Customer Reviews

Britten: Peter Grimes

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

How very lucky we are to have the release of the TV movie version dated 1969 of Britten's Peter Grimes. All the more so because we have the composer Benjamin Britten conducting and his partner Peter Pears who created the title role of Peter in what is certainly one of the greatest operas of the twentieth century. Pears projection of the character is superb; a troubled, confused yet resolute individual trying to fit in the village. The excellent Heather Harper as Ellen tries to reach Peter but can't. Ann Robson is commendable as the opium-dazed Mrs. Sedley the village gossip who with the drunk, failed Methodist minister Bob Boles turns the village against Grimes. All the singer/actors are very well cast. Because of the constraints of time and space, the opera had to be filmed in very small quarters on an adaptable, rotational ramp set cleverly conceived by David Myerscough-Jones. So well done that it belies the crampted space and one doesn't miss the opera house. The marvelous sea interludes were played against a series of absract images projected on gauze. The whole effect is of a misty, oppressive, constantly changing sea and the fragility of the lives that try to tame it. This is a beautiful work, beautifully done.

I just got the DVD and was blown away by it. I saw this performance on TV (black & while, rabbit ears, lots of snow) back around 1970 and had fond memories of it. I'm not sure how much restoration the recording required but the video is very good and the mono audio is fine. Peter Pears, of course, is incomparable and the rest of the cast is superb as are the staging and overall performance.

This is the only opera written after Puccini's TURANDOT that I consider to be an opera, let alone a masterpiece. If you enjoy GRIMES, my recommendation is to get this superb telecast plus the one with Vickers. Two very different interpretations that cannot be equalled today in any opera house. Britten wrote GRIMES for Pears so we have that link here as well as Britten's marvelous conducting. Vickers' Grimes is more tragic while Pears is pathetic but both deserve to be seen as two sides of one coin. Picture quality, sound, and supporting cast are top-rate.

In my opinion, this film is as close to the definitive staging of Britten's masterpiece as one can hope to get. If only Peter Pears was 25 years younger! When the opera was premiered in 1945, he was 35, and Joan Cross, who played Ellen Orford, was 45. I think that this is the ideal age for Grimes and Ellen. For a casual viewer, it would be hard to make sense from the story of the opera, when the title character is obviously older than anyone else in the village (as in this film). Nevertheless, we have to be very grateful for the opportunity to see Pears in the role of Grimes. As to the question of whether he was too urbane and sophisticated for this character... Well, Jon Vickers has made Grimes more conventionally operatic and "heroic", but Pears knew better what it is all about (being present at the conception of the opera). I particularly liked his very fine and revealing interpretation of the Passacaglia.

The advantages of this production are particularly clear compared with some recent stagings of the opera (e.g., one at the Met in 2007, which I found terrible). It also seems to me that the attempts to transfer the action to the 20th century (e.g., Opera North) are misplaced. What about buying apprentices from a workhouse? In fact, the universal meanings of this opera become more, rather than less, clear when it is put into its proper historical and geographical context.

There are some inevitable technical slips related to a life performance (e.g., the Nieces singing "together we are safe" are not in fact together). For a perfect musical rendering, one should go Britten's Decca recording of 1958. The current film provides a perfect complement to this recording and an incomparable historical document.

We can assume that this is as close as we will ever get to how Britten himself conceived the opera within the limits of casting and the attributes of the medium. In and of itself, as seen in the restored version, I never saw the original 1969 BBC production, this is a model for presentation utilizing some modern film technology with stage like scenic design.
Contrary to some reviewers, the question of Peter Pears age never entered my mind. In fact, it seemed perfectly appropriate for the period represented by the opera.
Whatever the undoubted merits of other productions on DVD available, this should be considered a must buy (particularly at the price) for any collection of modern opera. While not flawless, what is, it is classic.

That's what it says right on the box, and for a change I enthusiastically agree. Everything works together in this opera - the dramaturgy and the music - to fulfill the fundamental objective of the genre, a total synthesis of words, music, and theatrics. Likewise, everything works in this production, a film made for BBC broadcast in 1969, in color, staged and recorded in a small studio, conducted by Britten himself and starring Britten's long-time collaborator Peter Pears. I have two other DVDs of this extraordinary opera, both of them quite good, but this production is iconic, a supernova of affective art. Yes, "modern" opera is valid!

Peter Pears created the role of 'Peter Grimes' in the premiere of the opera on stage. Grimes is a rough, hard-bitten, antipathetic fisherman, ostracized by his community for his cruelty and abuse of his boy apprentice. In fact, he is suspected of having murdered the boy by mistreatment. The drama begins with a coroner's inquest, which rules that the boy's death was accidental. Grimes is defended, and loved, by the schoolmistress Ellen Orford, who helps him acquire another boy from the workhouse-orphanage. The role of Orford is sung magnificently here by Heather Harper; her presence and voice, and the lyrical music written for that presence, is as warm as sunshine bursting through a drenching rain.

The scenes of the opera are all in the village: on the wharf, in the street, inside the local brothel, and in Grimes's hut. These are clearly 'sets' such as might be used in an opera house production, giving us the illusion of the living stage. The BBC deserves all reverence and adulation for pioneering the genre of opera films and operas on TV. Hurray for public broadcasting! Hurray for government patronage of the arts!

I've recently watched all four of the filmed BBC productions of Britten's operas -- Owen Wingrave, The Beggar's Opera, Billy Budd, and Peter Grimes -- and I've been dissatisfied with Owen and Billy, especially with the latter. Basically, I don't find the vocal lines in either of those operas convincing as music. I have other objections to Britten's treatment of the Billy Budd story, which I've expressed in a separate review. What astounds me is that Grimes and Budd incorporate so many of the same themes, so much of the same musical idiom and theatrical ambience, yet Grimes is a richer and more powerful opera in every way. Both works are 'symphonic' operas, in which the orchestra narrates the emotional drama as much as, or more than, the singers. There are long orchestral interludes between the swiftly-changing scenes of Peter Grimes, and they are in effect profound meditations on the action. Britten's setting of words in Billy Budd seems to me to be awkwardly prosaic, ponderous, arbitrarily bludgeoned on the surface of the orchestral music. That's not at all the case in Peter Grimes; the vocal lines nestle in the symphonic score as naturally as naked bodies in a warm bed. The libretto consists chiefly of rhymed couplets - trimeters and tetrameters - and yet the language never seems jingly or goofy, as it does in Billy Budd. This is language that wants to be sung.

There's an immense tempestuous grandeur to this opera, as grand as the earth-scouring man-devouring sea that looms behind the scenes and the story. Peter Grimes is more than Britten's masterpiece; it's one of the masterpieces of all 20th C opera.

This television performance of Peter Grimes is the most dramatically intense of all the Grimes's I've seen; and Peter Pears, who quit singing the role after this production, was at his vocal and interpretive peak. We can only surmise that he stopped singing the role because he somehow realized that he could never better himself in this. It was Pears for whom this opera was written, and his unique voice has the perfect eerie plaintiveness for the pathetic and enigmatic Grimes. This is one of the most nuanced and intelligent operatic performances I have ever seen. Heather Harper also brought her considerable best musical and dramatic skills to this enterprise.

I rarely enjoy historic performances in monophonic sound (much to my own detriment, I admit), but this is an exception: the quality and passion of the performance definitely conquer all. (You may find, as I did, that the alternate soundtrack in "enhanced" Dolby Digital mono, mitigates the flatness of the pure monophonic sound of the main soundtrack.) Otherwise, the audio is quite good, well balanced with rich bass, and only very slightly constricted and metallic in the high frequencies during the loudest parts - so nearly irrelevant that I hesitate to mention it.

We had not seen this production since it was on TV in the 1960's, and have sentimental ties to it. It is wonderful to see it again and to re-appreciate the stunning performances of all, especially Peter Pears and Heather Harper. With Britten conducting this production is musically extraordinary. No one could color the vocal line and character like Pears, and though he was older when this was recorded, he still sounds fresh vocally for the part of the troubled fisherman. If you like Benjamin Britten's music and Peter Pears' performing, you will LOVE this recording. This recording is better than I had even fondly remembered it.

An opera like this one is surprising in many ways but this is a special BBC production of 1969 and I would like to insist first on the tremendous qualities of this production.

The first element is the setting. It is a complete village square surrounded by wooden houses all raised over the ground with outside staircases to go up to the main doors. These raised houses insist on the danger the sea represents when a tidal wave or a storm comes up to the coast. All made of wood. That's a brilliant idea and yet it is entirely unrealistic. It wants to be out of time and set in a past that could make the story plausible. That village looks like a pioneering settlement in New England in the 18th century, a puritan settlement in a way where everyone is meddling with the business of others because they are locked away from the world, and their only entertainment is to gossip and accuse the one they don't like of all abominable crimes.

The second is the house of Peter Grimes, or hut if you prefer. It looks like an upturned ship hull, a dream for many seamen who want to live on the earth as if they were on their boats. It is not without recalling some other uses of that concept, and in a way it reminds me of Moby Dick and of the whale which swallowed Jonas. Here the boat is swallowing the seaman even on the earth.

The third positive point is the use of crowds. The chorus is not in anyway set aside or gathered in one place. The chorus singers are moving as they were a real crowd and that gives a good illusion of the mass movements of a crowd when they are more or less chasing Peter Grimes.

The fourth point is the very clear distinction between the officials of the village and that crowd. They move alone and not along with a mass of people and they are dressed in a slightly different way. The lawyer and mayor for example with his red coat, or Ellen, the widowed school-teacher, with a knitted sweater and a big brooch. There is thus a clear distinction between the important people and the common people, on top of the fact that the former are the soloists.

The story is of course what is essential in that opera that is telling us a story. It is a very bleak story. Peter Grimes, a solitary sailor, needs an apprentice and he takes orphans from the workhouse in the next but rather distant city. The profession of fisherman is a very difficult profession with many hazards and we could say it is not a profession for children of let's say 10. What's more Peter Grimes seems to be rather rough and careless. In other words his apprentices seem to die by accident in a rather repetitive way. Helped by Ellen at first, he is abandoned by her when she discovers that the new apprentice is being brutalized. One day when trying to run away from the hostile crowd climbing up to his hut, the new apprentice slips and falls off the cliff to his death. Peter Grimes hides away for a couple of days but he has to come back and there a retired captain gives him the only piece of advice that would pacify the village: take tour boat, go out at sea and sink the boat and yourself. And he does it.

The story is depicting a brutal world that is not so much so physically, but I would say socially. The people are meddling with their neighbors' business all the time, creating tension and stress and pushing people to the brink of sanity and causing over-reactions more than anything else. This is perfectly rendered in this production.

But there is of course the music and that is also a great element in the opera. The music never ceases and is always dramatic in its movements up and down in the most logical and yet surprising ways. We cannot really know what is coming and the notes are thus separated one from the others as if the strings of notes were in fact successions of unlinked notes. This creates in the solos a strange feeling of distance, of something lurking in-between the notes, something menacing us constantly. That tone and atmosphere finds its acme with the choruses. The various chorus-singers sing together but most of the times along lines and patterns that are crisscrossing one another to give that impression of a hostile crowd no one can stop or dominate. There is one exception to that disorder. It is the early duet of Ellen Orford and Peter Grimes when they plan some kind of common future with the new child to come. The sentences are perfectly superimposed one onto the other with only the pronouns changing. The contrast between this messy and meddling crowd as long as Peter Grimes is alive and the sudden total ignorance and forgetfulness once he is gone, meaning dead, is of course striking thanks to that use of the music to build a dangerous and menacing environment.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne, University Paris 8 Saint Denis, University Paris 12 Créteil, CEGID