder of adulthood, Auden said, a false flight into memories of
boyhood. Auden further criticized his friend’s tendency to surround himself with
a cocoon of caretakers and admirers—“to build yourself a warm nest of love …
by playing the lovable talented little boy.” Auden concluded: “If you are really to
develop to your full stature, you will have, I think, to suffer, and make others
suffer.”
Britten ignored the advice. The sexless and the innocent attracted him to the
end. He kept trying to build his warm nest of love, although some musicians and
administrators who worked with him at the Aldeburgh Festival in later years
found the love in short supply; the tenor Robert Tear recalled “an atmosphere
laden with waspishness, bitterness, cold, hard eyes, with cabalistic meetings.”
Britten developed the unattractive habit of cutting off contact with devoted
associates who disappointed him or outlived their usefulness. Ironically, Auden
himself was among the first who suffered. That perceptive but intrusive letter he
sent to Britten in 1942 derailed their friendship.
Over the years, the list of ex-friends grew long enough that Britten reportedly
called them his “corpses.” Yet he never ceased to think of himself as a
vulnerable child: he acted not out of malice but out of a need to preserve the
illusion of a boyish paradise. In the Thomas Hardy song cycle Winter Words, he
set the poem “Before Life and After,” which may be his most personal
statement. Over a solemn procession of triadic harmonies, the singer recalls “a
time there was … when all went well,” a primal state before “the disease of
feeling germed,” and wonders whether such a time could come again. His plaint
becomes a sob: “How long, how long, how long, how long, how long?”
In April 1939, Britten traveled to America in the company of his increasingly
close friend Peter Pears, with the intention of settling there permanently. The
main reason for this unexpected move was sexual-psychological: the ill-defined
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relationship with Wulff Scherchen had grown so fraught that Britten felt the need
to leave the country. But there was also a potitical explanation. Auden had
moved to America at the beginning of the year, seeking an exit from what he
would call, in his famous poem “In Memory of W. B. Yeats,” the “nightmare of
the dark.” America was a new land, a liberal land, a refuge from the Europe of
Fascism and appeasement. On a practical level, Britten had received a tentative
job offer from Hollywood, or “Holywood,” as he called it in a letter to Scherchen.
For the BBC he had composed some brawny music to accompany a King
Arthur drama, and the director Lewis Milestone—for whom Aaron Copland later
wrote Of Mice and Men—wanted Britten to score The Knights of the Round
Table. Nothing came of that plan, and it’s just as well, since Britten’s sensitive
ego would probably have suffered terrible scars in the movie business.
Much of what Britten knew of America came from Copland, whom he had
befriended in England the previous year. On a visit to the Old Mill, Copland had
played through his children’s opera The Second Hurricane. Britten was
charmed by the freshness of the vocal writing and by the harmonious picture of
young comrades on a common mission. “It would be nice to keep in touch with
your triumphs and ‘problems,’” Copland subsequently wrote, “problems” being
young males.
Britten rapidly disabused himself of the idea of becoming an American, although
the outbreak of World War II and the attendant dangers of transatlantic travel
prevented him from returning to England until 1942. He tried valiantly to adapt
to the eccentric, bohemian lifestyle that Auden had cultivated in New York, but
he could not find the cocoon of comfort he required. In the fall of 1940, he and
Pears moved into a communal household at 7 Middagh Street, in Brooklyn
Heights, overlooking the bridge. Living with them were Auden, Paul and Jane
Bowles, the editor George Davis, and, up in the attic, Thomas Mann’s son Golo.
The high-society stripper Gypsy Rose Lee was a frequent guest; Salvador Dalí,
Christopher Isher-wood, Leonard Bernstein, and Golo’s brother Klaus also
dropped by. When the Bowleses left, the novelist Carson McCullers moved in,
with her alcoholic insanity.
Unable to work, Britten found asylum with the Mayers, German refugees on
Long Island. “Everything here is crazes—crazes—crazes,” he wrote to his
brother-in-law back home. “I’m gradually realising that I’m English— & as a
composer I suppose I feel I want more definite roots than other people.”
Yet Britten gained much from his American experience. From Broadway shows
he learned dramatic tricks that would serve him well in his operas from Grimes
onward, and, with Auden as his librettist, he made his own beguiling if not
entirely successful foray into musical theater with the archly surreal comedy
Paul Bunyan. At the same time, isolation helped him to focus his voice, and he
displayed new creative maturity in works from the years 1939 through 1943: the
piercingly elegiac Violin Concerto, apparently inspired by the tragedy of the
Spanish Civil War; the Sinfonia da Requiem, another bitterly eloquent lament in
time of war; and, most important, three major song cycles written for Peter
Pears, with whom Britten was now falling in love.
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In the songs, homosexual themes make their first appearances in Britten’s
music.Les Illuminations, for high voice and strings, draws on poems by the
bisexual Rimbaud—a “savage parade” populated by a “graceful son of Pan”
(Wulff Scherchen, according to the dedication), a “Being Beauteous, tall of
stature” (Pears), and “very sturdy rogues,” among whom are “some young
ones.” The Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo play like love letters to Pears, who
returned the love by singing them.
The third cycle, the Serenade for tenor, horn, and strings, was written in 1943,
after the return to England. In this anthology-like setting of six English poems
Britten confronted his central subject as composer, the corruption of innocence;
the cycle turned out to be almost a dry run for Peter Grimes. At the beginning,
the solo horn plays a broad theme in natural harmonics, which suggests, almost
in the style of Copland’s open-prairie music, a primordial realm untainted by
human complexity. Then the cycle moves through a sequence of established
forms, such as Pastoral, Nocturne, Elegy, and Dirge, and the “disease of
feeling” germs. At the heart of the cycle is a brilliant, frightening setting of
William Blake’s “The Sick Rose”:
O Rose, thou art sick.
The invisible worm,
That flies in the night
In the howling storm:
Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy:
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.
The strings begin with a “natural” open fifth on E and B, which pulses weirdly off
the beat. The horn starts on the note G-sharp, forming a clean E-major triad,
then falls to a G-natural, darkening the harmony to minor—a heart-sinking effect
of a kind that appears often in Schubert and Mahler. The horn spirals through a
circuitous, spasmodic pattern, creeping along in close semitone intervals and
then leaping by fourths or fifths. The tenor recites the Blake text in the space of
only eight bars, repeating the major-to-minor, light-to-dark shading of the
opening. Afterward, the horn reprises its solo, and at the very end the first two
notes are played in reverse order, G-natural to G-sharp. Thus, the piece closes
in E major. But it is hardly an optimistic resolution; it is the worm’s victory.
Britten had discovered one of the core techniques of his dramatic language, the
use of simple means to suggest fathomless depths.
Peter Grimes
George Crabbe’s poem “Peter Grimes,” part of the 1810 collection The
Borough, is the story of a vile man. Even in boyhood, Grimes is a horror,
spurning, berating, beating, and, it would seem, killing his own father. As a
fisherman, he takes to drink and grows viler. He subjects his first apprentice to
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physical abuse—“He’d now the power he ever loved to show, / A feeling being
subject to his blow”—and lets him die in bed, cause of death unknown. A
second apprentice, gentle and slender, is abused in ways that sound sexual as
well as physical: “Strange that a frame so weak could bear so long / The
grossest insult and the foulest wrong.” That boy falls from the mast of the boat.
A third dies in a storm. Finally, the residents of Aldeburgh, who have averted
their eyes from these incidents, forbid Grimes to hire more apprentices. He
floats in his boat through the estuaries, driven mad by the ghosts of his victims.
Raving but not contrite, he dies in a bed in the parish poorhouse. The epigraphs
at the head of the tale, one from Walter Scott and two from Shakespeare, all
contain the word “murder.”
When Britten and Pears first talked about a Grimes opera, they imagined a
character much like Crabbe’s. In some early sketches for the libretto, which can
be seen at the Britten-Pears Library in Alde-burgh, the death of the first boy
apprentice is described as an “accidental murder”—meaning, presumably,
manslaughter. Further, Grimes’s relationship with the boy is given a sexual
tinge. The fisherman is maddened by the boy’s youth and beauty: “Love me
darn you,” he says in one draft. A later sketch has him exclaiming:
Your body is the cat o’ nine
Tails’ mincemeat. O! a pretty dish
Smooth-skinned & young as she could wish.
Come cat! Up whiplash! Jump my son
Jump (lash) jump (lash) jump, the dance is on.
A little later in the conceptual process, Britten and Pears brought in the
playwright Montagu Slater to write the libretto, and Slater, an ardent
Communist, cast Grimes as a more sympathetic type, the victim of a closed-
minded society. Britten and Pears quickly accepted Slater’s ideas. Pears later
told the musicologist Philip Brett: “Once we’d decided to make it a drama of the
individual against the crowd, then those things”—hints of Grimes’s sexuality and
sadism—“had to go.” Pears wrote to Britten in the spring of 1944: “The more I
hear of it, the more I feel that the queerness is unimportant & doesn’t really exist
in the music (or at any rate obtrude) so it mustn’t do so in the words. P.G. is an
introspective, an artist, a neurotic, his real problem is expression, self-
expression.”
In the final drafts of the score, the collaborators can be seen covering up traces
of the original conception. More changes were made before publication, new
lines drafted to fit the extant music. Grimes’s line “You will soon forget your
workhouse ways,” addressed to the boy, becomes “She [the teacher Ellen
Orford] will soon forget her schoolhouse ways.”
Grimes’s fitful evolution from villain to victim could easily have produced a
confusing final impression. But the music is so richly layered that Grimes
becomes a fully multidimensional character, whom singers have interpreted in
strikingly different ways. Pears, the creator of the role, always portrayed Grimes
as a man wounded by his status as a social outcast. The tenor might have
agreed with Philip Brett, who read the opera as a “dramatic portrayal of the
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mechanics of oppression,” and specifically as “an allegory of homosexual
oppression.” The Canadian tenor Jon Vickers, by contrast, played Grimes as a
damaged brute, one who sways between heartbreaking lyricism and heartless
violence. Britten obviously sided with Pears’s portrayal, but Vickers’s scalding
performances pulled out hidden layers of the score.
Everything about Grimes is ambiguous. On first encounter, it looks to be an
opera in the nineteenth-century tradition, stocked with arias, duets, choruses,
and other set forms. Yet the inherited forms periodically splinter apart or stop
short, as if overcome by emotions that the composer knows are too complex to
be resolved in song. This is opera that presses constantly at the borders of the
genre, whether high or low: it bursts with folk song, operetta and vaudeville
tunes, and the vernacular punch of the American musical, and, at the same
time, it erupts in twentieth-century dissonances. In many ways, Grimes is an
English Wozzeck, extending sympathy to an ugly man, using his crimes to indict
the society that sired him. Or, as Britten put it, in his no-nonsense way: “The
more vicious the society, the more vicious the individual.”
The scene is set with a bustling, businesslike Prologue. Grimes testifies at an
inquest into the death of his first apprentice, who, in this version, dies of
dehydration at sea. “Peter Grimes! Peter Grimes! Peter Grimes!” cries the
village carrier—this tragedy will unfold against accusatory repetitions of the title
character’s name. Throughout the introductory scene, the music points up
fractures beneath Aldeburgh’s tidy surface: potential key centers jostle against
each other, major and minor triads are clouded over extraneous notes, clotted
chords appear in the lower brass.
Britten’s psychological precision in setting the English language is obvious from
the start. Like Janáček, he purposefully matches his vocal lines to the rhythms
of conversation, oratory, and dispute. Notice how he treats a simple little
question that the lawyer Swallow poses to Grimes—“Why did you do this?” A
prosecutor throwing out this phrase in court would lift his voice a little after the
“Why” and emphasize the “did” and the “do,” which is just what Swallow does.
As the scene goes on, the initial notes of the phrase—think of the first four
notes of “Auld Lang Syne” in quick, even rhythm—take on a symbolic function,
representing chatter, gossip, rumor. “How long were you at sea?” Swallow asks.
“Three days,” Grimes replies. At that, oboes and bassoons play the gossip motif
twice, staccato and crescendo. Later, it is picked up by all the winds and
becomes a driving ostinato, over which the chorus voices its growing suspicions
of Grimes. Hatred of the outsider will be the moral focus by which these upright
citizens organize themselves.
At first, Grimes is a blurry presence, trying to make himself heard above the din.
But his pride, impatience, and belligerence soon show through. “Let me thrust
into their mouths the truth itself,” he sings. In a duet with Ellen Orford, the
kindhearted schoolteacher, he reveals an alternate persona, one of keening
vulnerability. There follows Britten’s great orchestral evocation of the heaving
ocean on a cold gray morning—the first of six interludes in the opera, illustrating
different facets of the sea. Interestingly, some of the ocean’s motifs have
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previously appeared in the courtroom scene, characterizing Grimes; he and the
sea transmit the same primeval force.
The Borough’s residents, seen going about their morning business after the
interlude, are a motley lot, their peccadilloes more memorable than their virtues.
Auntie, keeper of the Boar Inn, runs a part-time brothel, making her “nieces”
available to the men of the town. The self-appointed lay preacher Boles is an
incorrigible drunk. The prim, scolding Mrs. Sedley is addicted to laudanum and
in need of a refill. When Ned Keene, the apothecary, offers Grimes a new
apprentice, the townspeople begin their muttering again; and when Ellen offers
to pick up the boy, they implicate her as well, accusing her of “fetching boys for
Peter Grimes.” Meanwhile, signs of an approaching storm gather in the
orchestra, and all but Grimes scatter to safety.
Alone against the elements, Grimes dreams aloud of a future in which he will
make a fortune, marry Ellen, and have his revenge on the town. He sings an
abbreviated aria of desperate, upward-lunging fervor:
What harbour shelters peace
Away from tidal waves, away from storms,
What harbour can embrace
Terrors and tragedies?
An attempted A-major climax is broken apart by a three-note dissonance,
starting ppp then growing in volume, in the trumpets and trombones. It moves
like a wedge, and it has the effect of cracking the harmony open: we are hurled
across the tritone into the E-flat-minor tonality of the second interlude, the music
of the storm itself. Britten offers little in the way of realistic nature painting,
instead whipping up a more abstract, contrapuntal tempest. The “What harbour”
music dominates the second part of the sequence, reinforcing the impression
that this is more a psychic storm than a physical one.
The townspeople have taken refuge at the Boar. Events follow a predictable
trajectory from merriment to altercation. They unload their pent-up unease on
Grimes, who comes blowing through the door with a vehement orchestral
restatement of “What harbour shelters peace?” (The stylistically voracious
Britten here borrowed from Gershwin, whose Porgy and Bess he saw in New
York in 1942; as Donald Mitchell points out in his multivolume compendium of
the composer’s letters and diaries, Act II, Scene 4 of Porgy is structured in
much the same way, with storm music blowing through an open door.) The
hypocritically moralizing Boles accuses Grimes of the unspeakable: “His
exercise is not with men but killing boys!” Ned Keene tries to restore good
feeling with a round of the song “Old Joe Has Gone Fishing”—an ancient-
sounding tune that Britten invented out of thin air—but the good feeling is
washed away when the door swings open and Ellen enters with the new
apprentice. Strings resume the “gossip” figure and harp on it maniacally until the
end of the act.
The storm music flares up even when the door is closed, suggesting once again
that Grimes is a storm unto himself. In the margins of Slater’s first libretto draft