About the House 1, no. 5 (1963)

In considering the subjects that Britten has chosen, one is struck by the fact that no fewer than four of his operas are about the persecution and death of someone who personifies goodness. Indeed, the betrayal of innocence might be said to be their underlying theme. It is true that Grimes' behaviour towards his apprentices is hardly consistent with goodness, and yet there is no doubt that we are meant to regard him as fundamentally an idealist, hounded by the forces of respectability and convention, and driven, by their hatred of anyone apart and different, to take his own life. In The Rape of Lucretia we have the very prototype of innocence and virtue also finding in suicide the only escape from the consequences of lust and brutality. In The Turn of the Screw, the forces of evil are let loose upon a child, and once again ‘the ceremony of innocence is drowned’. Billy Budd, young, handsome, and good, is brought to the scaffold by the wicked machinations of Claggart, though here we are faced with the cruelty of fate as well as that of man, for Claggart did not presumably intend to bring about Billy's death by forfeiting his own life.

In view of this continually recurring theme, it is interesting to see how Britten sets about making his music depict the struggle between good and evil. Characterisation is well to the fore in Peter Grimes.