| Description |
: |
The music of Peter Grimes occupied Britten from the beginning of 1944; on 10 January he was able to report to Pears that ‘I have broken the spell and got down to work on P.G.’. As was usual with Britten, the work took shape as a through-composed short score draft written in pencil, with the instrumentation indicated by means of abbreviations. This allowed the composer to forge ahead before having to make the full score, secure in the knowledge that many of the orchestration decisions were already made. For all the fluency of Britten’s working method, however, the composition of Peter Grimes was a far from straightforward process. Thirty-five sketch leaves from the opera, recently acquired by the Britten–Pears Library, demonstrate, as does the composition draft, that the composer changed his mind often, with some passages being particularly intractable. The ‘Storm’ Interlude dividing Act I is a section that caused Britten particular difficulties, judging by the number of deleted pages in the main composition draft, and the existence of this surviving discarded leaf. The sketch represents a passage from the second episode, leading up to the energetico restatement of the main storm theme at fig. 59 in the published score. During the composition of the work, this passage took, as Philip Brett has observed, ‘a variety of forms at various stages’; the music as it appears here was entirely rewritten after this draft had been discarded.
Composition draft, pencil on paper. |
