Powerful and haunting music of extraordinary emotional intensity brings alive Peter Grimes’s disturbing story of prejudice, suspicion and persecution in a small fishing village on the East Anglian coast.

The power of the sea and the changing moods of the landscape are famously evoked in rare subtlety by this great music as the background to a drama that requires the richest of musical and dramatic interpretation.

Ben Heppner as the outsider fisherman Peter Grimes and Amanda Roocroft as the school mistress Ellen Orford – steadfast in her sympathy for Grimes – are at the centre of an impressive cast under conductor Andrew Davis.

Willy Decker’s production of Peter Grimes has its first revival by the Royal Opera, bringing an intense focus to an introverted and judgemental world in which intolerance leads to tragedy. The music and the drama are deeply intertwined in a great opera of menace and beauty, threat and compassion.

Peter Grimes is sung in English with surtitles.

Learn more about London operas within the West End.