Opera after 1900 by Margaret Notley

Author:Margaret Notley [Notley, Margaret]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781351555784
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2017-07-05T00:00:00+00:00

Part III

Operas by Britten and Birtwistle

[12]

‘Peter Grimes’: The Growth of the Libretto

Philip Brett

Grimes…is As very much of an ordinary weak person who, being at odds with the society in which he finds himself, tries to overcome it and, in doing so, offends against the conventional code, is classed by society as a criminal, and destroyed as such. There are plenty of Grimeses around still, I think!

Peter Pears1

MUSICAL SCHOLARSHIP has been involved for a long time in exclusive notions of authorship and authority. Rather than loosening attitudes about the supremacy of the composer in reaction against Romantic ideals of artistic perfection and male genius, high modernism, heavily invested in male authority, tended to make them if anything more rigid, usually by trying to control interpretation to a greater and greater degree by means of the score, and by seeing the work as autonomous. The focus on the score as representing the work encountered in most analytical circles and many historical ones left little room for an exploration of the contribution to any artistic event of the performers, let alone the concert promoters or audience.

In the field of opera, the difficulty of maintaining such separations as were necessary to promote what one might call the theory of the ‘onlie begetter’ called for extreme measures. The many other people involved in the construction of an opera — librettist, scenic and lighting designers, stage director, as well as singers, orchestra and conductor — made especially problematic the elevating of the composer into an exclusive, dominant category. It took the eloquence of the most articulate and racy operatic critic of the post-war era, Joseph Kerman, to inscribe for a whole generation the critical axiom that ‘opera is a type of drama whose integral existence is determined from point to point and in the whole by musical articulation,’ supported by the assertion that ‘not only operatic theory, but also operatic achievement bears this out’.2 The canon he constructed elevated composer’s opera (the Monteverdi of L’Orfeo, Gluck, Mozart, a re-articulated Verdi, Wagner, Debussy, Berg and Stravinsky) far above singer’s opera (Handel, Rossini, Bellini, the traditional Verdi, Massenet, Puccini). His effort was so successful that even historical opera based on very different principles could only be reclaimed by the same critical means, Handel’s operas being a case in point.3 And though none of this totally altered opera-house policy or the enthusiasms of opera-goers, as a critical strategy it is still powerfully alive today, postmodernist interventions notwithstanding.

Benjamin Britten began his successful operatic career, with Peter Grimes, only a little before Kerman began writing — the latter’s trenchant review of Grimes, based on a knowledge of the opera gained from (but barely acknowledging the influence of) the problematic New York Metropolitan production of 1948, is among the earlier of his Hudson Review articles.4 Throughout Britten’s career his reception, whether up or down, was much affected by this critical ideology. What is more, the composer’s image encouraged such a view to a large extent. The reclusive magician of Aldeburgh, drawing to

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