Sentimentality under Erasure in Peter Grimes

Chapter two examines how Peter Grimes (1945) undermined oppositions between “difficult” realism and “easy” sentimentality. After detailing critical attempts to style Grimes as an authentic modernist opera that shocked early audiences, it uncovers the more sentimental charms that they struggled to erase: its idealized vision of love, its melodrama, its manipulation of sympathy, its compelling musical lyricism, among other features. Beyond pointing out previous omissions, the chapter seeks to explain how Britten’s opera encourages the subtractive reactions it received. Ultimately, it is argued that by pitting “romantic” tropes against “modernist” ones, sumptuous lyricism against its erasure, Grimes was able to stage its own difficulty – translating modernism’s supposed rejection of nineteenth-century sentimentality into a rhetorical style.