Classical Music

Everyone Hates Peter Grimes

Opera Review: “Peter Grimes” @ The Met

(Photos by Ken Howard)

Like its central character, Benjamin Britten’s “Peter Grimes” occupies a precarious place in the social consciousness. With its attractive score and mysteriously dark story, the opera evokes the same kind of scrutiny the ambiguously sinister yet psychologically compelling Grimes attracts from the local townspeople; folks don’t know whether to sympathize with it, or to send it off to some penal colony never to be heard from again. But Grimes the opera is faring better these days than its conflicted hero in that it is often considered to be one of the greatest operas of the last century. Yet because of its subject–an angry fisherman whose abusive violence toward young boy apprentices attracts the town’s judgement when one of the boys turns up inexplicably dead–the opera cannot escape a lingering skepticism about whether or not it should be taken as a work of great artistic and moral value.

The opera is often championed as an allegory for the outcast soul, particularly that of the gay male in contemporary society (a position unfortunately promoted by its creators, Britten and his long-time partner and the first tenor to sing Grimes, Peter Pears), but such metaphor making is seriously compromised by the textual realities of the work, that, even interpreted liberally, still do not excuse Grimes’s violence: This opera is not about adult consensual romantic love; it’s about an adult person who is violent toward children. So casting is key, given that the audience is expected to identify with a hero who is essentially the town child abuser. If you get the right Grimes to enter the role, make him, if not likeable, then at least attractive, then you might have a compelling piece of theater on your hands. I hate to report that The Metropolitan Opera’s new production, a dark, cold, rigid staging with a casting flaw at its center, isn’t going to do much to benefit the future of the opera’s legacy.

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