Opening Night

For the first time since the 1940 blitz, when German bombs drowned out a performance of Faust, London's Sadler's Wells Theater reopened last week. Opening night, the premiere of Benjamin Britten's tragic opera, Peter Grimes, was London's biggest musical event in five years.

Critics pronounced Britten's music full of "vitality" and "force," but found something a little "fierce" in the libretto's psychological case history of a sadistic Suffolk fisherman (adapted from a 19th-Century poem by George Crabbe). The boyish, mild-looking composer (when he was eight he wrote an angry song to be sung by God) indignantly denied that his tale of a madman was gloomy: "It is the struggle of the individual against the masses ... a subject very close to my heart."

Critical judgments apart, it was a big night at "The Wells." Peter Grimes was England's first new opera in almost ten years. The score called for some 200 singers and musicians. Gallery oldtimers had set up their camp stools in ticket queues 24 hours in advance. Ecstatic music-lovers kept throwing bouquets at the cast and composer until the historic old stage was carpeted with flowers. The peerage showed up in more furs, white ties and tiaras than Londoners had seen since the war began.

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