Making connections

In idle mood — perhaps prompted by the news of terrible further flooding — I’ve just listened for the first time in many years to Peter Grimes.

In idle mood — perhaps prompted by the news of terrible further flooding — I’ve just listened for the first time in many years to Peter Grimes. Idleness scarcely survives the excitement that involves the listener from the opening bar. It’s difficult to understand Britten’s later disclaimer to a young admirer embarked on his own first opera — ‘but Grimes is full of howlers!’ — for everything now, 60-plus years after, has long since seemed so absolutely right. These six decades have consolidated the work as a permanent cornerstone. What has grown more recently is a wider context for a work at first sight so defiantly regional.

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This wider context is above all European.