PROGRAM NOTES SPONSORED BY THOMAS WARD

Suffolk-born composer Benjamin Britten (1913-1976) produced an amazing amount of music as a youth, roughly 800 pieces prior to his published opus 1! This precocious talent brought him into contact with influential teachers and performers from a young age. Benjamin had already mastered the viola and begun writing chamber works for all combinations of duo and trio textures. At 14 he was placed in the hands of Frank Bridge, a leading voice in the older generation of English composers; Britten also studied with John Ireland and Ralph Vaughan Williams during a less enjoyable stint at the Royal College of Music from 1930 to 1933. Gustav Mahler’s distant influence was also keen, emerging in the heightened expressiveness of his youthful instrumental works.

Britten had planned to study abroad in Vienna after graduation. Instead, heeding the advice of friends and family, he remained in the UK and cut his teeth on a series of theatrical and cinematic scores. During this period he befriended W. H. Auden (the two worked together on numerous projects) and then tenor Peter Pears, who would become Britten’s muse and lifelong partner. When war broke out in 1939, the pair were in the United States and remained there for several years. Britten had already begun exploring operatic settings. A first effort (Paul Bunyan in 1941) failed with critics, and both men were becoming increasingly homesick. They returned to England in April 1942, registered as conscientious objectors, and Britten set up shop at a family home in the country.

In 1945 Britten’s name became internationally known following the premiere of his first major opera, Peter Grimes. Over the remaining three decades he composed another 14 operas – including Billy Budd, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Death in Venice – that helped establish Britten as a leading figure in the genre during the 20th century. Among these works, a curious chamber opera based on Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw marks an early highpoint. Commissioned for Venice’s Biennale, the piece was written quickly and premiered during the festival in September 1954. (It is worth mentioning that the speed of composition was necessitated by Britten’s own delays; he had toyed with the project for several years but only got notes on the page five months prior to the scheduled premiere.) Britten led the performance as conductor, while Peter Pears sang the tenor roles, including the dark but alluring Peter Quint. The work’s reduced scoring – just 13 instruments – makes it easier to produce and lends a chamber-music intimacy that works well in capturing the insular, isolated setting of James’s tale. Vocally, Britten assigns the seven parts to four sopranos, a tenor, and boy soprano or treble voice.

Novelist Henry James wrote The Turn of the Screw in 1898. The plot brings together several dramatic threads. It proved intriguing to later literary critics for the ambiguities raised, though on the whole it is primarily regarded as a disturbing ghost story. The Turn of the Screw first appeared in serial fashion in the American publication Colliers Weekly. Art critic Myfanwy Piper, born Mary Myfanwy Evans (1911-1997), fashioned James’s novella into a libretto suited for musical treatment. Years later she also collaborated with Britten on two other operas: Owen Windgrave, treating another of James’s texts, and Death in Venice, based on Thomas Mann’s famous short novel.

In James’s original, the novella opens on Christmas Eve with friends sharing stories around the fire. One figure retells the experiences of a deceased Governess his family used to employ. In the Governess’s past, she cared for two orphaned children, Flora and Miles. The pair were adopted by an uncle who shunted responsibility for their care to various other people: Miles was sent to school and Flora grew up under the watch of Mrs. Grose, the housekeeper, until the Governess enters the picture. That summer Miles arrives home from school, harboring the open secret that he has been expelled – though the cause of his dramatic dismissal is not revealed. Quite soon the governess begins to encounter ghostly apparitions looming around the country estate. She matches these supernatural figures to two former employees at the same house: Miss Jessel, the previous governess, and Jessel’s lover Peter Quint.

The Governess concludes that the children are aware of these eerie intruders. There is also the implicit suggestion that, while alive or even after, Jessel and Quint exerted a corrupting and possibly abusive influence over the children. The governess sends Flora away after finding her at the lake, apparently in conversation with Miss Jessel. Miles remains at home and eventually opens up about his problematic behavior at school. The pivotal moment occurs late in the story. The ghost of Peter Quint appears at the window, visible to the governess and to Miles, who resists her protection to try to view the specter. Despite her efforts, the boy openly confronts Quint but mysteriously dies under the hovering gaze of the intruder.

The musical style of The Turn of the Screw invests a great deal in a leading theme (leitmotif) and its varied presentation across the opera’s 100 minutes. As in Wagner’s famous examples created almost a century earlier, Britten uses this leitmotif to unify different moments of the drama and musically evoke characters or factors not expressly mentioned by the text. In musical terms, Britten’s “screw” motif has several intriguing features. First, it combines two whole-tone scales. In a simple sense, whole-tone scales transcend traditional major-minor keys by avoiding the directional, intensifying effects of semitones. In other words, whole-tone patterns convey a more expansive, directionless – some might say floating – sensation. (Debussy, for instance, uses whole-tone scales in countless situations to achieve a vague kind of “sonic impressionism.”)

Whole-tone scales are also open-ended, meaning there is no defined focal or terminal pitch. They can unfold seemingly without ever ending – a major part of their appeal. Each of Britten’s two whole-tone scales contains six unique pitches:

1: A, B, C-sharp, D-sharp, F, and G
2: B-flat, C, D, E, F-sharp, and G-sharp

Thus, when presented together, they encompass all twelve pitches used in the Western musical system. That fact raises the shadow of Arnold Schoenberg, who developed a non-directional compositional method based on the twelve-tone collection in the early 1900s. Compared to Schoenberg, however, Britten moves freely into and out of the twelve-tone pitch structure. The “screw” motif is clearly significant, forming the basis of numerous instrumental variations that precede each scene. In addition, the notes underly nearly every major melody sung in the opera. It is particularly evident in the Act Two “Colloquy” of Jessel and Quint but it truly haunts the entire score in a way that is both powerful and chilling for this modern-day ghost story.


SYNOPSIS
Act One is launched by piano arpeggios that accompany a rather traditional recitative delivered by the Prologue’s narrator. The “screw” theme first appears in the piano as the Prologue ends and the other instruments join the drama. Following a boisterous interlude, the unnamed Governess steps forward, voicing rather predictable clichés about her trepidation starting a new job. Indeed, it is perhaps ironic how similar her trite words are to those sung by Maria in The Sound of Music, which was written only a few years later: “Very soon I shall know what’s in store for me. Who will greet me? The children . . . will they be clever? Will they like me? . . . Oh, why did I come here?” (Compare Maria’s “What will this day be like, I wonder? What will the future bring, I wonder? . . . Oh, why am I so scared?”) The mesmerizing timpani in the background foreshadows that all will not go well.

The “Welcome” scene grows from a sing-song duet for Flora and Miles into a sophisticated quartet including the newly-arrived Governess and the housekeeper, Mrs. Grose. Each new episode in the opera unfolds along a consistent pattern: Britten uses instrumental variations on the “screw” motif followed by scenes led by the voices. In some cases, Britten intentionally creates a jarring effect, as when the children’s singing of “Lavender’s Blue” overlaps with the women’s concerns over Miles’ dismissal from school. At other times, as when the Governess sings alone about her happiness in the country, nothing at all seems amiss.

Once Peter Quint begins to hover over the stage, both music and story take on a sinister turn. He chillingly fulfils the villain’s role, though the “hand’s off” meekness of Mrs. Grose and the absent guardian share blame for whatever has happened to the children. Soon after Quint appears, Miss Jessel turns up by the lake, exerting her influence over Flora. Britten reprises the evocative arpeggios from the Prologue but places them in the celesta, the piano’s rather more mysterious cousin. That evening we first hear Quint’s soaring vocal summons, calling out to Miles like a malevolent Pied Piper. Miss Jessel provides an equally hypnotic control over Flora. Act One culminates in a cacophonous explosion of sound involving all six principal characters.

Britten opens Act Two with another variation on the main theme, here enlivened by a series of cadenzas (for clarinet, horn, and eventually oboe), somber duets for bass instruments, and lavish harp passages. This material sets up an eerie platform for the pivotal “Colloquy” scene between Jessel and Quint. Each lays out their need for a helper in sinister deeds. This goal – “The ceremony of innocence is drowned” – encapsulates their depravity and is a recurring concept explored in Britten’s other works. That key phrase does not come from James, in fact. Britten’s librettist drew it from an apocalyptic poem by W. B. Yeats called The Second Coming (1919):

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.


The Governess gets drawn into a gloomy duet with Miss Jessel, both striving for psychological and emotional custody of the children. Jessel moves in tandem with a dolorous triplet figure in the bassoon, whereas rising and falling scales in the flute evoke the contest raging within the Governess herself. She finally decides to contact her employer (“There are things that you must know”), and the opera enters its final phase.

In the “Bedroom” scene, introduced by a duet for flute and bass clarinet, Miles reprises his curious “Malo, malo” song from Act One. As he builds courage to reveal the secret tormenting him, Britten overlaps the on-stage music with off-stage siren calls from Quint. When Miles goes to the piano to entertain his elders, Britten fuses Mozart with Prokofiev for extended piano passages still based on the recurring “screw” motif. Mrs. Grose dozes off and Flora sneaks out to the lake. Eventually found by the Governess and Mrs. Grose, the four female roles sing a dizzying quartet. The Governess ends up feeling delusional, believing she has “failed, miserably failed.”

To this point everything that has taken place could perhaps have been in the Governess’s imagination. Indeed, in James’s original fictional tale, neither Quint nor Jessel ever speak. This is changed in the opera, where these characters are more fully developed. Still, in the presence of the Governess, the existence of Quint and Jessel have not been admitted openly by the children (despite their strange behavior) or the housekeeper. In the final scene, Mrs. Grose finally admits something evil is at work on the estate. As she leaves with Flora, the Governess and Miles share the stage alone. Miles again seems poised to unburden himself but, once again, Quint intrudes. The boy is caught in an eerie, paranormal battle of wills. Breaking from Quint’s spell, Miles rejects the devilish man but seemingly dies from the struggle. The Governess can only mimic the whispering denouement of the music, her strength gradually ebbing away as she sings the melodious “Malo, malo” idea.

This Latin phrase puns on two possible meanings. In one sense, it could be a simple sing-song way to remember declensions of the adjective malus, meaning bad or wicked – thus “evil, evil.” But the verb malere means to “choose” or “prefer,” thus adding a further disturbing dimension to young Miles’ possible sympathy with Quint’s evil nature: “I prefer wickedness.” Britten himself was not immune to the self-exploration element that frequently attaches to artistic creation. He was homosexual at a time and place when that was still a criminal offense. We mentioned earlier that work on Turn of the Screw was delayed for several years. One reason was Britten’s own hesitation to bring this troubling work to the public, for its central element – the loss of innocence and the corruption of children – touched on sensitive matters for a man drawn emotionally to younger men. In 1953 the police visited Britten at his home to warn him that he was being watched and could, without further warning, be arrested and imprisoned like many other gay public figures. Fortunately, the threat remained idle. He continued with the project and brought it to a successful completion just in time for the premiere in Venice.

Jason Stell, © 2026