With music that surges, pitches, billows in every bar, and a story dragged towards doom with riptide inevitability, Peter Grimes (1945) is ruled by the sea. No revelation there: on many occasions its composer, Benjamin Britten, said as much himself. He and his partner, the tenor Peter Pears, who created the role of Grimes, spent most of their adult lives near the Suffolk coast, the North Sea a steely backdrop. In a new staging for Gothenburg Opera, conducted by Christoph Gedschold, the British director-designer Netia Jones has ditched the usual sea-as-metaphor idea, a handy cover-all for life’s existential questions, and embraced maritime reality.
To underline the point, costumes, faded and weather-beaten, have been sprayed with salt. Workers gutting fish in white aprons are spattered with blood. Every detail reminds us of a sea that is not figurative but harsh and physical. Newly appointed associate director of the Royal Opera, London, Jones is a radical creator who uses video to original effect. This was her Gothenburg debut. She has removed the opera from its original East Anglian fishing village setting, taken from The Borough (1810), a collection of poems by George Crabbe, to a libretto by Montagu Slater.
