Britten: Four Sea Interludes and Passacaglia from Peter Grimes

Benjamin Britten (1913-19765)

Four Sea Interludes and Passacaglia from Peter Grimes

1. Dawn
2. Sunday Morning
3. Passacaglia
4. Moonlight
5. Storm

George Crabbe’s collection The Borough is a set of 24 poems in heroic couplets describing life and characters in a 19th-century Sussex fishing village. Each poem is styled as a letter describing an aspect or character from village life. The model for the poems was drawn from the poet’s childhood home of Aldeburgh. Benjamin Britten was born further up the same coastline in Lowestoft and later made his home in Aldeburgh. He therefore knew Crabbe’s world well, and the music he composed for his opera Peter Grimes, based on the 22nd of Crabbe’s letters, is vividly evocative of the Sussex coast. However, his first encounter with the poems was in Los Angeles, where he found a copy in a second-hand bookshop in 1941 after reading an article about Crabbe by E.M. Forster in the Listener.

Britten and Peter Pears had travelled to America to escape an uncertain situation in Britain as Europe drifted towards war. In 1942 they returned home, constructing a scenario for an opera from the poem while on the plane back to England. Having appeared before a tribunal for conscientious objectors, Britten was spared prison, and set to work on the opera, which was mostly composed in 1944. It was commissioned by Serge Koussevitzky in memory of his wife Natalie. The first performance was intended for the Berkshire Festival in New England in 1944, but the war prevented this, and so Peter Grimes was eventually unveiled at Covent Garden in 1945.

Britten’s take on the character of Grimes is considerably more sympathetic than Crabbe’s, but he is nevertheless an ambiguous character: Britten clearly identifies with him as an outsider in an intolerant and often hypocritical society, but Grime’s brutality is not glossed over. Through the course of the opera, a series of seascapes portray not only the Sussex coast, but Grime’s mental anguish as he is progressively alienated from even those villagers who are initially sympathetic. The first interlude evokes the cold wind of dawn, with low brass chords implying something oppressive lurking in the background. “Sunday Morning” in contrast depicts a bright scene, with sunlight sparkling on the waves and church bells ringing. The Passacaglia is built on a recurring bass line which derives from Grimes’s cry of “May God have mercy upon me!” as he strikes Ellen Orford, alienating the one friend he has left in the village. This same phrase is subsequently heard as the villager’s insinuating refrain, “Grimes is at his Exercise!” as they speculate about his treatment of his apprentice. “Moonlight” depicts a tranquil night in the harbour, though punctuated with stabbing phrases suggesting Grime’s mental agony. The final “Storm” appears before Act One, Scene Two of the opera; Britten changed the sequence when he extracted the Interludes as a concert work in order to provide an effective conclusion. In the middle of an increasingly violent tempest emerges briefly an ecstatic moment, which, wrote Britten, “describes the ecstasy of Peter Grimes... whose existence is a solitary one and whose soul is stimulated by such a storm as this.”