Wagner in a Sou'wester

At the end of the first act of Peter Grimes, the applause was tentative. It came as something of a blow to the Metropolitan Opera audience to attend an opera written in English, only to discover that you still had to read the libretto to find out what they were singing about. But after the audience sat back and just listened to the music, as they do at operas sung in Italian and German, everything went better. At the final curtain, the Metropolitan's only new opera of the year got ten enthusiastic curtain calls.

Peter Grimes, by Britain's gifted young Benjamin Britten (TIME, Feb. 16), was unquestionably a success--the most successful new opera the Met had put on in years. It was not, however, the success it had been in Europe. The Met had lavished great care on it: the chorus sang well, Emil Cooper's orchestra did handsomely by Britten's tricky music (the best of his music is written for the orchestra, not for the soloists). But the Met just couldn't break itself of its old habits. Frederick Jagel neither looked nor acted the difficult part of a crude and defiant Suffolk fisherman; he was simply a posturing Wagnerian in a sou'wester. The innkeeper-madam thought the part called for the kind of hand-on-hip coquetry of a road company Carmen.

The critics generally agreed that the opera was a success, but in spite of the Met's staging.

Wrote the New York Herald Tribune's Virgil Thomson: "If Mr. Britten's work came out scarcely in English, vocally loud from beginning to end and decorated in a manner both ugly and anachronistic, it also came through the ordeal with its music still alive and its human drama still touching."

Most hearers wanted another go at it--including the Met, which scheduled another performance next week. This time the Met (which always rehearses two casts, in case of mishaps) will give the other cast a try.

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