| Description |
: |
“I am native, rooted here …
By familiar fields
Marsh and sand,
Ordinary streets
Prevailing wind.”
Thus Peter Grimes, as depicted by Montagu Slater and Benjamin Britten, struggles to assert his rightful place within the Borough, a community that is overtly hostile toward him. His declaration is made in the light of Captain Balstrode’s recognition that he is ‘a lonely soul’ who might do better if he leaves the Borough to ‘try the wider sea’. Despite the fact that Balstrode is one of the few characters in Britten’s opera who tries to understand him, his suggestion to Grimes is in keeping with the general view held by nearly everyone else on stage. From the prologue the purpose of most of the other characters is to drive Grimes apart, to emphasise his solitude and in so doing reject any claim to a sense of belonging that he might feel.
If Grimes’s claim to being ‘native’ is so strong, why then is it so difficult for him to be seen as anything other than an outcast by his fellow men and women? Ironically, the answer may lie in the very landscape that George Crabbe, Benjamin Britten and Montagu Slater depicted in their respective versions of his tale. Britten chose The Borough, a long poem written in 1810, as the basis for his first full length opera after Crabbe reawakened the significance of Suffolk and, particularly, the sea to his imagination. In 1941, while living in the United States, he came into possession of E.M. Forster’s article ‘George Crabbe: The Poet and the Man’, which had appeared in The Listener in May. Spurred on by Britten’s interest in the poet, Peter Pears purchased a collection of Crabbe’s verse from a Californian bookshop later in the summer of that same year. Britten’s reading of the poem, and of Forster’s essay, inspired him to create an opera based around what he later described when introducing his work in the Sadler’s Wells Opera Book Number 3 of 1945 as ‘the perpetual struggle of men and women whose livelihood depends on the sea’. The composer briefly described the process of creating the text for the opera in the same essay: ‘On arrival [back in England] in April 1942 I outlined the rough plan to Montagu Slater, and asked him to undertake the libretto. Discussions, revisions, and corrections took nearly eighteen months’. The result was a unique retelling of Crabbe’s original story. |
