Page 293 - (DK) The Classical Music Book - Big Ideas Simply Explained

MODERN 1900–1950 291

See also: Dido and Aeneas 72–77 ■ Tosca 194–197 ■ Peer Gynt 208–209 ■
The Wreckers 232–239 ■ A Child of Our Time 284–285

of Peter Grimes as the subject for
opera, but he also determined to
return to his native Suffolk.
In spite of the danger and
difficulties of crossing the Atlantic
I wanted to express in wartime, he and Peter Pears
my awareness of the traveled to England on a cargo
perpetual struggle of men vessel, the Axel Johnson. During
and women whose livelihood the 19-day sea journey, they worked
depends on the sea. together on the libretto for the new
Benjamin Britten project, surrounded by what Peter Benjamin Britten
Pears described as “callous, foul-
mouthed, witless recruits for Born in Lowestoft, England, in
company.” Such a setting for the 1913, Britten played the piano
beginnings of Britten’s first serious and composed from an early
opera was apt; the sea would form a age, studying with the
haunting backdrop in Peter Grimes. composer and violinist Frank
the headquarters for opera and Back home in Suffolk, Britten Bridge in his teens. In 1930, he
ballet (the Covent Garden Opera worked further on the libretto won a scholarship to London’s
Company, later the Royal Opera, with the writer Montagu Slater. Royal College of Music.
was not founded until 1946). Britten, a deeply sensitive man, From 1939 to 1942, Britten
Britten felt passionately that his wanted to explore the character and the tenor Peter Pears lived
country should have a permanent of Crabbe’s murderous outcast. in America. On their return
national opera company and Britten felt himself to be an outsider to London, Pears joined the
Sadler’s Wells Opera Company,
believed the Sadler’s Wells Opera in society and not only because of whose theatre premiered Peter
Company, which later became his pacifism. He had first met Peter Grimes, in 1945. The success
English National Opera, was a Pears in 1937, and the two suffered ❯❯ of the opera excited interest
good first step. in every new work by Britten.
Britten and Pears formed
Inspiration for Grimes the English Opera Group in
During World War II, Britten and his 1947 and in 1948 launched the
partner, the tenor Peter Pears—a Aldeburgh Festival. In 1962,
fellow pacifist—spent three years Britten’s War Requiem was
in America. While there, Britten premiered in the newly rebuilt
read George Crabbe’s poem The Coventry Cathedral. Britten
Borough, published in 1810, in was made a life peer in 1976,
which Crabbe devotes a whole a few months before he died
section to the villain Peter Grimes, of heart failure. He was the
first composer or musician to
a murderous outcast, who is hunted be made a member of Britain’s
down by his community. The long House of Lords.
poem depicts the people of the
Suffolk town of Aldeburgh, on
England’s east coast, and describes Other key works
the local flat landscape, the marshy 1946 The Young Person’s
terrain, the stony beaches, and the The soprano Joan Cross plays Guide to the Orchestra
the schoolmistress, Peter Pears is
suck and surge of the waves. It Peter Grimes (center), and Leonard 1951 Billy Budd
moved Britten so deeply that not Thompson is the apprentice in the 1961 War Requiem
only did he decide to use the story original 1945 production of the opera.

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