How many operas feature a man who is crowned May Queen because no one can vouch for the virginity of the village girls? Andrew Mellor on Britten's comic gem, Albert Herring

One June night in 1947, an audience at Glyndebourne settled into its seats for the premiere of Benjamin Britten's new comic opera Albert Herring. Two years earlier, the composer had stepped into the operatic limelight with his grand and unsettling tragedy Peter Grimes. Albert Herring retained Grimes's Suffolk setting, but otherwise appeared completely different: a smallscale, genteel comedy reflecting the delightful idiosyncrasies of English village life. The audience chuckled its self-regarding approval, and Albert Herring was promptly filed under "inoffensive comic romp". Give or take the odd attack on its musical validity, it has remained there ever since.

But that might be about to change, as Opera North prepares to unveil its new production of the work in Leeds next week. And if any of Britten's major operatic works deserves wholesale reappraisal in the composer's centenary year, it's surely this one. Behind the opera's jolly japes and canny pastiches is one of Britten's boldest, most socially revolutionary statements: a piece hardwired into the youthful urge to experiment, rebel and break free.

When I first heard Albert Herring as a teenager in the 1990s, against a backdrop of grunge and the cult coming-of-age TV drama My So-Called Life, it hit me like a freight train. Here was an opera that didn't feel anything like one: nobody dies; nobody dresses up as a member of the opposite sex; nobody so much as hides in a wardrobe. Instead, a confused and shy young man is crowned Queen of the May because no one can vouch for the virginity of any of the village girls. He spends his prize money on a night of alcohol-fuelled debauchery, probably losing said virginity in the process.

Five years earlier, Britten had abandoned a life in the US and returned to his native East Anglia. But as much as he felt rooted in Suffolk, Peter Grimes and Albert Herring represented fierce attacks on the small-town England of the mid-20th century. The composer's most recent biographer, Paul Kildea, writes of Britten "dealing with the suffocating awfulness of the British class system" when he started work on this new comedy. It's precisely this which Britten depicts in Loxford, the fictional Suffolk town where, circa 1910, Albert works in his mother's shop.

Albert is a nerd, a loner, a victim of parental and societal repression. Physically strong, he is assumed by all around him to be mentally weak. Loxford festers under the feudal control of Lady Billows, an aristocrat with a Thatcherite flair for ensuring the village seniors bow to her rampant conservatism. Albert is friendless but for the butcher Sid, who enjoys premarital, alfresco sex with his savvy girlfriend Nancy and urges Albert to break free from his mother's control. At the May celebratory dinner, Sid spikes Albert's lemonade with rum.

Albert takes his chance – coerced into action by an acerbic parody of his own coronation music punched out by Britten's angry little orchestra. He escapes with his prize money, binge-drinks and starts a fight in a pub. There's the sure implication, in Eric Crozier's libretto, that Albert has a sexual encounter – possibly one he pays for. Some, including Kildea, point to a suggestion in the text that it might be with a man.

Alexander Sprague will take the title role in Opera North's new production. "It's not so much the way Albert experiences the world when he has this night out – it's more what he realises he can do," the tenor says. "Britten is having a dig at the way children are brought up, the way people are squashed so their true personalities can't surface. It's a kind of 'up yours' to certain people. It must be a reflection of how he was treated by society in his lifetime."

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Opera North's website touts Albert Herring as "endearing, light-hearted and funny". True enough. But Giles Havergal, the director, sees more in it. "Britten was writing about the world he confronted in 1947, particularly the class and generational conflict. We associate the breaking out of youth with the 50s and Look Back in Anger, but it was already in the air. People like Britten knew what was going to happen."

Whether audiences receive the piece as a light comedy or a visionary argument for social change, Albert Herring has always proved a hit with ordinary people. (It's the not-so-ordinary people – the self-appointed curators of musical opinion, mostly critics and conductors – who have tended to shout it down for its perceived lack of musical value.) One reason they love it so much is that it contains some of Britten's most moving, honest and staggeringly inventive music. The whole score effectively rests on a giant musical metaphor: Lady Billows and her cronies are always in control of the orchestra, their music taut and clipped, chugging away on the tracks of baroque pastiche, burning itself out in bloated, congesting fugues. Enter Sid and Nancy, and suddenly the music dances: it becomes rhapsodic, it slithers and soars, sweeping the orchestra along with it.

It was the summer riots of 2011 that got me searching for my recording of Albert Herring, perhaps because it's the only opera I know that targets the hollow promises of commercial household brands. As the village flaunts its allegiance to Colman's mustard, Albert sings a fawning paean to Swan Vesta matches.