Music: Wagner in a Sou'wester

At the end of the first act of Peter Grimes, the applause was tentative. It came as something of a blow to the Metropolitan Opera audience to attend an opera written in English, only to discover that you still had to read the libretto to find out what they were singing about. But after the audience sat back and just listened to the music, as they do at operas sung in Italian and German, everything went better. At the final curtain, the Metropolitan's only new opera of the year got ten enthusiastic curtain...