Opera's New Face

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On stage, the beefy Wagnerian gods of Gotterdaemmerung snorted and bellowed in their Valhalla. In the wings, a huge Siegfried, mounted on a ladder, sagged his 230 Ibs. down onto waiting shoulders to be borne on stage. "I'm getting too fat for this," grumbled hefty Heldentenor Lauritz Melchior. A warrior-god charged into musty corners, looking for his sword; bored spear carriers fumbled through a prop basket full of hunting horns. Behind the backdrop a ragged army of stagehands lounged on the rocks of the Rhine (out of use for the moment), gulping coffee from paper cartons and jeering at a stableboy who was trying to direct a sorrel horse on stage.

Though no one in the red plush seats out front knew it, there was also hammering, hurrying and rehearsing going on all over the block-square Metropolitan Opera House. High above Valhalla, craning for an occasional amused glance at the tiny gods on stage below, painters swashed away at new scenery of an English fishing village. In rehearsal rooms, catacombed through the six-story building, singers agonized over the strange notes of a new score. On a rooftop stage, conductors and stage directors exhorted another cast fully as large and glamorous as the one before the audience.

All this work in progress would culminate this week in the Met's first new opera of the year. The new work is Benjamin Britten's Peter Grimes, and no opera written since the days of Puccini has had so much advance praise.

In Purcell's Steps. In an age when even opera's best friends are calling it decadent, bright young Benjamin Britten's admirers acclaim him as the wonder boy who will restore the glitter to opera's tarnished tiara. In England, which has never produced a composer to match its poets and playwrights, critics call him the likeliest English opera discovery since Henry Purcell composed Dido and Aeneas for a girls' boarding school 250 years ago.

The composer himself, who at 34 looks like an overworked undergraduate, will not be in the audience when the Met's gold curtains part this week. He will be off on a concert tour of Italy and Holland. A shy fellow, but sure of himself, Britten wasn't worried about how Peter Grimes would fare in Manhattan. Since London first heard Peter Grimes at Sadler's Wells in June 1945, it has been cheered 115 times, in Stockholm, Copenhagen, Milan, Berlin, Budapest, translated into eight languages, and praised in all of them.

Punch & Power. Peter Grimes is more than a new opera; for the Met it is a new kind of opera. Dissonance has been heard in the Met's hallowed halls before--in Strauss's Elektra and Salome. Bernard Rogers' The Warrior, which was flashed on & off last year, was nonsensically dissonant. Britten's music runs from perky jigs in the woodwinds to forceful, discordant barkings in the brass. The Met's soggy chorus would need a shot in the arm to handle some of the rounds, which sound like sea chanties and are as complex as a Bach fugue. Singers found themselves singing one duet written in different keys. There were none of the arias that most Italian operas hand out like a free lunch--but the audience would find at least a few things to hum.

To the Met's foreign-born conductors, Britten's English idiom was new, at first forbidding and finally fascinating. Said white-haired, Russian-born Conductor Emil Cooper, who will conduct the first performance of Grimes: "For 40 years I am a conductor, but I do not know English opera before. There is no difficulty in doing Italian opera; when you start you know what you are doing. French and German the same. This is somehow different . . . the rhythms and inflections of English speech which Britten gets into his music. . . . But I am excited!"

Once in rehearsal, when the orchestra stumbled on some of Britten's rocky rhythms, Conductor Cooper slapped his score with his baton, cried out: "No, no, it is not wrong. I am like you, gentlemen. At first I thought it was wrong . . . you will change your minds." Most already had. Muttered one violinist, tapping his temple: "It's good, it's very good."

But the real challenge for the Met, with its stable of posturing actors who sometimes make opera more gross than grand, would be to project the power and punch Composer Britten has packed into his Peter Grimes. One top Met official admitted: "If it flops, it'll be our fault." The Met, like most conservative opera houses, still stages its operas like any smalltime Italian company, with every singer's steps and gestures stylized, so that a substitute can step into any role on a moment's notice. The stylizing makes for convenience, but hot for conviction.

In rehearsal for the London premiere of Peter Grimes, Composer Britten was all over the stage, his enthusiasm overcoming his shyness, begging his singers to act their parts instead of grimacing and posturing. There were few in the Met's cast who didn't realize what they were up against. Soprano Regina Resnik is a Britten veteran: she had sung in his Rape of Lucretia in Chicago last year (TIME, June 9). But Tenor Frederick Jagel, who sings the leading role, was worried: "This is so tough dramatically that it becomes tough musically. If I don't watch my step, I end up with my tongue on my chest."

Crude but Sympathetic. Peter Grimes is no conventional operatic hero. Britten found him in a poem written by Parson Poet George Crabbe (1754-1832) and added a few hints of Freud. Crabbe's Grimes was an uncouth and unsympathetic ruffian; to Britten and Librettist Montagu Slater he is still crude but somehow sympathetic--a character who, by his uncontrollable rages, continually puts himself at swords'-points with society, which Britten represents with the massive chorus. Sings Peter Grimes: "They listen to money, these Borough gossips. I listen to courage and fiery visions. . . ."

As soon as the curtain is up (there is no overture), it is clear that Peter Grimes, although he has committed no crime, is as doomed as a character in a Kafka novel. The opera opens with Peter facing an inquest--indeed a trial--in the village hall. He has just returned from a fishing voyage with his boy apprentice dead. The inquest absolves him, but with sinister warnings that it had better not happen again, and the townspeople gossip about him. Peter rages: "Charges that no court has made will be shouted at my head . . . let me stand trial. Bring the accusers to the hall. . . ."

Only Ellen Orford, the widowed village schoolteacher, gives him comfort. His ambition is to live down his unpopularity, make money (to buy respectability), and marry Ellen. Sings Captain Balstrode, a retired merchant seaman: "Man--go and ask her. Without your booty, she'll have you now." Sings Peter: "No--not for pity!" Balstrode replies: "Then the old tragedy is in store: new start with new 'prentice, just as before."

The new apprentice, a weak young boy from the workhouse, is brought to the pub through a magnificent storm (Britten lets his furious storm music in each time the pub door is opened). The second act finds Ellen sitting beside the boy in the Sunday sunshine; she discovers that Peter Grimes has already cuffed and bruised him. This is Britten at his musical trickiest: as she sings to the boy, a church choir nearby is chanting words from the Book of Common Prayer; first the soprano's voice, then the choir, fades in & out like music in a radio play. The chorus angrily follows Peter and the boy to his hut atop a cliff.

There the boy cowers in fear, while Peter rages. As they head out the cliffside door to go fishing, the boy slips and falls, and Peter rushes after him. The townspeople find the hut empty.

A few days later, the apprentice's sweater is found washed up on the beach. The townspeople, surex that Grimes has committed another murder, head offstage on a new hunt, chanting now near, now far: "Peter Gri-imes ... Peter Gri--mes." As Peter appears on stage, clearly out of his mind, the orchestra is silent; the only sound to be heard is an eerie foghorn. His friend Balstrode warns him to "sail out . . . then sink the boat," before the mob finds him, and Peter Grimes obeys.

The Vicious Society. Composer Britten regards this opera as "a subject very close to my heart--the struggle of the individual against the masses. The more vicious the society, the more vicious the individual." Actually, Grimes does not defy the masses, only their fury: he would like to be one of them.

Those who have seen Benjamin Britten find it hard to believe that he could conceive so violent a play as Peter Grimes: it is almost like Baby Snooks reading lines from Medea. He is the kind of person no one remembers meeting at a party. Usually to be seen in a loose tweed coat, slacks and sweater, his hands habitually stuffed into his pockets, he has a rather tight, lean, nosy face which wrinkles easily into a vinegarish smile under a widow's peak of crinkly hair. He has a very English embarrassment about expressing emotion about anything. He is rarely a talker, usually a listener --a lanky, youthful but somehow worn-looking young man who is painfully awkward with strangers. Around his Suffolk coast home at Aldeburgh--the setting of Peter Grimes--the local folk are used to seeing him walking on the beach, or driving at a conservative speed in his huge old cream-colored Rolls-Royce.

Racing Distance. What on earth leads a young man to write an opera these days? To Ernest Newman, who knows his composers well (his four-volume biography of Richard Wagner is a classic), Britten is a "thoroughbred"--the musical "combination of good pedigree, good build, and clean running and jumping." And Thoroughbred Benjamin Britten ("Benjy" to his friends) had simply found that opera is his best racing distance.

Britten's musical pedigree comes from his mother's side (his father was a dentist). At two, Benjy was calling himself

"Dear," demanding to be put at the piano by squawking "Dear pay pano." By the time he was a curly-haired five, like Mozart he was composing his own childish songs. His older brother and two sisters liked to play the piano, too, but the young composer managed to wrest it from them by announcing that he "had a thought," a line that soon became a household gag. At seven, he was taking scores instead of comics to bed to read. At nine, he had written his first string quartet.

School lessons came easy to him, especially mathematics. He was nimble at tennis and cricket; but his mother refused to let him play Rugby because she considered him too frail. She kept his mind on music, started him on the viola, an instrument he still plays well (and one which has given him a fine aptitude for writing for strings).

At 16, Benjy could have passed for one time Screen Moppet Freddie Bartholomew. With his first symphony, six string quartets, ten piano sonatas and dozens of songs under his belt, he won a scholarship to the Royal College of Music. He had already learned a great deal from the late Composer Frank Bridge, and later preserved his old teacher's name by writing Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge for orchestra. At the Royal College he flummoxed the professors by his musical knowledge. Said one to a London critic: "I've got a lad under me at the moment who has such an astonishing facility he makes me feel like an old duffer."

Impacts & Climaxes. Benjy's first professional job, a year after his father's death in 1933, was writing sound-track music for a government propaganda film called The King's Stamp, which Britten says "is about all I can remember about it." (He also wrote incidental music for Love from a Stranger, a movie starring Ann Harding.) What he did remember was how to apply movie technique to' opera--how to employ the quick dramatic climaxes and rapid impacts that make Peter Grimes a thriller.

At the movie studios, he met the friends who started him on the road to writing opera: Librettist Montagu Slater, and Poet Wystan Hugh Auden, who has taught Britten most of what he knows about fitting words & music. Some of Britten's best music is written to Auden texts: the Ballad of Heroes, the Hymn to St. Cecilia. Also some of the worst: Paul Bunyan, the first try at opera for both, flopped dismally when it was performed in 1941 at Columbia University. Auden introduced Britten into his circle of friends; until then, Britten says, he was "a rather dull, middle-class boy."

Benjy and Peter Pears (for whom he wrote the leading tenor role of Grimes) arrived in the U.S. in 1939, moved in with Auden, in an arty household at 7 Mid-dagh Street in Brooklyn. It was a ramshackle, remodeled four-story brownstone whose architecture had fascinated Auden and his friends: from the street it looked something like a Swiss chalet. It was there that Negro Author Richard Wright later wrote Black Boy, and Novelist Carson Me Cullers wrote Reflections in a Golden Eye. Composer Paul Bowles worked at his Mexican ballet on the parlor piano (until Benjy quietly asked that Bowles move his piano to the basement).

Gypsy Rose Lee came in blue jeans, to paint Benjy's fourth-floor rooms. Author Christopher Isherwood, Poet Louis Mac-Neice, Composers Aaron Copland and Virgil Thomson drifted in & out. At meals, Auden presided at one end of the table. He also did the bookkeeping, and was irritated if any of the tenants questioned their bills. Benjy always paid up (about $25 a week) without a murmur.

Britten lived about six months in Brooklyn, and another three years in Amityville, Long Island. For a time Britten conducted an amateur orchestra in another Long Island town, just for the fun of it. The amateurs got so they could play a Mozart symphony creditably, then began thinking about a professional concert. Britten thought that amateurs should be content to stay amateurs.

Rosy Prospects. Britten regarded his visit to the U.S. as a vacation trip "rather from the general European atmosphere than from overwork." Though his knowledge of the U.S. is pretty well limited to New York City and suburbs, he found the U.S. "a very rosy prospect" for composers : "The American composer has little to grumble at; compared with English composers, nothing." In fact, he saw a danger of "excessive nationalism" in the way conductors indiscriminately played U.S. music, and in American composers' search for a style of their own. Says Britten: "No accident of nationality has ever excused a composer for writing bad music." Besides, in the U.S. there was too much seeking out, too much pushing of composers "before they are ready."

He had another reason for wanting to leave the U.S. England was at war, and although he is a pacifist (his personal faith is something akin to the Quakers', though he is not much of a churchgoer), he thought he belonged there. But first he went to see Conductor Serge Koussevitzky, who had played some of Britten's music. Koussevitzky gave him $200 a month for five months to write an opera.* Says Koussevitzky: "If he had asked more we would have paid it."

Back in England, a Conscientious Objectors Tribunal exempted Britten from war service, but he gave concerts in bomb shattered towns.

For a while, he lived with his married sister Beth, but found it difficult to compose while Beth's children played trains under his feet, or left sticky traces of jam on the piano. Then he and Librettist Slater moved to Snape in Suffolk, to a windmill which Britten had remodeled as a house. There they plunged into Peter Grimes. Slater would work up in a bedroom, and shout down to Benjy, lolling on the grass, "How do you like this line?" They took long walks over the bleak Suffolk downs, saying nothing to each other, each busy with his own ideas. Britten gets his themes in bed, on a bus or train, anywhere, believes strongly in letting them sort themselves out while he sleeps. "Usually I have the music complete in my head before I put pen to paper."

In the evenings, Slater and Britten cycled to the local pub to drink beer and play darts. Says Mrs. Slater: "I had to make a rule they should speak to me at mealtimes."

Harsh & Helpless. When Britten finally got the surging dissonances and powerful choruses of Peter Grimes on paper, England had its biggest homegrown musical event since the Edwardian era triumphs of Sir Edward Elgar. The London Times pronounced Peter Grimes "a great opera ... its success is deserved and inevitable."

U.S. Literary Critic Edmund Wilson, dragged unwillingly to Peter Grimes, came away as enthusiastic as everyone else. Wrote he (in his Europe Without Baedeker) : "The opera seizes on you, possesses you, keeps you riveted to your seat during the action and keyed up during the intermissions, and drops you, purged and exhausted, at the end. . . . This opera could have been written in no other age, and it is one of the very few works of art that have seemed to me, so far, to have spoken for the blind anguish, the hateful rancors and the will to destruction of these horrible years. . . .

"By the time you are done with the opera--or by the time it is done with you --you have decided that Peter Grimes is the whole of bombing, machine-gunning, mining, torpedoing, ambushing humanity which talks about a guaranteed standard of living, yet does nothing but wreck its own works, degrade or pervert its own moral life and reduce itself to starvation."

Almost overnight, an all but unknown 31-year-old was the talk of London.

It took 2 1/2 years for London's enthusiasm to spread to Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera House. Why? For one thing, no one ever accused the Met of being progressive. General Manager Edward Johnson works on the theory that his customers like what they have been given, because they come back for more. Season-ticket holders buy out 85% of the house in advance, and take potluck. More than half of them have held seats for ten years; 10% of them for 40 years. Says Johnson: "Why should we force a new venture when we can sell out the house with Rigoletto?" And, unlike Broadway theaters which can play a hit nightly until it pays off, the Met plays each opera only four or five times a season. Even if Peter Grimes is a hit (as none of the ten most recent new operas has been at the Met), it would need a run of five years to break even.

At Covent Garden, Peter Grimes is still the favorite opera in the repertory, but it doesn't make money because of its huge chorus and 80-piece orchestra. Britten has since shrewdly trimmed his sails, produced two chamber operas, The Rape of Lucretia and Albert Herring, which use only a dozen musicians and even fewer singers. Some critics and musicians (like Aaron Copland) think The Rape, which is slated for a Broadway production this fall, is even better than Peter Grimes. Even so, says Britten, "I have to work hard between operas to make a living."

Beggar's Opera. English critics, having adopted Benjy Britten as a national hero, now insist on talking like Dutch uncles to him. Some complain that he is too intellectual, too facile, too fast (though Mozart wrote 22 operas, close to 50 symphonies, and more than 500 other works in his 35 years). Others say that Britten is not original enough, that his music runs the gamut from Schubert to Stravinsky. Says Britten: "I don't see why I should lock myself inside a purely personal idiom." He thinks music went wrong in the early 19th Century, and excepts only Tchaikovsky and Chopin. Though a childhood admirer of Beethoven, he now thinks Beethoven's music was too personal. "Let's face it," Britten says, "It was very sloppy music."

Britten has now moved from Snape closer to the beach at Aldeburgh in Suffolk, where the windows look out over a tangle of masts and rigging reminiscent of Peter Grimes. There he refuses to see visitors, doesn't answer letters, and works long hours. His next projects are a choral symphony for Koussevitzky and new accompaniments to The Beggar's Opera. Where will he go from there? Says he, with an off-center grin, "There's probably nothing I won't have the cheek to try."

* Peter Grimes, which is dedicated to Koussevitzky's late first wife, Natalie, was first performed in the U.S. at Koussevitzky's summer festival at Tanglewood, Mass. (TIME, Aug. 19, 1946).

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