| Summary: | This article critically evaluates the opera "Peter Grimes," by Benjamin Britten. A literary critic approaching the history of the composition of Benjamin Britten's Peter Grimes encounters a somewhat unusual circumstance. "Peter Grimes" is unusual because the first germ of the opera was provided by the novelist and critic E. M. Forster in a radio talk on the English poet George Crabbe that Britten came upon in a 1941 issue of the Listener. Throughout the opera, Britten uses all the stage and musical resources of opera, including extensive interludes, to produce this particular environment, for more was at stake for him than the opera itself. If Crabbe on his best behavior was barely suitable for joining the ranks of accepted poets, and even more of a challenge for an opera, the person whom Britten actually chose to make his protagonist embodies everything that troubled Crabbe's contemporaries about his writing.
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