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Three years after its première Peter Grimes had been translated into seven languages and performed throughout Europe as well as in America and Australia.
The first production of Peter Grimes after the Sadler’s Wells original was staged in Sweden in 1946. After attending the first performance in Stockholm on 21 March, Erwin Stein, Britten’s friend and music publisher, sent the composer a detailed report in which he praised the orchestra in particular, concluding that the performance had been ‘a great success’. The Swedish Peter Grimes was followed in May and June that year by the German language première in Basel, a Flemish production in Antwerp and a production in Zurich in which Peter Pears and Joan Cross performed, in German, as guest artists. Britten attended both Swiss productions and gave an account of the Basel performance in a letter to Erwin Stein describing Peter Grimes, sung by Bislaw Wosniak, as ‘remarkable & a real personality – but for my taste, far too dotty, & not sympathetic enough’. Britten felt that ‘the opera came off even with quite another (& wrong) kind of Peter – but mostly because the orchestra was adequate’. In Sweden Stein had also observed that despite the imperfect performance of Peter Grimes the opera did not perish. Indeed, in a review of the 1945 première, Frank Howes, music critic of The Times, had predicted that the dual personality of Peter Grimes would cause problems of interpretation for some singers but considered that Britten had ‘taken out an insurance against any defects of characterization in the libretto, in his own music, and in his interpreter by writing music of such dramatic intensity that one is prepared to accept Grimes as an instrument of a malign fate’. |
