When I was 19 my first (secret) boyfriend played me Britten’s recording. I was poleaxed. I’d sung a little Britten but nothing prepared me for this. And yes, my fave English opera too and possible favourite of all. The leap from Paul Bunyan to this is astounding. Startlingly few operas have this 1/2

Dorothy L. Sayers must be fuming in her grave that she didn't come up with that title.

Crabbe was also a huge inspiration to American poet Edwin Arlington Robinson, who wrote quite a moving poem about him:

They drew on the other 23 tales for the rest of the village, taking plenty of licence on the way: Crabbe's Ellen Orford never meets Grimes; Auntie, the Rector & Swallow are also extracted from independent sections. Only two, the sympathetic Captain Balstrode and Carter Hobson, are entirely invented.

I just consulted Paul Kildea's biography, which quotes Britten himself: "it was in California, in the unhappy summer of 1941, that, coming across a copy of the Poetical Works of George Crabbe in a Los Angeles bookshop, I first read his poem 'Peter Grimes'".

'Peter Grimes' is just one of 24 letters that form 'The Borough'. Crabbe's Grimes is an outright bully; Britten & Pears created a more complex man, a visionary outsider, without eliminating his faults. The villagers hound Britten's Grimes to his doom, but his own flaws fell him as much as the mob's.

The genesis of "Peter Grimes": in the archive at the Red House we have Britten's notes from this time, and the edition of Crabbe's poems that they stumbled on in a California secondhand book shop (Pears notes inside the cover that from this "we" - not just Britten - began work on the story).

Aha! I was wondering at what point in Pears's and Britten's American period they came across the Crabbe itself. Was it while they were staying with Ethel Bartlett and Rae Robertson?

It is such a pity that Koussevitzky—often thought of as the greatest double bass player of his generation—didn't strong-arm all the composers he commissioned (Ravel, Messiaen, Stravinsky etc etc) to write something for his instrument!

Koussevitzky did write a concerto for his own instrument which is fun since it is the only big late Romantic piece that I know of for it. It is really hard to pull off in concert, though, since the bass is a very softly spoken instrument which doesn't project well over the big musical forces.

A lot of plus points for the recital's programming too, which looks fascinating.

In my queue. @prestomusic.bsky.social Record of the Week.

While waiting for passage back to England, Britten told conductor Serge Koussevitzky that he couldn't afford to put other work aside to devote himself to writing an opera. Koussevitzky promptly put up $1000 for a commission, and Pears and Britten worked on the scenario on the voyage home.

In 1941, while in the USA, Britten read an E. M. Forster lecture on Suffolk poet George Crabbe (1754-1832), beginning "To talk about Crabbe is to talk about England". Britten then read Crabbe's poem 'The Borough': "In a flash I realised two things: that I must write an opera, and where I belonged"

One of my fave Planets!

The last three sentences of this Catherine Bray piece about Jaws are perfection

The producer was Erik Smith, but Culshaw was involved. Props too to balance engineer Kenneth Wilkinson. Even today, the 68-year-old sound is astonishing in its vividness, detail and perspective, with "all the life and realism of a stage performance" (as the Decca publicity boasted), and more.

I expected grim tragedy, so the opening court scene's sometimes jaunty tone took me by surprise, but from the first interlude on I was in its grip. Music, words, characters, even the 1958 sound were so vivid, I felt like I'd stepped into The Borough itself, rather than listening in my little room.

Once I finished playing my CD of the Serenade to death, I went on the hunt for more Britten. My college library didn't have many CDs yet, but they did have Britten's own Peter Grimes recording. The bleak black-and-white cover instantly grabbed my attention. I took it back to my room and put it on.

It's usually when I'm either listening to it for real or, more often, hearing it on my mental jukebox. All those days are better for the music whatever else might be going on in my life, although if it's the Act 2 quartet on the jukebox, I might be having a little cry to confuse people.