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This chapter criticizes English composer Benjamin Britten's opera Peter Grimes. It examines how audiences viewed and partly misunderstood the character of Peter Grimes and discusses the problems concerning the recreation of a literary character in another medium and the dilemma of making retrospective connections along a literary lineage. It suggests that Peter Grimes' embedding of his identity in the life of the community is similar to Britten's own communal life which demonstrates a commitment to the social relationships upon which all identity depends.

Grimes is very much 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, and is classed by society as a criminal. It is a particular irony of the fifty-year-old repertory opera, Peter Grimes, that the singer who premiered the role of the protagonist, and still the only one apparently capable of singing the notes as written, was also the person who drafted the scenario, and even wrote bits of the libretto. He happened to be the composer's lover, whose auditions for that role were evidently as protracted and demanding as those for the role of Peter Grimes, which was originally conceived for a baritone, and given to him well into the course of the project.

This chapter explores the “paradox” and “difference” of text setting in Peter Grimes. It argues that any of Britten's incongruities of textual-vocal manner in the 1940s are in fact remnants of Purcell's influence—an influence the composer happily acknowledged, if in uncertain terms, but one that has gone largely unrecognized.

Leaving England for America at the commencement of the war, Benjamin Britten eventually returned to his homeland, realizing the essence of an artists' being in the vicinity of his roots. This chapter appraises the proclaimed proximate connection between Britten's decision to retract to England and the opera, Peter Grimes. It was in Southern California in summer 1941 that Britten picked up an issue of The Listener to which E. M. Forster had contributed an chapter on the Suffolk poet, George Crabbe. This seems to have been the turning point in Britten's assumption not only about nationality but also locality. Crabbe's Peter Grimes is one of the poor of the Borough, and though the poet grew up among the poor, he did not like them. His portrait of the man whose cruelty leads to the death of three boy apprentices from the workhouse and whose guilty conscience drives him to madness and death is alleviated by few redeeming features; a bold and unusual choice for the central figure of a musical drama in the tradition of grand opera.

This chapter attempts to reverse the appropriation of the suffering of women in Britten's operas by a politically resolute group of men. It also suggests that Britten is not so straightforwardly a champion of the underdog as his students are liable to claim. The analysis focuses on the operas, Peter Grimes and The Rape of Lucretia.

Pastoralism can take on utopian contexts as well as Arcadian ones, imagining a potentially brighter future rather than an idealized and fictitious past. While traditional metaphors of Christ as the Good Shepherd seem appropriate in such a context, several British composers engage with a broader utopian perspective largely detached from narrowly dogmatic forms of religious belief. Their visionary ethos—in some cases, reflecting the prophetic spirituality of figures like William Blake—provides a means of engaging with utopian thought in music that has been largely overlooked, providing new and often unexpected revelations about the significance of their pastoral works.

This chapter inquires into the inspiration that propelled Britten to produce Peter Grimes, depicting the internalized oppression of an allegorical figure undoubtedly signifying “the homosexual,” at least two decades prior to the commencement of liberation movements. The solution to the question lay in Britten's belonging to the upper-middle-class British Artists and intellectuals, dubbed the “Auden generation,” and his personal proximity to Auden himself. The twain met on the sets of John Grierson's documentary film unit. They first collaborated on the film Coal Face, but their most famous collaboration and most successful film was Night Mail. Earlier commentators on Britten who invested in the public/private binary were shy of reckoning the connection between the personal and political awakening of Britten, and their mutual synergy. Britten's collaboration with Auden proved to be the catalyst triggering this synergy.