Four Sea-Interludes and Passacaglia

from the opera Peter Grimes

Dawn: lento e tranquillo

Sunday Morning: allegro spiritoso

Moonlight: andante comodo e rubato

Storm: presto con fuoco - largament - animato

Passacaglia: andante moderato

Perhaps the most inspired aspect of Peter Grimes - the first performance of which by Sadler’s Well Opera in June 1945 so clearly signalled the renewal of British musical life after the War - is its distinctive, salty fishing-village atmosphere. Based on The Borough by the eighteenth-century poet George Crabbe, who was born and brought up in Aldeburgh on the Suffolk coast, and set to music by a composer who was no less familiar with the same stretch of the North Sea, it is as authentic in its local colour as any opera in the repertoire. If life in the fishing community in the opera is not quite as tough as that in Crabbe’s poem and if Peter Grimes himself is not nearly as rough, Britten’s evocation of a place always in sound of the sea, and always vulnerable to its moods, is no less convincing for that.

Much of the atmosphere is in the orchestral interludes which were written, for the most part, to allow set changes to be made behind the curtain and to prepare for the mood of the following scene. Dawn comes between the Prologue and Act I, Scene 1, which is set by the sea before the community is up and about. While interpretation of some of the sounds must be a personal matter, it is difficult not to associate the opening melodic line drawn by flutes and high violins with a seagull floating on the wind at first light, the rising and falling arpeggios on harp and clarinets with eddying seawater, the low brass chords with the deeper undertow.

Sunday Morning precedes Act II, scene 1, which is also set by the sea but now on a sunny and bustling Sunday morning outside the Parish Church. On one level it is an imitation of church bells: they ring out first on four horns which are later joined by trombones and tuba, then by trumpets and at the climax of the piece by two actual bells. At the same time the activity of the sea continues, reflecting the sunlight in bright specks of colour in animated rhythms on woodwind or strings. The broad melody that emerges on cellos and violas and passes on to violins is an anticipation of “Now that the daylight fills the sky,” the arioso sung by Ellen Orford who is devoted to Grimes and who might at this stage still save him.

Moonlight, which introduces the third and last act, is the nocturnal equivalent of the preceding interlude. Again light is reflected on the sea, which swells with gathering and receding force in the heaving harmonies on lower strings and woodwind, but this time it is a silvery light suggested first by flutes and harp and later by xylophone and trumpet.

Storm, which links the two scenes of Act I, is much the most dramatic of the four interludes. It derives some of its power from the fact that as well as representing a blustery gale-force wind and a turbulent sea it is intended to reflect in its rhythmic cross-current and conflicting harmonies something of Grimes’s unsettled state of mind. Towards the end the tempo slows down and the dynamic level falls to accommodate a moving reminiscence of his prayer for deliverance, “What harbour shelters peace?” - which, however, is engulfed by the continuing turmoil, just as Grimes himself will be.

Although, like the Sea-Interludes, the Passacaglia was designed to cover a set change, it is not about the sea. It is about Peter Grimes himself and his desperate situation in the following scene, which takes place in his fisherman’s hut, an upturned boat perched on the edge of a cliff. It is based on a seven-note motif associated with Grimes in the previous scene in the second act and presented here on pizzicato lower strings and timpani in the opening bars. During the course of the piece that motif is heard no fewer than thirty-nine times in the bass line, always in the same rhythm and always at the same moderate tempo, while a set of variations on a related theme proceeds above it. Introduced by a melancholy solo viola - representing the voice of Grimes’s boy apprentice, who is about to plunge to his death down the cliff - the theme goes through ten increasingly fraught transformations until the ghostly reappearance of the solo viola at the end.