The Met's Peter Grimes

Writing in 1853, Richard Wagner declared that the as yet unwritten music for his epic tetralogy, Der Ring des Nibelungen, "shall sound in a way that people shall hear what they cannot see," and when the music was finished, it proved Wagner as good as his word.

Benjamin Britten has little to do with Richard Wagner (or as little to do as is possible for a post-Wagner composer of opera), but one can imagine Britten saying the very same thing about his music for Peter Grimes. Virtually every measure of the extraordinary score is vivid with the sense and sounds of the sea in all its various moods and vagaries, and richly evocative of life in those coastline villages and towns whose very existence depends on the sea.

Last night, New York's Channel 13 (WNET) telecast the Met's 15 March Live In HD film of its new production of Britten's Peter Grimes directed and staged by Tony Award winning theater director John Doyle in his Met debut. We just finished watching our tape of Act I, and our extreme annoyance, even anger, has not as yet had enough time to subside to manageable enough proportions to permit us to go on to Acts II and III with due equanimity — beyond, that is, our skipping ahead to confirm our worst fear that the Prologue and first-act, two-scene set by set designer Scott Pask is used for the following two acts and their two scenes each as well.

And of what does that set consist? Primarily, it's a huge wall of blackened, sea-weathered wood planks, the wall provided with a number of open-doored or -shuttered cutouts along its width and height in which appear various of the opera's characters, the wall spanning the stage from extreme left to extreme right, and rising from stage floor into the flies.

And how is this supposed to symbolize or represent the fishing village (called the Borough in the opera, but meant to be an almost verbatim representation of Britten's native Aldeburgh) limned so brilliantly by Britten's music and Montague Slater's splendid libretto?

Only The Shadow and John Doyle know for sure, but we'd bet our last bippy that clever Tony Award winning theater director took his cue from this exchange at Grimes's "hearing" which forms the opera's Prologue:

Grimes
Stand down you say. You wash your hands.
The case goes on in people's minds.
The charges that no court has made
Will be shouted at my head.
Then let me speak, let me stand trial.
Bring the accusers to the hall.
O let me thrust into their mouths
The truth itself, the simple truth.
The truth itself!

Townspeople (chorus)
When women gossip, the result
Is someone doesn't sleep at night.
But when the crowner sits upon it,
Who can dare to fix the guilt?

Swallow
Clear the court!

Grimes
The truth — the pity — and the truth.

Ellen
Peter, Peter, come away!

Grimes
Where the walls themselves
Gossip of inquest.

And that for Doyle becomes everything that is the Borough; ergo, The Wall.

OK. We get it. Very slick.

And very empty, too; most especially as Doyle places the anonymous, gossiping townspeople — all clothed in dark-green and black, Puritan-like dress — in mostly static blocked masses in front of The Wall, not behind it and seen through the cutouts where the metaphor might have made some dramatic sense.

But in any case, the Borough is more than the malevolent gossiping of its inhabitants. It's a fishing village every detail of the daily life of which is centered on and ordered by the sea as Britten's music makes powerfully and abundantly clear. Where is all that village life in this production? It doesn't exist, and, further, is made of no consequence by Doyle's Konzept; a Konzept that blunts Britten's brilliant and evocative score at every turn.

But we don't wish to be misunderstood. We're not calling here for the fussy, natural realism of a typical 19th-century staging. The many-layered depth and profundity of Britten's music coupled with Slater's libretto can stand up to and even glory in an abstract stage treatment. But the abstraction must meet both music and text on their terms, not be some director's postmodern deconstruction of those terms; a deconstruction such as this one that fights against those terms every step of the way. We shudder even to think of how The Wall will play out in Acts II and III.

What's that? How was the performance itself? So far, pretty much first-rate for the most part, although we could, at times, have asked for a more passionately realized reading from the conductor, the excellent Donald Runnicles.

But we're running ahead of ourself. We're holding our considered judgment of the performance for another time. We have first to get through — and over — the staging of this production. I suspect that, ultimately, the only way we'll be able to accomplish that is to imagine our own staging as we listen to the performance with our eyes closed.