33, is an opera in three acts by Benjamin Britten, with a libretto by Montagu Slater based on the section "Peter Grimes", in George Crabbe's long narrative poem The Borough.

The "borough" of the opera is a fictional small town that bears some resemblance to Crabbe's – and later Britten's – home of Aldeburgh, Suffolk, on England's east coast.

Among the tenors who have performed the title role in the opera house, or on record, or both are Britten's partner Peter Pears, who sang the part at the premiere, and Allan Clayton, Ben Heppner, Anthony Rolfe Johnson, Jonas Kaufmann, Philip Langridge, Stuart Skelton, Set Svanholm and Jon Vickers.

Britten's compositions from his years there include the song cycle Les Illuminations (1940), the Sinfonia da Requiem (1940) and his operetta, Paul Bunyan (1941).

Pears found a copy of Crabbe's works in a second-hand bookshop and Britten read the poem The Borough, which contained the tragic story of the Aldeburgh fisherman Peter Grimes.

The Rector, Swallow, and the proprietress of the Boar inn, "Auntie", and her nieces derive from other sections of The Borough,[4][5] but other characters in the opera, including Balstrode, Boles and Ned Keene, are not in Crabbe's original.

[9] During the voyage back to England, Pears continued to work on the scenario of the opera while Britten composed A Ceremony of Carols and Hymn to St Cecilia.

He abandoned Crabbe's rhyming couplets and allowed his text "to reflect the diverse speech-rhythms of the individual Borough characters": In Crozier's view, Slater's "short interjectory sentences" in the recitatives and the "more expansive phrases" of the arias are ideal for musical setting.

[18] Tyrone Guthrie, the general administrator of the Sadler's Wells company, appointed his assistant Eric Crozier to stage the piece, and the latter, together with Britten, made adjustments to the libretto during rehearsals when Slater's text proved unsuitable for singability or clarity.

[22] Yet when Peter Grimes opened it was hailed by public and critics;[23] its box-office takings matched or exceeded those for La bohème and Madame Butterfly, which were being staged concurrently by the company.

[27] Grimes was played by, respectively, Ronald Dowd, Philip Langridge and Stuart Skelton; the conductors were Charles Mackerras, David Atherton and Edward Gardner.

[28] Peter Grimes was staged at the Royal Opera House in 1947, in a production by Guthrie, conducted by Karl Rankl, with Pears, Cross and Edith Coates reprising their roles from the Sadler's Wells premiere.

[29] The conductors were, respectively, Goodall, Colin Davis, Antonio Pappano and Mark Elder, and the title role was sung by Pears, Jon Vickers, Ben Heppner and Allan Clayton.

[39] The American premiere of the work was given in August 1946 at Tanglewood, conducted by Koussevitzky's protégé Leonard Bernstein, with William Horne in the title role.

[41] One of the first productions of the work outside Britain was at the Royal Swedish Opera in March 1946, conducted by Herbert Sandberg, with Set Svanholm as Grimes.

[42] The opera was given in Paris at the Opéra in 1981 directed by Moshinsky and conducted by John Pritchard, with Vickers in the title role and a largely Franco-British cast.

[45] In addition to the co-productions, above, between the Royal Opera and the Monnaie in Brussels, the Teatro Real in Madrid, the Teatro dell'Opera in Rome, and the Paris Opéra, productions included two in 2022: at the Vienna State Opera in a production directed by Christine Mielitz and conducted by Simone Young, with Jonas Kaufmann as Grimes, Lise Davidsen as Ellen Orford and Bryn Terfel as Balstrode;[46] and the Bavarian State Opera in a production by Stefan Herheim, conducted by Gardner, with Skelton as Grimes, Rachel Willis-Sørensen as Ellen and Iain Paterson as Balstrode.

Grimes suddenly enters ("Now the Great Bear and Pleiades..."), and his wild appearance unites almost the entire community in their fear and mistrust of his "temper".

The same, some weeks later On a sunny Sunday morning (the Third Orchestral Interlude), while most Borough townspeople are at church, Ellen talks with John the apprentice.

This does not go unseen: first Keene, Auntie, and Bob Boles, then the chorus comment on what has happened, the latter developing into a mob which sets off to investigate at Grimes's fisherman's hut.

While the townspeople can be heard off-stage hunting for him, Grimes appears onstage singing a monologue, interspersed by cries from the mob and by a mournful fog horn (a solo tuba).

[52] The Manchester Guardian's critic, William McNaught, considered the music "full of vivid suggestion and action, sometimes rising to a kind of white-hot poetry", but thought the libretto insufficiently "operatic" – "overloaded with scrappy and not always telling incident".

[54] The reviewer in The Times[n 5] found the use of a single spoken line for Balstrode at a key point intrusive in an otherwise through-composed score, but praised Britten's "effortless originality" and "orchestral music of diabolical cunning".

[56] After the American premiere, the critic Douglas Watt opened his review "Peter Grimes has greatness", and called the work "an opera for our time, brilliantly conceived and executed", with the "breathtaking pleasure" of the music matched by "the strong and lovely libretto", though he predicted that if an impresario succeeded in staging the piece on Broadway "it will be met with much intolerance and displeasure by audiences unprepared for its surprising magnificences".

[57] Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians describes Peter Grimes as "a powerful allegory of homosexual oppression",[58] and The New York Times has called it one of "the true operatic masterpieces of the 20th century";[59] the composer's own contemporary (1948) summation of the work was "a subject very close to my heart – the struggle of the individual against the masses.

[60] In a 1963 analysis of the opera in Music & Letters, J. W. Garbutt contended that Britten's "inventive genius" and the richness of the score led the listener to suspend disbelief, but that Slater's libretto failed to reconcile the violent and the visionary in Grimes's character and conduct.

[62] In The University of Toronto Quarterly in 2005, Allan Hepburn considered the various views of previous commentators on the extent to which homosexuality is relevant to the plot of the opera.