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Only Ellen Orford, the widowed village schoolteacher, gives him comfort. His ambition is to live down his unpopularity, make money (to buy respectability), and marry Ellen. Sings Captain Balstrode, a retired merchant seaman: "Man—go and ask her. Without your booty, she'll have you now." Sings Peter: "No—not for pity!" Balstrode replies: "Then the old tragedy is in store: new start with new 'prentice, just as before."
The new apprentice, a weak young boy from the workhouse, is brought to the pub through a magnificent storm (Britten lets his furious storm music in each time the pub door is opened). The second act finds Ellen sitting beside the boy in the Sunday sunshine; she discovers that Peter Grimes has already cuffed and bruised him. This is Britten at his musical trickiest: as she sings to the boy, a church choir nearby is chanting words from the Book of Common Prayer; first the soprano's voice, then the choir, fades in & out like music in a radio play. The chorus angrily follows Peter and the boy to his hut atop a cliff.
There the boy cowers in fear, while Peter rages. As they head out the cliffside door to go fishing, the boy slips and falls, and Peter rushes after him. The townspeople find the hut empty.
A few days later, the apprentice's sweater is found washed up on the beach. The townspeople, surex that Grimes has committed another murder, head offstage on a new hunt, chanting now near, now far: "Peter Gri-imes ... Peter Gri—mes." As Peter appears on stage, clearly out of his mind, the orchestra is silent; the only sound to be heard is an eerie foghorn. His friend Balstrode warns him to "sail out . . . then sink the boat," before the mob finds him, and Peter Grimes obeys.
The Vicious Society. Composer Britten regards this opera as "a subject very close to my heart—the struggle of the individual against the masses. The more vicious the society, the more vicious the individual." Actually, Grimes does not defy the masses, only their fury: he would like to be one of them.
Those who have seen Benjamin Britten find it hard to believe that he could conceive so violent a play as Peter Grimes: it is almost like Baby Snooks reading lines from Medea. He is the kind of person no one remembers meeting at a party. Usually to be seen in a loose tweed coat, slacks and sweater, his hands habitually stuffed into his pockets, he has a rather tight, lean, nosy face which wrinkles easily into a vinegarish smile under a widow's peak of crinkly hair. He has a very English embarrassment about expressing emotion about anything. He is rarely a talker, usually a listener —a lanky, youthful but somehow worn-looking young man who is painfully awkward with strangers. Around his Suffolk coast home at Aldeburgh—the setting of Peter Grimes—the local folk are used to seeing him walking on the beach, or driving at a conservative speed in his huge old cream-colored Rolls-Royce.