The Princeton Festival's production was in fact a little amateurish- the sets were adequate but not inspired, the direction made little use of the few advantages the set did offer, and featured a lot of milling around uncertainly from the large chorus the opera requires as the backgrounded townsfolk, who are in Britten's envisionment quite clearly a single character on their own, but not as clearly so in the director's imagination.
That said, it is a spectacular, brilliantly complex opera and the music was well-performed by the orchestra and well-sung by most of the singers, so I had a very good time anyway, and have placed Peter Grimes at #4 on my list of 20th century operas I've seen live.
It's hard to say what Peter Grimes is about because it's hard to say who Peter Grimes is. You could read him as clinically depressed, and read this as a story about his failure to cope with his illness. You could read into his unsettling relationship with his boy apprentices some sort of sublimated queerness, or you could read it as an expressed, abusive pedophilia. You could understand him as just a loner isolated by a community he's also unable to leave, or that he wants to become integrated into but can't figure out how. I overheard two people talking after the show about how easy it is to understand Peter Grimes as the villain of the narrative. "Britten in his brilliance makes you want to sympathize with him, but he's not a good person."
I don't think the singer or the director had a clear answer to these questions. They seemed to want the ambiguity because it let them throw some of the attention off Peter and onto the rest of the community, onto Ellen and Auntie and her nieces, onto Balstrode and Keene and Boles and Adams. The focus in this version of Peter Grimes was on everyone's anxiety about surrendering their individuality and becoming part of the undifferentiated mob. Given this focus, it's unsurprising that the two most compelling scenes in the production were the tempest scene in the Bull pub, and the mob scene with the ritualistic chanting of "Peter Grimes"- brilliant ensemble writing by Britten, but also the most animated and compelling acting performances from the chorus.
Grimes's anxiety about joining the community, though, is the most central. He could resolve his isolation by leaving the community, except he can't- he is glued by his familiarity with his home. (Here is where Britten's music, the sea interludes, is so integral to the success of the piece. Without them, without the clear sense of the brutal loveliness of their shore town, Peter's stuckness is inexplicable. But he is stuck here. And given that he is stuck, he wishes he could be part of the town, rather than a monster kept at bay on its outskirts. "Here comes the brand" he sings when the mob is on its way, as if he is understanding himself as some sort of animal to be tamed. But this puts him in the bind that ultimately dooms him- he could marry Ellen, give up his brutality and become part of the herd. He could do what the community asks of him. But he is unwilling to give up his individuality in order to join the herd. He wants to join the herd by becoming rich enough to buy some freedom from its compulsions. He wants to have his cake and eat it, too. But he is a poor fisherman in a town full of poor fishermen competing for the same fish. He is unable to become rich for structural reasons, no matter how hard he tries, no matter how much he presses his apprentices. (I suppose we should add "You could read Peter Grimes as a poor man in a brutal capitalist system" to our list of potential interpretations of his character.) So it's that push and pull of trying to figure out how to be of the community without being ruled by the community that is the central dilemma of the opera, and I think Britten's answer is that it's impossible to fully navigate, but that there are some half solutions that sort of work. The tradespeople of the town- the carter, the publican, the lawyer, the parson- move in and out of the mob with a grace Grimes is incapable of. But mostly the crowd is an ugly unmanageable beast full of people who do not like each other but are stuck together anyway. (This is not Hardy's Wessex.)
Something that struck me very strongly was how much the early going had the look of a Victorian romance, destined toward a happy ending where Peter, John, and Ellen awkwardly mesh into a happy blended family. I read Silas Marner fairly recently and they are basically the same story, except that Eppie saves Silas and Ellen cannot save Peter. There's something really unsettling about this sort of direct trope inversion, and in particular Ellen's heartbreak when she sings about how she had a plan, and how Peter is refusing to go along with their plan. Tropes are about unwritten promises being made to the audience, and this kind of trope inversion is dramatically effective because it so brutally yanks away your expectations. But I think Britten's point is that there's something unsettling about the whole notion of this kind of salvation, that this individual intervention can somehow bring a pariah into the community. It puts an immensely unfair burden onto Ellen's shoulders (and Eppie's shoulders, too). It's Peter's responsibility to save himself, not to pin his hopes on the magical healing power of a tough widow's love. That it's her own misguided choice hardly makes it more fair.
In any case, so happy to be able to check this off my opera bucket list. comments