Peter Grimes, Dutch National Opera 06.10.2024
‘I’m thinking of taking him to Peter Grimes’, I confided to my friend.
‘Absolutely not’, she answered. ‘No dates to the opera. It’s cursed!’
I suspected she might be right. Though you won’t find it on their website, the Dutch National Opera began as a city opera founded by a Dutch collaborator during the Nazi Occupation. The desire to have a city opera house was longstanding, but it was only under the occupying regime that the project received the attention and subsidies it needed. The Amsterdam opera company behaved most improperly during the war: their first performances were for the national socialist organization Frontzorg as well as for Vreugde en Arbeid (Joy and Labor), the Dutch equivalent of the German Freude durch Arbeit (Joy through Work). The company traveled to Salzburg at Hitler’s invitation. After the war’s end, the entire opera company was put on trial for professional collaboration with the enemy. The founder was sentenced to a five-year work ban, but the company as a whole was acquitted. The reason? Amsterdam had to have an opera house. It needed the prestige.
Maybe the decision to forgo punishment came at a slow-burning price, which only us post-war opera-lovers are expected to pay. There is, on the one hand, the very tangible tax imposed upon us through the Dutch National Opera’s impressive determination to make something both new and boring out of every pre-20th century opera. Where does this drive come from? Does it stem from the same fear of heroic grandeur we sense at Bayreuth, when Brunhilde storms out on stage wearing not a winged helmet, but bandages concealing a recent facelift? (Read Sigmund Oakeshott’s last review, if you haven’t already)
Considering the complicated relationship with the Third Reich shared by both opera houses, I am inclined to think there is some connection. But perhaps that is wishful thinking. Dreaming up such mythological causes for the sad circumstances to which opera performers and their audiences are subjected becomes a kind of post-performance ritual, necessary in order to forgive, forget, and return.
Fortunately this ritual was not at all necessary after Peter Grimes, an opera in three acts by Benjamin Britten (1913-1976), premiered in England on 7 June 1945. Britten had conceived of the idea while escaping the British draft In the United States during the Second World War with his partner, tenor Peter Pears (1910-1986). In 1941, a homesick Britten had stumbled upon a transcript of an interview with author E.M Forster (1879-1970) about the 18th century English poet, surgeon and clergyman George Crabbe (1754-1832): ‘to talk about Crabbe is to talk about England’, it began. Pears bought Britten a collection of Crabbe’s work from a secondhand book store, whereupon Britten read his poem The Borough, featuring a segment about a murderous fisherman named Peter Grimes.
In Crabbe’s poem, Grimes is a monster who murders his young fishing apprentices through abuse, starvation dnd neglect, and ultimately dies in a fit of madness, tormented by his crimes. By the time Britten and Pears were finished developing the poem into a scenario for their opera, Grimes had been transformed from a monster into a more complex, tragic character, primarily motivated by a desire to marry a school mistress, Ellen Orford, quickly. In Britten’s opera, Grimes’s reckless rush for cash and a better reputation, not his inherent cruelty, is the suggested cause for the dangerous situations he forces upon his apprentices , and which ultimately leads to Grimes’s shame-ridden suicide.
The most important advantage of this improvement to Grimes’s character, largely conceived by Pears, is that it enabled Britten to imagine him not as a baritone (as Britten had originally intended), but as a tenor. Thank goodness for that. It is difficult to imagine the opera’s success with a baritone as protagonist (forgive me, baritones). Naturally, Pears was the first to perform as Grimes at the opera’s premiere. It also allowed for the creation of a cast of characters within the village of ‘The Borough’, who harbor suspicions of Grimes and who erupt into haunting choruses evoking, to quote the director of Grimes for the DNO, Barbora Horáková, ‘how the dangerous mechanisms of a lack of empathy, mob mentality, incitement and exclusion can get out of hand’.
The performances in Horáková’s Grimes were gripping, particularly that of English tenor John Findon. Findon flew into Amsterdam two days before the Sunday premiere to replace the bedridden tenor Issachah Savage. He learned his stage direction on the Friday and ran through the dress rehearsal on the Saturday, we were told by the director seconds before curtain call. Had she not said anything I would not have known. His sonorous voice stormed through defiance and anguish to then float at the fragile heights of peaceful delusion when he sang the recurring refrain ‘What Harbour Shelters Peace’ in Act III, just before his death, amplified through floor-to-ceiling screens showing his drowned body. FIndon’s huge, physical presence was as imposing as his voice; I hardly took my eyes off him.
Still, it was too much to expect the Dutch National Opera to stage Grimes as it was written, in a 19th century, English port town. While the set designs by Eva-Maria van Acker were effectively dramatic and consistently simple in their suggestions, some of her costumes were not. The leopard-print blouse and leggings on Auntie, owner of ‘The Boar’ pub, were the most telltale sign that we might be in the 1980s. On the other hand, she also evoked a certain kind of post-menopausal, chain-smoking small town Dutch woman one might encounter today. Then there were Auntie’s ‘nieces’, who strutted out inexplicably in tutu’s for a salacious scene with a Methodist preacher. These costumes appeared to me as caricatures in what was otherwise an unironic production. They distracted from the seriousness of the opera, so much so that one year later, I can still remember them. Maybe that’s not a bad thing, I don’t know.
All in all, I didn’t have to pay much of a tax on Peter Grimes — at least not the first kind. I did end up paying the second tax, the cursed sort my friend was warning me of.
My dates came and went without opera and without incident. But not long after Peter Grimes, my four year-old black toy poodle suddenly became paralyzed in his hind legs. I took him to the hospital in the middle of the night. The next morning they put him through a CT scan and discovered a major hernia in his lumbar spine, and subsequently operated, promising a full recovery. We went home.
He never recovered. Over the course of the week he suffered through an ascending paralysis, losing control of both his hind and front legs, his vocal cords, and ultimately his ability to breathe. The vets at the hospital did not believe me when I described his symptoms. They were so fixated on their initial diagnosis that they refused to revise his recovery plan or schedule him for further examination. He died in my arms on 28 October, 2024, 6 days after Peter Grimes closed.
After my dog’s death I was so ridden with guilt about having left him alone at home at any point in the last, healthy weeks of his life that I swore off attending the opera for a long time. And after Peter Grimes, my guilt was all the more painful, because I had actually enjoyed it, basking in the tortured sound of a man’s guilt over the death of another.
References:
Crabbe, George. ‘Letter 22: The Poor of the Borough - Peter Grimes’ from The Borough (1810). Accessed via https://www.ourcivilisation.com/smartboard/shop/crabbeg/borough/
Roling, Laura. ‘Stage director Horáková and tenor Issachah Savage on Peter Grimes’, Nationale Opera & Ballet (1 March 2024). https://www.operaballet.nl/en/articles/stage-director-horakova-and-tenor-issachah-savage-peter-grimes
Veld, Nanno Klaas Charles Arie in ‘t. De Ereraden voor de kunst en de zuivering van de kunstenaars: Een bijdrage tot de geschiedschrijving van de zuivering van het vrije beroep. Staatsuitgeverij 1981.
