Just before the close of the final act of Peter Grimes (1945) Peter is left alone in his hut wailing in hallucinatory horror, his rejection from the Borough community underlined by the cries of the persecutory off-stage chorus calling his name, convinced of his guilt in relation to the death of his latest boy apprentice. In a mad scene of chilling intensity, Peter relives the music that accompanied his downfall. His fevered, fragmented recitative thematically recalls his visionary hopes, the inquest, Ellen's affection (the agent of his failed salvation) and the vindictive, prejudicial voices of the seafaring society. Suicide is, apparently, the only option; a fate made more poignant by the obliviousness of the villagers who return apparently unchanged to their daily routine as the curtain falls.

Writing about the libretto of Grimes in 1945, Desmond Shawe-Taylor suggests that it was such generic scenes as the mad scene that drew Britten to George Crabbe's poem as possible operatic material. He describes the libretto’s

That Britten, too, considered these scenes as significant structural and musical elements is underlined by the fact that the early draft scenarios of the work include generic titles for many of these sections.

Grimes is also notable for its number opera construction. Britten himself famously suggested that he had adopted the ‘practice of separate numbers’ in the work, and many commentators have viewed this allusion to 19th-century and earlier practice as a problematic and even conservative element in the score. Further, these number opera conventions (the division of scenes into discrete dramatic units, often marked by clear scene-changes and set-piece forms such as arias, ensembles and choruses) and generic scenes (stock scenes employed to set the mood or articulate dramatic action, for example storm scenes, dance scenes and mad scenes) also resonate with specifically Italianate and Verdian models.