Doktor Faust was left almost finished when Busoni died in 1924; there was a completion by Philip Jarnach shortly after this and another was made much more recently by Antony Beaumont; Ronald Stevenson also made a completion some years ago (before Beaumont's, actually) but this has never been released. I would have been surprised if Britten didn't at least know something of Busoni's final work, although it had precious few productions during his lifetime; how much it and other late Busoni works such as the Toccata for piano may have affected him I do not know (not that I'm a Britten scholar) although, for what it may or may not be worth, the name Busoni is absent from the indexes of both Eric Walter White's and David Matthews's studies of Britten. Krenek, on the other hand, would surely have known it and he was, after all, around at the time; I didn't know that his descendants are so unco-operative, but this kind of thing is not unknown - and Krenek will, under present legislation, be in copyright until 2061...

Best,

Alistair

We may be assuming that the final work is more coherent than it is? The libretto went through various modifications from different parties with different ideas on the characters and the type of story this was (all this is well-detailed in Philip Brett's Cambridge Opera Handbook on the work and the more recent The Making of Peter Grimes edited by Paul Banks). And in the end, I'm not sure whether the final result is wholly coherent as a result.

The concept of the outsider/outcast/wronged innocent is present in various permutations throughout the whole Britten operatic canon; even in MND the cause of the quarrel between Oberon and Tytania is 'a lovely boy stol'n from an Indian King'. Lucretia, Albert, Sam, Billy, Elisabeth, Noye, the Madwoman and her deceased son, the three Israelites, the Prodigal Son, the Cabin Boy, Owen and Aschenbach can all be seen as representing facets of the same personality.

Grimes as an opera with Porgy and Wozzeck as godparents: makes sense to me.

I see that has called up adverts for 'Grimes Family Tree Research ' and 'Gender Diversity Training'  

You may well be right - and, indeed, your evidence of lack of evidence does appear to point to that possibility - yet, who knows? - it may just be that, although he had some familiarity with the work, he wasn't especially affected by it (although how one could not be so is abit difficult for me to understand!)...

Best,

Alistair

I don't really feel that there's all that much I can add. I agree broadly with Ian Pace's arguments. It always strikes me as interesting that this opera, probably Britten's most derivative and most flawed, is also his most popular by a long way, presumably at least in part because it's derivative, and has operatic conventions that audiences are familiar with. Much as I love it, I do tend to think, "Ah, Puccini, Berg, bit of Strauss there - oh, Madam Butterfly definitely".  We have to remember, though, that Britten was barely 30 when he wrote it, and he didn't know every opera in the world.

I've never really believed in Ellen as serious love interest - it's just that Britten hadn't yet realised he could write an opera without a (fairly!) conventional "heroine", much less that it was possible to write an opera with no female voices at all - and he wanted a part for Joan Cross. I've always seen Ellen as one of the comforting, reassuring, protective women who recurred in Britten's own life - Elisabeth Mayer, who looked after him and Pears in America, or his own mother (who had died when he was 23) perhaps. (His intense admiration for Heather Harper's warm, motherly Ellen would support this.) When the recent Opera North production actually had Ellen and Grimes showing some physical interest in each other, I was quite startled - it really wasn't convincing at all.  I also think that it's quite possible to argue (not that I necessarily do) that the character of Grimes is somewhat botched, rather than intentionally very subtle and many-sided as we have come to think of it. And yet, and yet...it some how remains one of the most emotionally shattering operas there is.

It's instructive to read Britten's letters to Pears while he was writing the opera. There are quite a few, since Pears was touring with Sadler's Wells much of the time. They vary from "I write every note with your heavenly voice in my head" to "My bloody opera stinks, and that's all there is to it". He describes the difficulties of "keeping the recitative moving" in the Prologue, and of writing the Hut scene, which he says makes him "terribly upset by what I'm creating".

That's all extremely interesting, Mary. I've never read anything really going into detail on Britten's women - would you have any time for my notion that a large number of them tend to present mother-figures of one type or another, either benevolent and sometimes idolised (Ellen, Nancy, the Governess, Mrs Coyle, the Madwoman) or fearsome/super-bitches (Mrs Sedley, Lady Billows, Mrs Herring, Miss Wingrave, Kate). Queen Elizabeth in Gloriana combines a bit of both. There are a few exceptions - the pathetic Mrs Julian, Auntie and the Nieces (in neither case really developed that much) and the two that interest me most, Titania (though that has as much to do with Shakespeare as Britten, I feel) and especially Miss Jessel. Only in the latter two cases do the women seem to really have a more independent existence of their own, otherwise their portrayal is almost exclusively about what they mean to men (which doesn't necessarily mean a sexual thing, by any means). The lack of many three-dimensional female characters with wills and desires of their own is to me one of the weakest aspect of Britten's operas. Or could this perception be more a product of the types of portrayals that were developed by the singers who first took on these roles, which have been very influential upon subsequent productions? Very interested in your thoughts.