Abstract
Peter Grimes, the eponymous hero of Benjamin Britten’s first opera, written in 1945, is a fisherman in a little village on the east coast of England – a solitary, irascible outsider who feels misunderstood by all and can only relate to the sea. An accident on his boat proves to be Grimes’s downfall. After his apprentice perishes at sea, Grimes is charged with involuntary manslaughter, but acquitted due to lack of evidence. However, the suspicion remains, and the villagers continue to mistrust him. When his new apprentice is also killed in a tragic accident, Grimes escapes the mob justice of the villagers: he commits suicide by walking into the sea. Director David Pountney stages Britten’s opera as an intimate play depicting suppressed and unbridled emotions, and is an oppressive demonstration of the excesses towards outsiders to which a society can allow itself to be driven. As at the première, the British tenor Christopher Ventris can be heard in one of his classic roles, while Emily Magee performs the role of Ellen Orford.