I love the music of Peter Grimes, it’s a great piece and it’s fantastic to sing. I have loved the piece for over 40 years as a listener and then eventually as a singer. I do think, however, there are misapprehensions about the piece and what it’s about.

Peter himself is an outsider. I think, in modern language, we’d say he’s on the spectrum. He doesn’t know what other people want or need and therefore people don’t know how to be with him. But his environment, where he lives, is crucial to him. So even though he has skills, which he could take elsewhere, his is trapped in the Borough.

His loneliness and his anguish are fantastically well portrayed with lyrical musical lines that are a joy to sing. Vocally, it’s so well written. Britten never surpassed it, in my view, and that goes for Ellen Orford as well. He was speaking from the heart.

I do think it’s a gay opera, full stop. Benjamin Britten, a gay man, wrote it, and cast his lover in the title role. And to make this work, Britten completely massaged the original George Crabbe poem The Borough to suit the idea of a sympathetic portrayal of an outsider, which is a complete rewrite of the original poem. And when people bend over backwards to say, “No, he’s able to talk about an outsider because he’s an outsider gay man, he can talk about other outsiders,” I think that’s nonsense. It’s screamingly obvious to me that this is a gay man writing about a gay man in the early 19th century.

What I find uncomfortable in the opera is that Benjamin Britten and his librettist Slater decided to have their avatar of an outsider in society manifested in this brutal man. That wouldn’t be acceptable now, I don’t think that is how an outsider would be perceived or put on stage these days.

In some ways, Grimes gives off the vibe of a narcissist – he’s self-obsessed and unempathetic and also a violent person. He bullies people who come under his wing and he does physically attack Ellen Orford. And it’s unlikely that this is the first time he’s attacked anybody. This perhaps illustrates how old the opera is: Ellen Orford is diminished in this piece and the violence she receives from Grimes is simply viewed as an example of Grimes’ anguish, rather than what it means to her. If the opera was written now, I would hope that it would be different.

In Crabbe’s poem, Grimes’ relationships are about power and abuse. Grimes’ complete lack of empathy and understanding of other people reduces the boys to just machinery to fulfil whatever he needs to have done, which leads to the pursuit of money. “They listen to money, These Borough gossips listen to money, only to money.” In truth, it is Grimes who is obsessed with money.

And yet I love the piece. Conflicted and compromised characters are fascinating to perform, as I know from having sung Herod and Mime.