265. The Turn of the Screw (Britten)

• Opera in a prologue and two acts
• Composer: Benjamin Britten
• Libretto: Myfanwy Piper, after the story by Henry James
• First performed: Teatro la Fenice, Venice, Italy, 14th September 1954

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Characters

THE PROLOGUE	Tenor	Peter Pears
THE GOVERNESS	Soprano	Jennifer Vyvyan
MILES, young children in her charge	Treble	David Hemmings
FLORA	Soprano	Olive Dyer
MRS. GROSE, the housekeeper	Soprano	Joan Cross
QUINT, a former man-servant	Tenor	Peter Pears
MISS JESSEL, a former governess	Soprano	Arda Mandikian

Setting: In and around Bly, a country house in the East of England, in the middle of the nineteenth century.

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It has been more than 20 years since I read Henry James’s ambiguous ghost story, but my impressions at the time were that I much preferred M. R. to Henry. In classical Gothic style (Jane Eyre and all that), a naïve young governess arrives to take charge of a couple of children, and discovers creepy things are afoot at the estate. The children seem to be under the influence of the ghosts of the valet Quint and the governess Miss Jessel. Are they real, or are they manifestations of the new governess’s sexual repression?

Britten’s opera is clear: the ghosts exist. The true horror, though, is child abuse. (“The ceremony of innocence is drowned,” the ghosts of Quint and Miss Jessel sing, quoting Yeats.) Quint “made free” with both the governess, Miss Jessel, and with little Miles. “He liked them pretty, I can tell you, miss, and he had his will, morning and night,” the housekeeper, Mrs. Grose, reveals. The spirit of Miss Jessel likewise seeks to control Flora, seeking a “soul to share in [her] woe … forever to [her] joyless spirit bound”.

Child abuse and the corruption of innocence are themes that recur in Britten’s operas: in Peter Grimes, in Billy Budd, in the later Death in Venice; even A Midsummer Night’s Dream concerns the fairy king’s desire for a boy. Britten, himself molested as an adolescent, was sexually attracted to pubescent boys, but never acted on that attraction. In this case, he was infatuated with David Hemmings, the boy playing Miles (and later a film actor, best known for Antonioni’s excruciatingly dull Blowup). It is a queasy subtext to Britten’s work, and one of which casual listeners should be aware.

The Turn of the Screw was premiered at La Fenice, during the 17^th International Festival of Contemporary Music. Colin Mason (Manchester Guardian) called it “the most difficult and tightly unified of Britten’s operas”, but hailed it as “yet another tour de force, and, it seems likely, … another masterpiece”. These days, it is regarded as one of Britten’s most effective operas.

The Turn of the Screw is a chamber opera: two violins and a dozen solo instruments; and no chorus. The vocal parts all lie very high: three soprani, one boy treble, and one tenor. It is the first opera in which Britten uses Schoenberg’s twelve-tone technique: the theme of the Screw, “alternating rising fourths and falling minor thirds”, introduced at the start, recurs as variations played between each scene, “ingeniously ‘turned’ through a circle of fourths and fifths”. “The whole effect,” Martin Cooper (Daily Telegraph) wrote, “is of great, almost excessive, refinement and intelligence, of a very personal taste and a tense nervous sensibility hard indeed to match.”

Like many twentieth-century operas, this is not a ‘song-opera’, even less so than Peter Grimes or Billy Budd. While there are monologues and soliloquies, children’s rhymes, and the occasional ensemble, most of the opera is arioso, almost accompanied dialogue. “Britten’s vocal line has a superb lyricism, but the wilfully sketchy orchestral score, eliminating the unessential to the nth degree, though dramatically adequate, is too bare and loose to satisfy,” complained R. Smith Brindle (The Observer).  The first really ‘operatic’ moment is the end of Act I: the appearance of Quint, who calls to Miles with a burst of coloratura (the first heard in the work).

Scenes are short and rapid; it is almost a cinematic approach to opera, rather than a theatrical one. It works as a piece of drama, but much of it doesn’t seem to justify being turned into an opera. The Turn of the Screw seems to be the model for a lot of tuneless, through-composed modern operas (like André Previn’s Streetcar Named Desire).

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Recordings

Listen to: The original cast recording, with the London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Britten; London, 1955. Decca.

Watch: Helen Field (the Governess), Sam Linay (Miles), Machiko Obata (Flora), Menai Davies (Mrs. Grose), Richard Graeger (Quint), and Phyllis Cannan (Miss Jessel), conducted by Steuart Bedford; Schwetzingen, 1990. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRDPh8WXpe8

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 Works consulted

• Martin Cooper, “Britten at Venice: Refinement and Intelligence”, The Daily Telegraph, 15^th September 1954
• Colin Mason, “Britten’s New Opera at Venice Festival: Welcome for ‘The Turn of the Screw’”, The Manchester Guardian, 15^th September 1954
• R. Smith Brindle, “Britten at Venice”, The Observer, 19^th September 1954