PETER GRIMES

OPÉRA NATIONAL DU CAPITOLE, Place du Capitole

But when Grimes takes a new apprentice, suspicion rises again, then rumor, then the pack. Between stormy skies and the tides of conscience, a man alone faces the verdict of a community that has already spoken. In 1941, exiled in California, Benjamin Britten discovers The Borough, the long poem by George Crabbe. Homesickness overwhelms him – and with it, the revelation of an opera subject. For Crabbe paints a véritable comédie humaine: a vain judge, a sly landlady, a pompous reverend, a gossip-hunter, a troubled apothecary – as many faces as Britten and his librettist Montagu Slater…