Four Sea Interludes and Passacaglia from ‘Peter Grimes’, Op. 33a and 33b

Program notes

About the Work

In 1941 Benjamin Britten was living in the United States, homesick, when he came across an article by E. M. Forster about the Suffolk poet George Crabbe. He sought out Crabbe’s long poem ‘The Borough’, with its story of the brutal fisherman Peter Grimes, and recognised the coast he had grown up on. The conductor Serge Koussevitzky arranged a commission from his new foundation, Britten sailed home, and ‘Peter Grimes’ opened at Sadler’s Wells in London on 7 June 1945, a few weeks after the end of the war in Europe. Its success was immediate, and it is usually taken as the starting point of modern British opera.

In the libretto by Montagu Slater, Crabbe’s villain becomes something more troubling: an outsider and a dreamer, rough and violent, hounded by the gossip of a fishing town much like Aldeburgh after his apprentice dies at sea. The sea is present in every scene. It gives the town its living and takes its men, and Britten put it into the orchestra, above all in the interludes that are played while the scenery is changed. There are six of them. He published four as a concert suite, the ‘Four Sea Interludes’, Op. 33a, and a fifth, the Passacaglia, separately as Op. 33b. This concert brings the five together.

The Passacaglia is the one interlude that is not about the sea. It comes at the centre of the opera, in the second act, as Grimes drives his new apprentice up to his hut on the cliff, and it is a portrait of the man himself and of what is closing in on him.

What to Listen For

‘Dawn’ follows the opening inquest in the opera. Three ideas alternate and never blend: a high, cold line for flutes and violins in unison, a ripple of clarinets, harp and violas like light catching the water, and slow, heavy brass chords that swell from underneath like the tide.

‘Sunday Morning’ is bright and brittle. The horns hold overlapping notes that clang like church bells, the woodwinds chatter above them, and a broad tune for violas and cellos is the one that Ellen Orford sings in the opera as she greets the day. Real bells join in towards the end.

‘Moonlight’ is the still point: soft, breathing chords for low strings and bassoons, in a rhythm that never quite settles, pricked by flashes from flute, harp and xylophone. It is a summer night with nothing peaceful about it.

‘Storm’ breaks out between the two scenes of the first act. It is a rondo of great violence for the whole orchestra, and in the middle of it the gale drops for a soaring, yearning melody, the music of Grimes’s question in the opera about what harbour can shelter peace.

The Passacaglia is built on a short figure in the bass, plucked by the cellos and double basses and repeated without change from beginning to end, taken from the phrase to which Grimes has just sung in his despair. Over it a solo viola begins a lonely, wandering tune, often heard as the voice of the silent apprentice boy, and a set of variations grows from it, increasingly agitated, before the viola returns alone at the close. The conductor decides where among the sea pieces the Passacaglia is placed.