This talk examines how Britten’s first and most famous opera, Peter Grimes (1945), undermined oppositions between modernist realism and difficulty on the one hand, and “cheap” and “easy” sentimentality on the other. After detailing attempts of early critics to stylize Grimes as an uncompromising modernist opera, which shocked and offended early audiences, the speaker uncovers the sentimental charms that they struggled to erase: its idealized vision of love, its melodramatization of good and evil, its compelling musical lyricism.