
Contents
85 An Interview With Benjamin Britten (1967)
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Published:July 2003
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Abstract
BRITTEN: The story of how I came to write Peter Grimes was perhaps rather interesting. I was in California at the time and happened to pick up an old copy of The Listener, a very good English journal which reports radio talks; I found in it a talk by the English novelist E. M. Forster on the works of George Crabbe. There were quite a few quotations from the poem ‘Peter Grimes’ by Crabbe and I don’t know whether it was homesickness or a sudden opening of my eyes to a new poetic style, or both, but I was amazed and thrilled by this poetry. I went into Los Angeles a few days later and, in an old second-hand shop, I found a copy of the works of Crabbe and devoured them avidly. The idea of writing an opera came almost immediately, although it would be the first full-length opera I’d ever written. I didn’t start it until I got back to England, but meantime I had talked it over with Peter Pears, who was with me, and we had planned the action very thoroughly together. But it was a chance reading of that old copy of The Listener which sent me to the poem ‘Peter Grimes’ by Crabbe.I told this story to Koussevitsky when he was performing a work of mine very soon after this chance finding and he asked me why I didn’t start writing the opera. I said, quite frankly, that one must take a long time off to write an opera and one can’t always afford to do it, but that I hoped one day to be able to. He then asked me whether if he found the money so that I could take the time off, I would write it. I said certainly I would ... and that was how I began work on Peter Grimes.
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