Engrossing and Moving

In terms of productions and performances, Benjamin Britten's Peter Grimes is one of the twentieth century's most successful operas, after those by Giacomo Puccini and by Richard Strauss. Britten was in his late twenties when around 1941 he started working on it, after a musical comedy, Paul Bunyan, which had been a flop in New York (and would have to wait until 1976 to reach London's West End). Christopher Isherwood had declined to write a libretto on the rather ambiguous poem The Borough (a very critical look at the then emerging middle class) by the late eighteenth century misfit George Crabbe. Montagu Slater took up the slack and the challenge...