Dawn / Sunday Morning / Moonlight / The Storm
Benjamin Britten's opera Peter Grimes marked the renaissance of the English operatic tradition. It came as a result of a commission from the Koussevitsky Foundation and was first performed at Sadlers Wells Theatre, on 7 June 1945. This was a gala occasion for, not only was this the first new opera heard in London for many years, but it also celebrated the re-opening of the theatre after five years of wartime closure. The opera was greeted with enthusiastic critical acclaim and the New York Times described the occasion as "a milestone in the history of British music". Within a short time the opera received more than one hundred performances in the major opera houses of Europe and at the Metropolitan Opera, New York. It now has a firm place in the repertoire of opera houses worldwide.
Britten used as his source George Crabbe's The Borough, a story that appealed strongly to his humanity and compassion. It told of the fisherman Peter Grimes, turned into a hard villain by the misunderstandings of his neighbours, and the deaths of two of his apprentices through ill-treatment. In this theme Britten saw man's struggle against a narrow society and a conflict between the individual and the unreasoning masses. However, Montagu Slater's libretto changed the thrust of the story to emphasize Grimes' innocence, and his helplessness against the fury of the village folk and inevitable disaster. Although he is declared innocent, suspicions still remain in the minds of his neighbours and when the mob descends upon his hut he flees to sea in his boat and never returns.
Peter Grimes retains the well tried formula of 'numbers', with set pieces of arias, quartets, choruses, and recitatives, and while the voice is supreme, the orchestra has a major part to play in creating atmosphere. This is very true of the six orchestral interludes of which four have become a popular independent entity in concert programmes. Dawn, occurring between the Prologue and the beginning of Act I., may suggest Debussy's La Mer, but inescapably it paints a picture of the North Sea and the grey sky seen from the little fishing village. Violins and flutes suggest the bleak early morning scene with cries of gulls, while harp and clarinet arpeggios picture the wind rippling the surface of the water, and a quiet, idyllic moment brings the rise of the sun over the water.
Sunday Morning leads into Act II. This is a depiction of the quiet village street as church bells ring. These are not real bells, however, but the tolling of four horns, two of them ringing out minor thirds, against major thirds from the other two. High octaves from the woodwind suggest the glitter of sunlight on the waves, of which Ellen Orford, with whom Grimes is in love, sings as the curtain rises. Introducing Act III is a description of the moonlight over the sea and the Borough in an impressionistic nocturnal portrait punctuated by the sounds of revellers at a barn dance in the village hall. Syncopated ferocity marks the last of these four interludes as the storm rises to dominate the second scene of Act I. Snarling trumpets and trombones, and angry horns describe the sea in ferment, but there is an original passage when stillness reigns in the middle of the tempest and the whole orchestra plays an agitated pianissimo ostinato, before the elements rage once more. The Four Interludes received their première as an independent orchestral work at a Cheltenham Festival concert on 13 June 1945, when the composer conducted the London Philharmonic Orchestra.
Programme notes provided by John Dalton, September 2008
