SFO presents Britten's Peter Grimes

In celebration of the centennial of the birth of Benjamin Britten, this was a brilliant production.  Peter Grimes, an Opera in Three Acts and a Prologue derived from the poem "The Borough" of George Crabbe, Opus 33. Floating in back of the orchestra was a moving media presentation of the sea in stormy moods, which furnished a context for the tenor, Stuart Skelton's, extraordinary voice.   The SF Chorus furnishes the chorale, acting as the townspeople's response to the tragic Peter Grimes. Though a grim character, the music transcends, and elevates our feelings to new levels of human concern, for those without means, and perhaps, most of all for child labor and abuse, which still persists in our world.

The libretto was written by Montagu Slater, after Christopher Isherwood turned down the task of taking the "bare bones" of the poem and transforming it.   Britten participated in the GPO  film unit which included W.H. Auden, the kingpin, and Christopher Isherwood, and Monatagu Slater. 

Britten became engrossed in the poetry of George Crabbe (1754-1832).  An Article by E. M. Foster introduced him, through an article in May 1941, in "The Listener". 
That summer, after finding the volume of Crabbe's poems in a Los Angeles book store, Britten read the poem and reported:  "I suddenly realized where I belonged and what I lacked", the meaning of which is not clear to me.  

Peter Grimes is an "unsavory East Anglian fisherman who took on  pauper lads as helpers, abused them and even caused their deaths.  The people of the borough turned a blind eye: 

Some few in town observed in Peter's trap
A boy, with jacket blue and woolen cap;
But none enquired how Peter used the rope,
Or what the cruise, that made the stripling stoop...
None reasnon'd thus -- and some, on hearing cries,
Said calmly, "Grimes at his exercise".

All three apprentices die in short shrift.  Finally Grimes is forbidden to enlist any more boys, after a court hearing.  Grimes grows less stable, and dies insane, haunted by the boys' ghosts.  A townswomen had befriended Grimes and he hopes to free himself from his toil, to marry her, but that is never to be, given his means.
The music is haunting, and transcends the story of child and labor abuse, about which Dickens is so articulate, in another context.  Grimes becomes, rather like Peer Gynt, a tragic protagonist.

The Brittenesque "fingerprints" are "sympathetic portrayal of a social outcase, undertones of sexual ambiguity and abuse, suggestions of the corruption of innocence, and the hypocrisy of an intolerant community given to scapegoating...and a leading tenor role originally cast for "Pears", his partner. The score is Modernist, in its idom yet not twelve tones, using harmony both to suggest horror and to offer comfort.  The opera is rooted in place, the fictional village redolent of Aldeburgh, Britten's home, with villagers "English to the core".

A commission for the opera arrived from the conductor Serge Koussevitzky for a plan to introduce the opera with the Boston Symphony at Tanglewood during the summer of 1944,but resume in 1946..  Sadlers Wells Opera Company in London, instead, offered a quick premiere in 1944, instead, after which Britten would form his own opera company, the progressive English Opera group.
The staging of the SF opera was in