The outstanding recent production of Peter Grimes at the London Coliseum, I was thinking, might have sounded like a quintessentially English experience. This, after all, is a postwar English opera, by the 20th-century English composer Benjamin Britten, performed by the company that gave Peter Grimes its first performance in 1945 – as Sadlers Wells Opera Company – before changing its name to the English National Opera.

But rarely can the piece have sounded and looked less English. Directed by the American David Alden, with costume designs by Munich-born Brigitte Reiffenstuel, this Grimes appeared more German than English. The peculiar inhabitants of the Borough (aka Britten’s home town of Aldeburgh) had been reconfigured to resemble the grotesque characters painted by Christian Schad. The part of Grimes was sung by an Australian, the magnificent Stuart Skelton; the distinguished Canadian-born baritone Gerald Finley sang the part of the very English Captain Balstrode. The score, delivered with tremendous incisiveness by the ENO orchestra under Edward Gardner, sounded more like Stravinsky than Vaughan Williams.

Then it occurred to me that this archetypal English opera was written in America by a conscientious objector and sexual outsider, fearful of his reception when he returned home. This production brought home, in every sense, that the theme of Grimes is xenophobia. When near the end of the opera the chorus of Borough worthies, baying for the blood of the tormented fisherman, waved little Union Jacks, they were perhaps needlessly underlining a point.

But Peter Grimes, an opera about xenophobia, is also an antidote to xenophobia. Written from a particular place, with an understanding of how it feels to feel out of place in a locality, it has gone on to conquer the world. Conquer, that is in the best and most unbloody sense: Grimes has won over audiences from Yokohama to San Diego. If the opera has been performed all over the world, in places unimaginably remote from coastal Suffolk, that must be because its themes have universal resonance. The success of his masterpiece surely gave Britten comparable satisfaction to that of Arthur Miller, creator of another seminal postwar work, when Death of a Salesman played to huge enthusiasm in Beijing.

A bland statement that culture bridges national divides sounds little better than a cliché. You could maintain the same about beach football or mobile phone technology. To call a cultural phenomenon such as Grimes an antidote to xenophobia is to make a stronger claim; it is to suggest that such a penetrating work exposes the roots and essence of xenophobia in a dramatic action that can profoundly affect an audience.

We take xenophobia to mean hatred of foreigners. We recognise this is one of the most poisonous of all group or political sentiments, and unfortunately, as last week’s European elections reminded us, it is alive and well among us. But more fundamentally, xenophobia means fear of the stranger, of the different one.

The Greek word xenos originally meant something as unforeign as guest or host (the word, like the Latin hospes, could mean both). So that would give us the translation “fear of hospitality”, “fear of being hospitable”; then we would need to ask what or whom we were afraid to welcome. In rural Greece and Turkey, I have found that the ancient spirit of hospitality lives on. Once, walking the streets of the little town of Konitsa in Epirus, a schoolfriend and I were summoned from a house, several flights of stairs up, to eat cakes and drink ouzo. Our very limited Greek didn’t get us beyond pleasantries but I can still remember the exchange of photographs and smiles. In Turkey, in a beer garden in Antalya, my then girlfriend and I were regaled with presents of fruit and tall glasses of beer by fellow customers, simply expressing a hospitality that has left an indelible mark.

The modern Greek word for hospitality is philoxenia, the polar opposite of xenophobia, replacing fear or hatred with love or friendship. Sad that this word does not exist in English, that our default linguistic mode when dealing with the stranger or foreigner is fear or hatred; sad also when even the Greeks and Turks, great exponents of hospitality, fail with regard to it – most notably in relation to each other.

This breakdown of hospitality very close to home takes us back to Peter Grimes and our question about whom we might be afraid to welcome. Shambling, awkward, proud, poetic, full of yearning, over-sensitive, occasionally brutal, Skelton’s Grimes was a portrayal of full human emotion in a world of fearful small-mindedness. What if the stranger we are afraid to welcome is ourself – the true, feeling self we may have suppressed over decades in the interests of group conformity? We may have become strange to ourselves: perhaps that is what Rimbaud meant when he wrote “Je Est un Autre”. All the more reason, then, to welcome our own strangeness and all other strangers, rather than turning on them in destructive, and self-destructive, fear and fury.

harry.eyres@ft.com
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