Peter Grimes is an opera by the English composer, Benjamin Britten. It has a prologue and three acts. (See Britten, Benjamin.) The libretto (text), by Montagu Slater, was based on The Borough (1810), a poem by the Suffolk poet George Crabbe. The opera was first performed at the Sadlers Wells Theatre in London on June 7, 1945.
The opera is set in approximately 1830 in a Suffolk, England, fishing village called the Borough. The prologue consists of an inquest into the death of a boy apprenticed to a local fisherman, Peter Grimes (tenor). The coroner brings in a verdict of accidental death, but Grimes is warned not to take on any more young apprentices.
After the prologue, the orchestra plays the first of four Sea Interludes, this one depicting dawn. Others throughout the opera depict Sunday morning, moonlight, and a storm. They punctuate the brooding mood of the opera in which Grimes, a loner, becomes the target of the community’s feelings of distrust and hostility. Only the schoolmistress, Ellen Orford (soprano), tries to understand and support him. One day, she goes to fetch him a new apprentice. That evening in the Boar, the local pub, the villagers accuse Grimes of murder. When Ellen arrives with the new boy, Grimes takes him back home.
One Sunday, a few weeks later, Ellen argues with Grimes over the boy’s welfare. Grimes strikes Ellen and storms off to his home. The villagers coming out of church witness the quarrel and set off to Grimes’s hut to find out what is going on. At the hut, Grimes thinks the boy has been complaining about him, making the villagers angry. Grimes hustles the lad out the back entrance, which leads onto a dangerous cliff path. In the rush, the boy misses his footing and falls to his death.
A few days later, Ellen Orford recognizes a jersey washed up on the beach as the one she recently made for the boy. Grimes’s boat has returned to the harbor after a few days’ absence, and some of the villagers go out to search for him, even though fog and night blanket the Borough. Grimes has now lost his reason. His madness is brilliantly depicted in a long soliloquy (a speech made by a performer alone on stage, revealing thoughts and feelings to the audience). Grimes performs the soliloquy without accompaniment, except for the intermittent sound of a foghorn imitated by a French horn. Ellen and Captain Balstrode (baritone) eventually find Grimes. Balstrode tells him to take his boat out to sea and sink it. This he does as dawn rises.
