• Benjamin Britten. Opera in a prologue and three acts. 1945.
• Libretto by Montagu Slater, after George Crabbe's poem The Borough.
• First performance at Sadler's Wells, London, on 7th June 1945.

In the prologue, with the inquest on his apprentice, Peter Grimes is warned by the coroner, Swallow, not to take another boy apprentice. Popular prejudice is strong, but Ellen Orford shows sympathy. In the first act various inhabitants of the borough appear, while the fishermen and their wives go about their daily tasks. Ned Keene has found Grimes another apprentice, and Hobson agrees to bring him the boy, when Ellen Orford volunteers to look after him. While hostility is general, Balstrode too offers friendly advice to Grimes, suggesting that he leave the town to seek work on a merchant-ship. The second scene is set in The Boar, while a storm rages outside. Mrs Sedley comes to collect the laudanum Keene will bring her, Balstrode jokingly complains of the noise the frightened nieces are making and Boles, drunk, makes advances to them. Grimes comes in from the storm, intending to collect his new apprentice. His position as an outsider increases tension that is dissolved when Auntie calls for a song. Hobson comes in, with Ellen and the boy, and Grimes takes the latter away at once to what he calls home. The second act opens with Sunday morning. The people are in church, while outside Ellen questions the new apprentice about his life. She sees the boy's jersey is torn and that he has a bruise and pleads with Grimes to keep the day of rest, when he comes to take the boy off to work. In anger Grimes strikes her, the scene overheard by others, who now agree to set off in a party to Grimes's hut to see what is going on. The men march off together, intent on dealing with Grimes. A passacaglia, at the centre of the opera, leads to a new scene set in Grimes's hut. As the party of vindictive townspeople approaches, Grimes urges the boy to hurry down the cliff to the boat. The boy slips and falls to his death and Grimes follows down the cliff, leaving the hut empty, to the evident surprise of the men who now enter and find nothing amiss. The third act is set outside the Moot Hall, where a dance is taking place. Various people of the borough are seen, but Grimes is not there. Balstrode has found the jersey that Ellen had made for the boy, washed up on the shore. Mrs Sedley overhears and before long a band of angry men has formed, eager to hunt down Peter Grimes, the outsider. Grimes is now distraught at the disasters of his life and the failure of his ambitions. Balstrode advises him to take his boat out into the bay and sink it. The opera ends as Swallow confirms the coastguards' report that a boat has been seen out at sea, sinking. The life of the borough resumes.

A remarkable and pertinent study of the outsider Peter Grimes, his situation reflecting in one sense the position of Britten and his friend, the tenor Peter Pears, as pacifists and homosexuals in an intolerant and prejudiced society, and a still wider preoccupation with the rôle of the outsider, the opera Peter Grimes began a true revival of English opera as part of international operatic repertoire. The Four Sea Interludes , Dawn, Sunday Morning, Moonlight and Storm , with the Passacaglia are often heard in concert. Moving moments in the opera must include Ellen Orford's plea Let her among you without fault and her Embroidery Song in the third act. Peter Grimes expresses something of his aspirations in the second scene of the first act, with his Now the Great Bear and Pleiades and reveals his disturbed state of mind in his final scene. The fishermen have their own contribution to the second scene in The Boar when they sing the round Old Joe has gone fishing and it is the people of the borough, in their hypocrisy and incomprehension, who constitute the villain of an immensely theatrical work.