9 days to the Peter Grimes premiere!

Ann Hould-Ward’s imaginative costume designs for the stage version of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast earned her a Tony Award in 1994. A Broadway veteran, she is now making her Met debut working on Peter Grimes with director John Doyle. (Although, she points out, she knows the house well, having worked for American Ballet Theater several times.) With Doyle, she recently collaborated on Weill’s Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny at Los Angeles Opera and Sondheim’s Company on Broadway.

Not unlike Mahagonny with its heavy irony and sarcasm, Grimes takes place in a dark world. “Two of the keywords John mentioned when we started were ‘bleak’ and ‘oppression,’” Hould-Ward recalls. To get a feel for the time and place, she turned to 19th-century photographs of fishermen and fishing villages. Another important inspiration came from the works of painter J.M.W. Turner. One of his seascapes, “The Shipwreck,” created in 1805, provided the color palette for the principals’ costumes. Every shade of brown, blue, green, gray, or yellow that’s being used in the costumes of the soloists appears somewhere in the painting. By contrast, the chorus is dressed entirely in black, the color of the set. “The idea is that the townspeople are coming out of the scenery,” the designer explains. “They are what Peter is up against.” Some of the ladies’ capes and the rain slickers the men wear feature a design of bird feathers. Even though this will be all but invisible to the major part of the audience, it provides an important thematic element. “John said that to him the villagers are like ravens or crows on the beach,” Hould-Ward continues, “and I tried to capture that in the costumes.” Interestingly, none of the principals changes his or her costume over the course of the opera. “We wanted to make it very specific and to allow the audience to really make a personal connection to the characters,” the designer points out. “If you take the lawyer Swallow, for example. How does he differentiate himself from the rest of the town? How does he see himself, how does he look at others? Our aim was to create a costume specifically for this person to make it clear to the audience who he is throughout the piece.” There are not many operas that provide a costume designer with the opportunity to create images for as many different—and distinct—characters as Peter Grimes does.

Some of the costume designs for Peter Grimes

Turner’s “The Shipwreck,” shown here by Ann Hould-Ward, provided the color palette for the costumes.

A selection of dyed fabric samples can be seen on a black board below the painting.

The designer with some of her creations.

Photos: Philipp Brieler/Metropolitan Opera

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