Tenor roles don’t come more complex than Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes. Tempestuous and at times ferocious, Grimes is the community’s scapegoat. He is ostracised by the village and accused of murder, despite it being ruled as accidental circumstances. He eventually ends his life rather than defend himself again against a mob of people convinced of his guilt. The musical and vocal demands require entering an unsettling sound world, where dramatically the singer must create space for an unsympathetic outcast to have everything a human has.

Issachah Savage, debuting the role at Dutch National Opera, has fully committed to finding nuance in this opera of extremes. He explains, ‘I played him down at first to where he was afraid of everything, even his own shadow. I started to use it as a way of making the audience not hate him so much. But it evolved through the rehearsal process, which allowed me to see that I can have that and the other things as well to help tell the full balance of his story. He is brutal. He’s all of that, it’s not either or.’

Montagu Slater based the libretto on George Crabbe’s poem The Borough – the story of a small town resembling Aldeburgh in Suffolk, where conformity was everything and hard work was the most admirable quality. This stark setting was important for Savage’s research.

‘I tried to get as many pictures as I could from that particular time period. Studying that literature was really important to me and is how I learned about Peter and his father. I read of a young man who was constantly trying to please his dad. The dad never sees that the kid is trying, he only sees things as “not good enough”. As an adult, that means it has about 30 to 35 years to fester in him and to grow, creating even more of a monster.’

It would be easy to play Grimes as an inhumane brute. His actions – forcing children to do adult work or being violent towards love interest Ellen – wouldn’t contradict that. As an audience, we would then be able to draw a neat conclusion and reject him much like the Borough does. However, Savage thinks Grimes is more of a mirror than we think – a reflection of unprocessed pain, showing up in ways we find uncomfortable.

‘I think he could be any one of us. I think we’re all broken in some way or another. We all have something that needs to still be healed. I think that’s true for Peter, but I think it also could be true for us.’

Savage describes the rehearsal process with director Barbora Horáková as ‘peeling an onion’. To round out the role Grimes plays in the community, Savage looks at every relationship Grimes has, not just the ones where he doesn’t fit. ‘I think Ellen gave the greatest level of empathy, and Balstrode was a confidant. They have a scene together where they start talking like homeboys – they’ve been friends for a long time, you know? That’s a unique relationship.’ It’s an important layer to investigate, to humanise Grimes, and to find further clarity on why he is so loathed.

The microcosm of the borough has religious zealots (Rev Horace Adams), entertaining sex-workers and puritanical elders (Mrs Sedley) gossiping and engaging with vice. There is endless hypocrisy in the ‘good’ people of the village, and yet Peter is the one who gets despised.

‘We don’t have any real concrete evidence that he’s killed any of these kids. In a normal society, it’s “innocent until proven guilty”. But it is quite the reverse with Peter’s situation. He’s already guilty without any proof whatsoever. He’s seen to be volatile. When we see a person act out, we don’t know where their pain came from, we just see the volatile thing. We see it as a mean thing, a horrible thing. And it may really well be, but we never really know.’ The onion is still peeling, and one of the things that’s being exposed is the social and personal cycles of abuse.

The workhouses in Peter Grimes exist in modern times, as juvenile detention centres and group homes, where children with social, behavioural or family issues are usually left for nothing, and, as Savage points out ‘it gives older people an opportunity to take advantage of them. For instance, Peter Grimes.’

Savage contextualising Grimes as someone who has been ‘dejected, rejected, cast out and cast down not just from society – but even as a child, from his own father who did not love and accept him’ creates a discussion around not only empathy, but compassion, even for those we don’t understand.

‘I strongly believe that hurting people hurt people. If you have empathy for the child that was abused, do you also have empathy for the adult that was once also abused?’

The role of Peter Grimes was written for tenor Peter Pears, a depiction immortalised in a recording from 1969 with Britten conducting. This recording proved useful for Savage, who likes to get the recording closest to the composer as possible, to hear the closest version to what they wanted and how they interpreted it. However, this does not limit Savage’s interpretation: ‘It was written for a sound that is so very, very different from mine. I think that’s another part of the brilliance of this role. It’s virtually impossible to copy this part. Anybody who sings this role will not be able to carbon copy it.’

Though Grimes never realises his dream of ‘freedom from the pain of gossip’, Ellen offers us a masterclass in empathy, as one of the few people who sees him as human in a vicious community. ‘The sexism, stereotypes, classism, cynicism and lack of trust – I think it is so parallel to our world today with the political climate that’s happening all over the world,’ says Savage. ‘Our opposites could be endless. If we agree on nothing else, we can agree that you’re human, I’m a human and we both need love.’

This article originally appeared in the Winter 2024 issue of Opera Now. Never miss an issue – subscribe today