Composers Datebook

On today's date in 1945, a month after the end of war in Europe, a new opera by the English composer Benjamin Britten debuted at Sadler's Wells Theater in London. Its title was "Peter Grimes," with its story based on George Crabbe's long poem, The Borough, published in 1810, which described life along England's North Sea coast. In the early 1940's, Britten was living in America, and had read Crabbe's poem in California. The commission for the opera was also American, coming from Serge Koussevitzky, conductor of the Boston Symphony and one of the leading music patrons of the day. But Britten's opera is intensely English—evoking, as it does, the images and sounds of the North Sea off the east coast of Suffolk. Britten was born within sight of this seascape, and lived, for the better part of his later life, a little farther down the coast at Aldeburgh—the "Borough," on which George Crabbe had based his poem. From the start, "Peter Grimes" was an immediate success. Leonard Bernstein conducted its American premiere at the Tanglewood Festival, and within three years the opera was playing around the world. Within a week of its June 7th premiere, Britten conducted the London Philharmonic in an orchestral suite of "Sea Interludes" from his new opera, and these, too, have since firmly established themselves in the concert repertory.