[2] Crozier suggested adapting the Maupassant short story Le rosier de Madame Husson and transplanting it to the Suffolk landscape already familiar to Britten from his home in Snape.

According to one writer, the owner and founder of Glyndebourne, John Christie, "disliked it intensely and is said to have greeted members of the first night audience with the words: 'This isn't our kind of thing, you know'.

[3] In 1949, Britten's English Opera Group toured with both Rape of Lucretia and Albert Herring, giving ten performances between 12 and 23 September in Copenhagen and Oslo.

Sviatoslav Richter called it "the greatest comic opera of the century"[5] and in 1983 staged Albert Herring as part of the December Nights Festival at Moscow's Pushkin Museum.

Her mistress Lady Billows is organising the annual May Day festival and has gathered all the important people of the village to elect the May Queen.

Herring is thrilled by the prize of £25, but Albert balks at being paraded in swan-white and mother and son quarrel to the mocking commentary of the village children.

Sid and Nancy are preparing the banquet tent, and they take the opportunity to slip some rum into Albert's lemonade glass.

Together with a crown of flowers and the gruesome but improving Foxe's The Book of Martyrs, Albert is awarded twenty-five pounds in prize money.

Asked to make a speech, he is tongue-tied and becomes an object of pity at the feast in his honour, but after draining his lemonade glass (which Britten satirically underlines with a Tristan chord, alluding to the philter in that opera).

A boy shouts that a "Big White Something" has been found in a well, and the village worthies file in to break the news en masse that Albert's crown of flowers has been discovered, crushed by a cart.

Like Peter Grimes and other works by Britten, this opera explores society's reaction to an odd individual, although, in this case at least, it is from a generally humorous and lighthearted perspective.