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On 7 June 1945, a month after VE day, London was still badly scarred by bombing - but its citizens were still in party mood. Theatres were beginning to re-open, including Sadler's Wells in Islington, which had been requisitioned during the war as a shelter for people made homeless in the Blitz. People camped outside the theatre to be sure of getting a place for the re-opening night. And what was on the bill?

It was far from celebratory. Audiences that night were to see the world premiere of a new opera by the 31-year-old Benjamin Britten: Peter Grimes, the grim tale of a misfit fisherman (and probable child-murderer) hounded to madness by a merciless community. The opera was anticipated with a mixture of suspicion and excitement. The suspicion was of Britten himself and his partner Peter Pears - as homosexuals who had gone to America to avoid military service - as well as rumours from the rehearsal room about the dissonance and complexity of the opera. But there was excitement among musical insiders. This would be the first full-scale opera from a clearly prodigious talent. There was an awareness, too, that this might be the work to revive the fortunes of British opera.

That night an audience of eager opera fans and demobbed soldiers were joined by the cultural big hitters of the day, including Vaughan Williams, Yehudi Menuhin and William Walton (who, afterwards, wrote Britten an unabashed fan letter). Britten himself was too nervous to take his seat: several witnesses described him nervously pacing up and down at the back of the stalls throughout the opera. But it was clear from the very first sounds that the young composer had created something extraordinary, unexpected, unsettling. However unpalatable a character Grimes may be, Britten (himself an outsider) had written luminous music that forced the audience to identify and sympathise with him.

When the curtain came down at the end, there was a long, long silence in the theatre. Then applause, shouting, cheering - and, when Britten came down from the back of the stalls, 14 curtain calls. Grimes was a sensation and the talk of the town. For the rest of the run, when the Number 19 bus stopped outside Sadlers’ Wells, the bus conductor would call: "Any more for the sadistic fisherman? Any more for Peter Grimes?"

This is one of 100 significant musical moments explored by Â鶹Éç Radio 3’s Essential Classics as part of Our Classical Century, a Â鶹Éç season celebrating a momentous 100 years in music from 1918 to 2018. Visit bbc.co.uk/ourclassicalcentury to watch and listen to all programmes in the season.

This archive recording features the Â鶹Éç Philharmonic with conductor Juanjo Mena.

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