ABSTRACT
The memory of Laura Palmer’s face refracts into several of the ghosts in Twin Peaks’s machine; it’s the source of much of the show’s mysterious force. And, like the spirits invoked in the first act of Peter Grimes, which materialise in the last, it emerges from and manifests itself in a very deliberate intersection of landscape and music: a metaphysical psychogeography of sound. Badalamenti’s ‘Twin Peaks Theme’ continues to attract acclaim as a masterpiece of music for television capable of underpinning Lynch’s ‘pioneering example of unorthodox, auteur-driven event TV’, but listen to it after a couple of hours spent on Britten’s beach, and it starts to sound suspiciously like a synthetic rehash of a Sea Interlude. Perhaps the most significant new truth to take from the revelation that Peter Grimes represents a triumph in two forms, a great work of theatre as well as opera, is the suggestion that Britten was a truly English artist.
