Peter Grimes is a shipwreck waiting to happen.

The Wortham Theater might not sink under the waters of Houston Grand Opera’s second offering of the season, which opens Friday night and runs through November 11. But the siren song of calamity in the later British composer Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes could pull you under.

Shipwreck becomes literal at the end of this opera as the central character sails knowingly into a storm in hopes of ending his miserable life. But the real disaster is on shore, in the hearts of a mob full of suspicion and rage. They need a handy scapegoat, and nobody fills the role better than Peter Grimes.

We can’t really blame the townspeople. After all, Grimes’ apprentices do have a funny way of dying. And it happens again in Britten: think of the hapless Billy Budd in his adaptation (along with E. M. Forster and Eric Crozier) of Melville’s tale of persecution on the high seas.

As another election cycle unfolds, Australian director Neil Armfield can’t help thinking of how the story relates to contemporary politics.

“We’re living in a time in which societies are gripped by fear,” Armfield said in a recent telephone interview. “I look at the way the Tea Party seems to be calling on the worst impulses in human beings as a way of targeting an enemy and targeting difference and rallying behind a false notion of patriotism and the flag.”

The opera was born in a similarly bleak moment in history. As Armfield pointed out, “Britten wrote this work across the darkest days of the 20th century, the end of WWII, and he’s trying to understand where rage in the human heart comes from, how fear is inferred, and works inside society through this almost fascist outpouring of societal energy.”

Britten thrived when adapting literary works, and his operas are particularly marked by collaborations with great librettists. Peter Grimes is based on poet George Crabbe’s 1810 collection The Borough, a series of letters focused on the inhabitants of a small, rural town. Poet and playwright Montagu Slater, a frequent collaborator with Britten and legendary poet W.H. Auden, adapted the traditional rhythms of Crabbe’s poem to produce a rougher and more modern idiom.

HGO music director Patrick Summers also emphasizes the opera’s weighty theme.

“If truth doesn’t matter to a society, if you can be ostracized for your difference,” Summers said, “then there cannot be a moral world. And that’s what Peter Grimes is about.”

In the stormy world of Peter Grimes, death seems as irresistible as the sea. But surely the fascination of Britten is the beauty of what’s so difficult. For Armfield, the “wonderful collusion of music and society” in Britten is compelling. According to Summers, Peter Grimes remains the most popular of Britten’s operas because it is composed of familiar forms: duets, arias, rousing choruses, interludes, and what he called, “incredibly lush and gorgeous orchestral works.”

Of course, HGO is no stranger to the works of Benjamin Britten, or to Armfield. Peter Grimes represents the fourth installment in the company’s Britten series. Armfield directed last year’s thriller The Turn of the Screw and, in previous years, Billy Budd and A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

In fact, Armfield will fly in for Friday’s premiere from Chicago, where he has been directing Britten’s Dream for Chicago Lyric Opera. As compared to Peter Grimes, he said the later opera is quite distinct.

"It’s amazing that it comes from the same composer,” Armfield added.

Armfield worked through a Janáček opera series for Opera Australia, a co-producer of this Peter Grimes along with West Australian Opera and Perth International Arts Festival. Because of that experience, he was keen to engage in HGO’s Britten project.

“It’s wonderful to feel you’re sifting layers in a composer’s imagination, feeling the internal rhythms,” he said. “There’s an intense psychosexual energy with Britten, especially one that is layered with the flesh somehow, and a contemplation of the world, of human society.”

HGO’s commitment to Britten provides an important antidote to the neglect of this composer’s works, at least here in Houston. The company last performed Peter Grimes in 1984. Summers affirmed his interest in returning to operas he thinks are underperformed by most American opera companies.

“I think Britten requires a level of participation and thought, and a willingness to think and explore,” Summers said. “You can’t sit back and be blindly entertained by Britten. You have to be willing to go on the journey.”

Clearly, Houston audiences have been more than willing to undertake that journey. Summers said that HGO was thrilled with the reaction to last season’s Turn of the Screw. In fact, he said, A Midsummer Night’s Dream proved more difficult for Houston opera lovers.

As audiences settle into the hypnotic pulse of the sea that emanates from Peter Grimes, they can rest assured that Britten’s challenging operas will continue to find a home in Houston through the Britten Centenary in 2013. Summers and Armfield confirmed that next season will feature his The Rape of Lucretia, but both were hesitant to say which opera will conclude the centenary.

Britten’s early Paul Bunyan seems unlikely, but perhaps another stunning literary adaptation might fill the bill, such as Myfanwy Piper’s setting of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice or Henry James’s Owen Wingrave. Whatever HGO chooses, it will likely be glorious.