Run time: Approx. 16 minutes

In the east of Suffolk, along the North Sea and some 87 miles from London, lies the small fishing village of Aldeburgh. Home to approximately 2,200 people—a population that has remained largely unchanged since the postwar years—the village is widely accepted as the setting for Benjamin Britten’s opera Peter Grimes. It was also home to Britten himself, as well as to George Crabbe, the 18th-century author of The Borough, the poem on which Benjamin Britten based his tale. Britten settled in Aldeburgh shortly after completing Peter Grimes. He first encountered Crabbe’s poem whilst feeling rather homesick in America during World War II, and later recalled that upon reading it, “In a flash I realised two things: that I must write an opera, and where I belonged.”

Peter Grimes is, at its heart, a story about otherness and the danger that can arise from fearing what we don’t understand. Peter is a fisherman whose volatile temper and antisocial ways have made him an outcast in his community. When his apprentice dies from harsh conditions at sea, he is put on trial, and the townspeople grow increasingly suspicious, eventually hunting him down in an angry mob and driving him to commit suicide by sinking his ship in the ocean.

Britten himself knew a thing or two about being an outsider. He was a gay man at a time when homosexuality was illegal in England. Though his relationship with well-known tenor Peter Pears was something of an open secret amongst their artistic community, and the pair performed together extensively, they could never speak publicly of their relationship. The couple was together from 1939 until Britten’s death in 1976, but only nine of their 37 years together were spent legally. Britten was also a staunch pacifist. He and Pears officially registered as conscientious objectors during the war, a decision that was not altogether applauded by the British public.

Peter Grimes has essentially four principal characters. There is Peter, who wishes to be accepted by his community but cannot amend his volatile nature nor his isolationist tendencies. There is Ellen Orford, the schoolteacher whom Peter hopes to marry and the only member of the village who is sympathetic to him. There are the townspeople, whose fear of Peter leads to blame and hysteria. And then there is the sea itself.

In the opera, the sea is portrayed by the orchestra, which plays a series of interludes that Britten cleverly composed to cover scene changes, allowing time for the sets to shift while musically establishing the tone of each new day. Britten fashioned four of these interludes into the orchestral suite, offering short vignettes that encapsulate the turbulent story even without the text and actors.

In addition to providing an omnipresent and malevolent backdrop, the sea offers a metaphor for Peter himself—both his inner turmoil and his contradictory character. In the words of Peter Pears, who originated the character, 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!”

Just as people often contain contradictions, the sea has many conflicting characters: tranquility, violence, beauty, abundance, power. And like the inexorable resolve of the angry mob that ultimately seals Peter’s fate, a tide, when it has gathered enough force, can rarely be overcome.