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How Grimes became grim

James Fenton finds Benjamin Britten's Aldeburgh opera powerful - but immoral
Peter Grimes, Royal Opera House
It was a dark and stormy night: Peter Grimes, Royal Opera House.

Today sees the opening of Benjamin Britten's Peter Grimes at Covent Garden: a powerful but an inadvertently immoral opera, as some of its earliest audiences immediately saw. The hero, the fisherman Peter Grimes, has a reputation for mistreating the apprentices he receives from the workhouse. One of them has died shortly before the opera begins. Another is physically abused and terrorised during the course of the action and, though his death is technically an accident, one would say today that Grimes's sense of his "duty of care" is non-existent.

And yet the piece as a whole invites us to sympathise with Grimes and to condemn the society in which he lives, to sympathise with the school-teacher Ellen Orford (who loves Grimes and helps him acquire his workhouse boy) and think harshly of such Aldeburgh worthies as the laudanum-addicted Mrs Sedley, who realises that apprentice number two must be dead at sea.

Desmond Shawe-Taylor, who in 1945 was a critic on the New Statesman, wrote that "what neither composer nor librettist seems to realise is that, after all, the sympathetic schoolmarm was wrong (and therefore, in effect, an accessory in the second boy's death), whereas poor Mrs Sedley was dead right." And he said there was "something shocking in the attempt to win our sympathies for a character simply because he is an outlaw and an enemy of society".

Neither Britten nor Peter Pears (who sang the part) seems to have seen the difficulty. Michael Tippett told Humphrey Carpenter many years later that Britten thought of the libretto as "somewhat leftwing, the individual against a wicked society. I [Tippett] didn't regard that as very accurate, and I don't think he seemed to understand that a problem would come over the question of Peter Grimes's relation to the boys."

What that relation was can only be sorted out by looking at the strange transformations Grimes underwent, between George Crabbe's poem, "The Village", and the final score as sung. Crabbe's version of Grimes is absolutely unproblematic: he is a paragon of cruelty, a damned soul who acquires his apprentices for financial gain, and is responsible for their early deaths.

EM Forster broadcast a talk about Crabbe in which he drew attention to this poem, and it was this talk which Britten heard. Thinking the tale would make a good opera, he showed it to Isherwood, who declined the task. At the time, Isherwood made out that he simply did not find the subject interesting enough to make time for. But he told Philip Brett many years later that he had thought the poem homophobic. (He wouldn't have used that word, however, in the 1940s.)

This is one of the mysteries about the Grimes libretto: who decided that Grimes was queer? Not Crabbe, certainly. There is no such suggestion in the poem. Not Forster either. Maybe the notion cropped up in conversation between Britten and Pears (Pears wrote the notes on which the earliest drafts were based). Or maybe Isherwood, in some moment now lost to history, insisted that a man with such a history must be queer.

At all events, having decided that a sadist must be a pederast, Pears then began to think that "the queerness is unimportant and doesn't really exist in the music (or at any rate obtrude) so it mustn't do so in the words". In due course the librettist, Montagu Slater, was encouraged to cut out the pederasty (or most of it) and to tone down the sadism. Pears's view now was that Grimes "is an introspective, an artist, a neurotic, his real problem is expression, self-expression".

Poor Montagu Slater! He considered himself an artist, but Britten and Pears seem to have thought of him as a sort of caterer. By the time Britten and Pears had returned to London, as Pears told the story later, "the whole story of Peter Grimes as set in the opera was already shaped, and it simply remained to call in a librettist to write the words." Much of the problem in making head or tail of Peter Grimes derives from this attitude: we have the story, now let's just "call in a librettist".

Slater had the audacity to arrange for the publication of his libretto in a volume called Peter Grimes and Other Poems (Bodley Head, 1946). Britten and his circle were shocked by the presumption behind this, and Brett, who has traced the composition of the text, refers to it as "a final act of aggression". It seems more like a justifiable, somewhat meek, doomed gesture of artistic self-assertion.

Pears wanted Grimes to be an introspective, a neurotic, an artist. Through the long, twisted logic of collaboration he ended up playing a possibly (although not in fact) queer sadist, who wants to make as much money as possible in order to earn the respect of Aldeburgh and to stop certain rumours about him being put around. This obsession with money involves him in the deaths of two workhouse boys. Where the artistry comes in I do not see.

In the end, Ellen Orford witnesses the broken Grimes being instructed to commit suicide. She does nothing to save his life, apart from, as Slater puts it, "sobbing quietly". Like Grimes, she ends up with blood on her hands. She's as bad as Aldeburgh says she is.