libretto Britten recruited an old friend, the writer Montagu Slater. Slater was a journalist, novelist and playwright. Before the war Britten had composed incidental music for two short verse-plays of his. Eric Crozier, who worked closely with Britten, comments that the whole of the original text of the libretto – "apart from six quatrains by Crabbe and the small phrase 'Grimes is at his exercise'" – is Slater's work. He abandoned Crabbe's rhyming couplets and allowed his text "to reflect the diverse speech-rhythms of the individual Borough characters": In Crozier's view, Slater's "short interjectory sentences" in the recitatives and the "more expansive phrases" of the arias are ideal for musical setting. In Slater's hands the character of Grimes was further developed. In Pears's words, Grimes is "neither a hero nor a villain", but "an ordinary, weak person who, being at odds with the society in which he finds himself, tries to overcome it and, in doing so, offends against the conventional code, is classed by society as a criminal, and destroyed as such. There are plenty of Grimeses around still, I think!" Discussions between composer and librettist, revisions and corrections took nearly eighteen months. In January 1944 Britten started writing the music and just over a year later it was complete. The premiere had been planned for Koussevitzky's Tanglewood Festival, but the festival had been suspended for the duration of the war, and Koussevitzky waived his contractual rights and gave his blessing to Sadler's Wells Opera to stage the first performances, saying that the opera – which he thought the greatest since Carmen – belonged not to him but to the world. Tyrone Guthrie, the general administrator of the Sadler's Wells company, appointed his assistant Eric Crozier to stage the piece, and the latter, together with Britten, made adjustments to the libretto during rehearsals when Slater's text proved unsuitable for singability or clarity. Slater resented this, and insisted on publishing his original version in 1946, as Peter Grimes and Other Poems. Crozier brought in Kenneth Green to design the costumes and sets, the latter being naturalistic and based on Aldeburgh. Performance history Premiere Sadler's Wells had been closed during the war, and the premiere of Peter Grimes, on 7 June 1945, marked the reopening of the theatre. When Joan Cross, director of the company, announced the plan to reopen the house with Peter Grimes − herself and Pears in the