These roles were still well cast in the 1967 production, but without quite the same level of sheer vocal capacity. These artists’ collective efforts come across powerfully on these recordings, and must have generated considerable impact in the house.

The conducting of Emil Cooper was a source of critical complaint during this production’s run, and in some of the later comment, too. Well, he was a staff conductor—one of long experience, dating back to the first decade of the 20th Century in St. Petersburg (Sergei Levik mentions him in his fascinating memoir of those days), and as such dealt better with some pieces than with others (quite well with Khovanshchina, surprisingly so with Pelléas, routinely with Roméo and Aïda, dully with La Gioconda). Britten was certainly not an unknown quantity in the late ’40s, but neither was his style—the flow of his line, the shapes of his gestures, the colors of his harmonies and instrumentations, all of which are not dauntingly “advanced,” but are highly individual—a matter of absorbed, reflexive music-making, or even widely shared understanding. Though Leonard Bernstein, who had conducted the U. S. premiere at Tanglewood less than three years earlier, was obviously a brilliant young musician, there just weren’t any Britten specialists on hand. Edward Johnson’s Metropolitan took Grimes into its rolling rep system as it would any other grand opera, and presented it on those terms.

So no, there isn’t the eloquence and specificity of Colin Davis or Britten himself. And I’m loathe to judge much about orchestral timbres and balances on the basis of these crude recordings. There are assuredly moments of insecure ensemble. There are passages (e. g., the great Storm Interlude between the scenes of Act 1; the “We live, and let live” episode in the pub scene) that are too rushed to sink in). There’s an overall quality we might call brash (though that’s not always to the score’s disadvantage), and of course the flavor is distinctly American—people elocute quite well on the whole, but not in imitation Brit colorations, and when the chorus (very solid, the women steadier than we often hear now) intones “Bring the branding iron and knife,” it is in the same open, cheery tone they might want to tell us about their real nice clambake. Still: the big scenes build logically; the brass gives strong underpinning and the strings roil and soar at the appropriate junctures; and a goodly measure of the opera’s power comes through. In general, the ’49 performance is a marginal improvement over the earlier one.

Sullivan’s Grimes, which I had not heard before, is an impressive achievement. Britten really knew how to write to the strengths, and around the weaknesses, of Peter Pears’ voice and temperamental predilections, with the result that, given the modern rigidification of vocal categories and the resultant narrowing of technical capacities within each, the tenor who sings this writing well is probably not suited for much else, whereas voices better conformed to an opera-tenor norm are apt to encounter difficulties with it. These will center on expressively crucial passages involving restrained dynamics and persuasive word inflections in the upper-middle range. As with any first-rate opera composer and his favorite singers, one can, I think, trace the gradual downward slant of Pears’ vocal condition through inspection of how Britten was setting his tenor writing at any chosen interval. Grimes, written for Pears in his early prime, is a Young Heroic part; any of the Lohengrin/Tamino tenors cited above could have met its vocal requirements, as could Vickers—that, along with his strong affinity for the character’s dark strangeness, is what made him great in the role.^(I) Sullivan is neither Pears nor Vickers. They were more inimitable than he. But, singing in his native language and with a character more naturalistically conceived and thus more easily available in emotional terms than Lohengrin or Tamino, he seizes on both the rough dramatic and the eerie contemplative sides of the writing with a fervor that surprised me. In both performances there are signs of strain toward the end of the long solo (not truly a soliloquy, but effectively that in the listening) in Act 2, Scene 2 (in the hut), and in ’48 he’s not yet entirely on top of the Pleiades and Great Bear aria in the pub (by ’49 he’s solved it), but apart from these spots the voice stays fresh and full right through the wrenching mad scene. We might say that he proves it’s not necessary to be weird to do justice to this wonderful role.