Britten: The Turn of the Screw Blu-ray Review
Ghost Story: The Opera.
Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman, January 12, 2013
The Turn of the Screw holds a special place in my heart in terms of its impact on my own history as a composer,
for the very first commission I received was when I was a young student and a local theater company was producing
The Innocents, the William Archibald play that is based upon Henry James' disturbing novel. I can't recall any
more how the producers found out about me, but they asked me to write the source music that needed to be
performed during the play. I recall there was a violin tune that one of the children needed to "mime" (we prerecorded
all of the music which was then loaded into the soundboard to be cued during performance), and I also recall writing a
main theme in C minor that I have the sneaking suspicion I probably plagiarized, at least in part, from any number of
great mystery film
scores that were no
doubt embedded deeply in my subconscious. To turn a famous phrase on its head, and move from the ridiculous (me)
to the sublime
(Benjamin Britten), though I wasn't aware of it in my young student days,
The Turn of the Screw provided
inspiration for a rather
interesting opera by one of England's most redoubtable composers. In fact there
may be a through line from that opera, composed by the iconic Benjamin Britten to a libretto by Myfanwy
Piper, and the William Archibald play, for Britten's version highlights a quote from the famous William Butler Yeats poem
The Second Coming, namely, "The ceremony of innocence is drowned." Of course there's a certain irony to
"innocent" or "innocence" being bandied about with regard to the children at the center of
The Turn of the
Screw, for it was James' great contribution to the novelistic art that the reader is never quite sure what exactly has
happened in this tale of tragedy and death. Are these children in fact pure as the driven snow, dealing with a disturbed
governess who is quickly becoming mentally unbalanced? Or are the children themselves possessed by a malevolent
spirit that is leading them to
drive the governess crazy?
The Turn of the Screw might have
seemed like a fairly traditional ghost story when readers first came to
it
all those years ago, but there was a built in dialectic in the novel's very structure, told from the point of view of an
obviously disturbed governess who has been hired to care for two children at an isolated manor house. In both
The
Innocents and the operatic
Turn of the Screw, certain decisions needed to be made
vis a vis the
apparitions themselves, which in the novel may in fact be actual spectral entities or merely the delusions of an addled
mind. Britten and his librettist give the ghosts full body and full voice in their interpretation, and if that perhaps appears
to
deprive the story of at least a little of its inherent ambiguity, upon further reflection, it actually may not: if the ghosts
are real, then why not make them completely corporeal? And on the other hand, if they're merely the
hallucinations of the increasingly deranged governess, again—why not make them completely corporeal?
Britten and Piper
do introduce ambiguity in a couple of rather ingenious ways. First of all, they present the main
Turn of the Screw story within a framing device whereby a character known as Prologue (Toby Spence) recounts
the story of a governess (Miah Persson) he once knew, reading from her supposed memoirs. So right away, even
though we are ostensibly "seeing" the governess' memories,
are we really? On a more subliminal level, Britten
drifts back and forth between fairly straightforward diatonic material and some of his most forthright explorations into
twelve tone serial technique. It's an often startling juxtaposition, and it is a suitable aural analog for an unbalanced
psyche.
This Glyndebourne production remounts director Jonathan Kent's acclaimed version which was originally premiered in
2006. Jones has set the opera not in the gothic world of the nineteenth century but instead in the kind of bleak post-
war era of Britain, when mid-century modern was just beginning to supplant the shortages caused by World War II. So
instead of a labyrinthine mansion that
could quite easily be haunted, we instead find ourselves in a surprisingly
open expanse, one elevated by the extremely expressive set design of Paul Brown. In fact this production is extremely
cinematic—as the Prologue begins to sing about the children, we see home movies playing in the background, and later
when the Governess is on her way to Bly House, she's in a train, with a rapidly passing background whizzing by the
train windows. The stage revolves regularly throughout the production, lending an easy fluidity to segues between
scenes.
This is an intensely intimate piece, arguably the best opera in Britten's rather legendary career. Kent has upped the
sexual angle rather provocatively in several key scenes scattered throughout the proceedings, but he hews very closely
to Piper's text, never introducing any unneeded or superfluous elements. The cast here is superb, including Persson,
whom some might not immediately think of when casting a dowdy, troubled character like the Governess. Also
outstanding is the boy soprano Thomas Parfitt, who makes Miles both troubled and troubling. Toby Spence also returns
as Quint, the hulking "ghost" (or is he?), with a full bodied performance that is both spooky and strangely erotic.
Britten's score is given an astoundingly visceral performance by the London Philharmonic Orchestra under the baton of
Jakub Hrusa. Britten's music can transition from elegant, almost Vaughan Williams-esque sonorities to sudden bristling
dissonances in a heartbeat, and the conducting and playing energizes these changes with an almost sensuous allure.
This is a superb production of a fascinating opera and is certainly one of the most exciting Glyndebourne offerings in
recent memory.
