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This chapter criticizes English composer Benjamin Britten's opera Peter Grimes. It examines how audiences viewed and partly misunderstood the character of Peter Grimes and discusses the problems concerning the recreation of a literary character in another medium and the dilemma of making retrospective connections along a literary lineage. It suggests that Peter Grimes' embedding of his identity in the life of the community is similar to Britten's own communal life which demonstrates a commitment to the social relationships upon which all identity depends.

This chapter discusses the work of British composers including Benjamin Britten, Peter Maxwell Davies, Harrison Birtwistle, Cornelius Cardew, Gavin Bryars, Michael Nyman, Mark-Anthony Turnage, and Andrew Toovey. British performing institutions have included the Pierrot Players and the Almeida Theatre. Also discussed are Louis Andriessen from The Netherlands (and his influence on younger British composers) and Per Nørgård from Denmark. Institutions mentioned are NewOp, Musiktheater Transparant in Antwerp, Die Munt (Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie) in Brussels, and Den Anden Opera in Copenhagen.

The association of Britten and E. M. Forster is one of the more interesting in the annals of opera. Britten's opera Albert Herring was dedicated to Forster quite appropriately, for it contains whiffs of Forsterian social comedy and a good dose of the message of the early novels. Forster had written sympathetically about Melville in his Aspects of the Novel, but the story offered him more than purely critical delight. For Britten, Billy Budd must have seemed a logical and necessary further exploration of themes he had already broached, most notably in Peter Grimes and Albert Herring. In Billy Budd, the setting is still a hostile, uncomfortable environment dominated by oppressive forces. The musical language of Budd as a whole is less demonstrative and colorful, subtler than that of Grimes, suggesting most convincingly a certain gray monotony of life at sea, as well as the inner grayness of a character such as Claggart, in whom it dwells.

With the creation of new forms of ritual music theater in twentieth-century Europe and America came a radical reconceptualization of the audience's role and of the performance space itself. A basic trend toward increased audience participation, and away from the notion of performance as commercialized entertainment, reached one extreme in the “happenings” of the 1950s and '60s. These events were based on the premise that everyone present was a participant and that all sound and movement within the performance space constituted the performance. Occasions during which some Euro-American audience members would be accustomed to participate significantly include the religious services of Christianity. In the Catholic Mass, for example, there is a clearly defined audience/congregation and performer/celebrant space. Benjamin Britten is the most prominent twentieth-century composer to have created works of music theater specifically intended to be performed in church.

The phenomenon of domesticating the exotic is common to many examples of cross-cultural appropriation or (more neutrally) of influence in the twentieth century. Modernist Euro-American composers repeatedly discovered what they had been looking for in their exotic models and tended to adopt only those prevalued elements. Such exotic features then took on a special fluid status: having been extracted from their specific native environment they became “exotic” in general and lost their particular meanings. Stripped of their original context, they were routinely cloaked with new meanings, and they were readily combined with traits from other exotic sources. Like Yeats, who had moved from three plays based on Japanese Noh models to an entirely Christian context with his final dance play Calvary, Britten moved progressively away from his exotic source both in the composition of Curlew River and in the evolution of the Church Parables. This departure from the exotic toward the security of a “comparable setting” was of paramount importance to Britten's creation of this genre.

Adès’s second opera, The Tempest (2003), has been celebrated for many reasons. In the public imagination it has solidified comparisons between Adès and Benjamin Britten (the composer of one of the other most well-known Shakespeare operas of the last hundred years, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 1960). The Tempest also established Adès as a leading presence in contemporary opera. My goal in this essay is to explore how two interrelated concerns—the expressive possibilities of moving from one medium to another and the interpenetration of different subjectivities with one another—show one way of thinking about The Tempest which is emblematic of several recurrent aspects Adès’s sensibility. The Tempest, as the largest work he completed in the decade after his initial flush of success in the 1990s, demonstrates the longevity of his quest for what he calls “new objects” which transcend their medium and engender singular subjective experiences.

This chapter discusses Blitzstein’s work as director, translator, and adapter from 1950 to the end of his life. This includes his supervision of a production of J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan for which Leonard Bernstein had written the music; his adaptation of Benjamin Britten’s Let’s Make an Opera for American audiences; his adaptations of Verdi’s La Traviata, Offenbach’s L’îsle de Tulipatan, Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s The Threepenny Opera and The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, and Brecht’s Mother Courage, among other works. The adaptation of The Threepenny Opera, which starred Lotte Lenya and Scott Merrill, enjoyed special success; by the time of its close in 1961, it had broken the record for New York’s longest-running musical, while one of its songs, “Mack the Knife,” proved one of the great hits of the time, with recordings by Louis Armstrong, Bobby Darin, and Ella Fitzgerald.

This chapter examines vowel differentiation and modification in a professional tenor voice using a spectrograph. Spectral analysis supplies information regarding technical maneuvers during singing. What the ear can hear, the eye then simultaneously verifies. Comparative studies of phonations can provide clues to common practices among singers of similar vocal category, and can point out individual differences that contribute to the unique characteristic of each singing voice. This study considers phonations from Benjamin Britten's Sonnets of Michelangelo, sung in the original Italian. Spectral analysis confirms what the practical pedagogical ear discerns: in a male voice, vowel modification is possible for registration purposes in upper range, so as to maintain desirable harmonic balance in a mounting scale without destroying vowel integrity. This is in accordance with vocal pedagogy based on the Italian School model.

This chapter studies songs for the tenor repertoire by Hans Werner Henze. Henze’s three songs, based on texts by the poet W. H. Auden, are a key example of his fastidious and beautifully-crafted vocal writing. Henze sets these three contrasting poems with utmost sensitivity. The fast-moving texts contain layers of subtlety, couched in a concise, freely chromatic musical language which sits easily in the voice. The settings build cumulatively in proportion and weight. A tiny, poignant tribute to a dead cat leads to a powerfully intuitive, four-verse portrait of the poet Arthur Rimbaud. This is followed by a substantial love song, full of tenderness and passion, yet controlled with consummate skill. The work is written in standard notation (without bar-lines) and should prove a rewarding vehicle for singers of relatively modest attainment as well as mature artists.

This chapter examines The Centred Passion by Derek Holman. This beautifully crafted cycle shows flair and spontaneity, and a deep understanding of the physical nature of the voice. The idiom is quasi-tonal, with frequent use of wide intervals such as ninths and thirteenths. Furthermore, chromatic intervallic relationships with the piano need careful tuning at all times. Each of the six settings from Alfred Tennyson’s In Memoriam A.H.H. (1849) has its own distinct flavour, and the idiomatic keyboard parts are accordingly well varied, with a clear sense of balance and layout. Standard notation is used, but without key signatures. The cycle should prove an absorbing experience for both performers and listeners.

This chapter explores a contemporary work for contralto by William Mathias. The piece runs in a continuous span, but contains many contrasting sections within it. Although conceived for a rich, low voice, it also requires the lightness and agility to articulate swift staccato passages with aplomb. The highest pitches are at a loud dynamic. Otherwise, the contralto’s strong chest register is exploited rewardingly. A good deal of stamina is required to sustain and conserve energy through a welter of varied gestures and moods, which are enhanced by a striking piano part. The musical language is ‘advanced traditional’. It should prove an excellent vehicle for an enterprising duo able to give an authoritative interpretation. The inspiring text is an additional asset.

Leaving England for America at the commencement of the war, Benjamin Britten eventually returned to his homeland, realizing the essence of an artists' being in the vicinity of his roots. This chapter appraises the proclaimed proximate connection between Britten's decision to retract to England and the opera, Peter Grimes. It was in Southern California in summer 1941 that Britten picked up an issue of The Listener to which E. M. Forster had contributed an chapter on the Suffolk poet, George Crabbe. This seems to have been the turning point in Britten's assumption not only about nationality but also locality. Crabbe's Peter Grimes is one of the poor of the Borough, and though the poet grew up among the poor, he did not like them. His portrait of the man whose cruelty leads to the death of three boy apprentices from the workhouse and whose guilty conscience drives him to madness and death is alleviated by few redeeming features; a bold and unusual choice for the central figure of a musical drama in the tradition of grand opera.

One of the sure tests of a composer's stature is how Grimes reacts to success. The furore over Peter Grimes both at home and abroad after its premiere in 1945 was possibly more remarkable than that accorded any other opera this century. Grimes was a success from the start, and the sort of success that might have tempted a lesser composer to continue in the same vein. The Rape of Lucretia, first performed a little more than a year after Grimes, represents a radical departure from the earlier work in more ways than one. The chamber proportions and scoring of Lucretia can of course be explained by practical considerations, which were always a creative challenge for Britten. Indeed, it led to the withdrawal of Peter Grimes from the repertory after a surprisingly small number of performances.

Britten completed his last opera, Death in Venice (1973), just before cardiac surgery during which he suffered a stroke. Not yet 60, he underwent many of the changes associated with extended aging: dependency, physical impairment, the facing of his imminent demise. Known for his work ethic and professionalism, the prolific Britten completed only 9 independent works before his death 3 years later, but productivity is no measure of creativity: the last works stand as some of his best. Britten’s self-identification as a “working composer” underpinned one of the two life narratives that, this chapter argues, structured and gave meaning to his sense of himself. While he retained this narrative to the end, the other story of the self had to be abandoned with his sudden entry into older age: that of being ever youthful. Britten’s delight in the company of young boys, the topic of much gossip, is here seen as rooted in his own strong nostalgia for the innocence and spontaneity of youth. His two life narratives come together in that last opera, Death in Venice, the story of the homoerotic desire for a beautiful young boy experienced by an older artist in the throes of a creative crisis.