User:Dybryd/Sandbox/Britten

The role of the apprentice was not originally silent--Slater wrote a

Humphrey Carpenter and Donald Mitchell have characterized this synopsis as homoerotic, and that implication is stronger in some discarded drafts of Act 2.

Murray Schafer, British Composers in Interview (London: Faber & Faber, 1963), 113-124

"A central feeling for us was that of the individual against the crowd, with ironic overtones for our own situation. As conscientious objectors we were out of it. We couldn't say we suffered physically, but naturally we experienced enormous tension. I think it was partly this feeling which led us to make Grimes a character of vision and conflict, the tortured idealist he is, rather than the villain he was in Crabbe."

Pears sketch of

"Admits his youth hurts him, his innocence galls him [...] He had no father to love him, why should he? His father only beat him, why should not he? 'Prove yourself some use, not only pretty [...] would you rather I loved you? you are sweet, young etc. - but you must love me, why do you not love me?'"

In the next version, still by Pears, the death is still the result of Grimes brutality but has become accidental:

"Grimes is furious [...] He blames & his anger grows (as he drinks). He finally drives the boy back to the door over the cliff & in terror the boy opens it: dashes out - onto the rocks."

In early drafts of the libretto by Slater, Grimes' violence was more explicit, with each lash of the whip specified:

"By God I'll beat it out of you. Stand up (lash) Straighten (lash). I'll count two. And then you'll jump to it. One - Well? Two. (The boy doesn't move. Then Peter lashes hard, twice. He runs. Peter follows.)

In the finished libretto this has been softened to "Will you move? Or must I make you dance?" with no stage direction specified.

Britten:

""For most of my life I have lived closely in touch with the sea [...] my life as a child was coloured by the fierce storms that sometimes drove ships onto our coast and ate away whole stretches of the neighboring cliffs. In writing Peter Grimes, I wanted to express my awareness of the perpetual struggle of men and women whose livelihood depends on the sea--difficult though it is to treat such a universal subject in theatrical form."

"I am especially interested in the general architectural and formal problems of opera, and decided to reject the Wagnerian theory of 'permanent melody' for the classical practice of separate numbers that crystallize and hold the emotion of a dramatic situation at chosen moments. One of my chief aims is to try and restore to the musical setting of the English language a brilliance, freedom, and vitality that hav been curiously rare since the death of Purcell."

Britten subtitled the interlude that precedes this scene "Boy's Suffering" in the score. Humphrey Carpenter points out that the melody of the interlude is carried by the viola, the instrument Britten himself played as a child, and one which is often associated with memories of childhood in his music.