Benjamin Britten (1913-1976)
Opera composers may wish to set to music the best stories and the best writing. The greater the literature, the more the risk that the opera will be compared unfavourably with the original book or play, and the musical dramatisation be felt to detract from, rather than enhancing the impact. Benjamin Britten invites this testing comparison more often than most, since he showed such discrimination and – be it said – ambition in the choice of literature for his operas.
Henry James’ tale The Turn of the Screw, published in 1898, was recognised from the first as one of the most engrossing and terrifying of ghost stories. Told mostly through the journal of a governess, it tells of two children, dwelling in an English country house, and their governess’ struggle to save them from the demonic influence of the eerie apparitions of two former servants of the household: a valet and the governess he seduced.
The idea of a musical setting was first suggested to Britten by his friend Myfanwy Piper, wife of the artist and stage designer John Piper. Her ideas for turning James’ tale into an opera persuaded Britten to ask her to write the libretto. Both composer and librettist regarded this as a tremendous challenge. Myfanwy Piper remembered that most people thought it would be impossible to turn the story into an opera, because of ‘the overwhelming importance of the words between the action in James’ story’ and because of the story’s vagueness about what actually happened between the children and the haunting pair.
Both composer and librettist thought ghosts in an opera must sing, and sing words, rather than ‘nice, anonymous, supernatural humming or groaning’. In this respect, at least, Britten’s opera was to be markedly different from the story on which it was based.
Britten had intended to give the opera a different title, avoiding too close comparison with the literary original. But eventually he admitted to Myfanwy Piper ‘I have a sneaking horrid feeling that the original H.J. title describes the musical plan of the work exactly!’ James assumes his readers will know what his title means: the phrase ‘to give the screw another turn’ survives from the days when the thumb-screw was used as a form of torture to extract confessions or money. Each turn of the screw increases the pressure gradually.
Britten had decided to represent the increase of tension (in James’ story, largely within the Governess’ mind) by short scenes linked by musical interludes. In between these interludes, purely instrumental with one exception, the action is presented like a set of cinematic flashbacks. This is Britten’s solution to dramatising the interplay of the natural and the supernatural, and the interludes are as vital in creating the atmosphere as any words.
The turning of the musical screw is achieved by making the interludes a theme and fifteen variations. The theme, the screw to be turned, has 12 notes, but these are not used as a row in the Schoenbergian way, and tonality plays a major role in the raising of the tension, as key centres are screwed upwards.
Britten was deeply impressed by James’ story, and Myfanwy Piper was right in her instinct that it was a fit subject for him: ‘corruption and innocence and their mutual effect’. These were close to the heart of the matter in two of Britten’s previous operas, Peter Grimes and Billy Budd.
The ambiguity of James’ story has led to conflicting interpretations, signs of a puzzled fascination. The American novelist and critic Edmund Wilson was first to popularise the view that ‘the ghosts are not real ghosts at all but merely hallucinations of the governess’. Wilson found the tale full of Freudian sex symbolism: the male ghost first appearing on the tower, the female ghost on the far side of a lake, the little girl fitting the mast of a wooden boat into its base. In Wilson’s interpretation, the Governess’ neurotic sexual repression has led her, in her infatuation with the children’s guardian (whom she has only met twice), to morbid imaginings about her predecessors.
Much of the point of James’ story lies in the fact that his ghosts, Peter Quint and Miss Jessel, do not speak. The evil they represent is intangible, which makes it all the more terrifying and difficult to attack. The challenge for Myfanwy Piper was how to give the ghosts a text to sing leaving imprecise the nature of their influence on the children. Her solution, which may offend admirers of Henry James who read the libretto without hearing the music, and seeing it staged, is brilliant, daring, and imaginative. She gives the ghosts words of a poetic quality such as to appeal to the minds of lively and clever children like the Miles and Flora of the story:
I am the hidden life that stirs when the candle is out
Upstairs and down, the footsteps barely heard
The unknown gesture, the soft persistent word
The long sighing flight of the night-winged bird.
And when, at the climax of the story, the ghosts are heard alone, expressing their will to control the children’s minds, Piper borrows a phrase from W.B.Yeats catching evil’s corrupting power over both the children and their governess:
The ceremony of innocence is drowned.
As Myfanwy Piper pointed out, the ambiguity in James’ words is not about the events, but what the reader thinks of them. James is precise enough, in his story-telling, to give a clear basis for characterisation and dramatic action. James tells us what Peter Quint and Miss Jessel look like; about the Governess’ inexperience, innocence, and her impressionable nature; Mrs. Grose’s ignorant good-heartedness, the children’s precocity and charm. He is precise about how many times Quint and Miss Jessel were seen, and where. But there is no suggestion anywhere in James what the ghosts might have said to the children or to each other.
After she had begun working on the libretto, Myfanwy Piper saw the stage play The Innocents, based on the same story (and later made into a film, with Deborah Kerr), and she realised that ‘in losing the sense of time, the shifting of places, the long months when nothing and everything happened, by laying it on thick and fast, it lost the ambience and the drama as well’. [As Wilfrid Mellers has pointed out], Myfanwy Piper must have realised that she had one advantage over James: music can add the psychic dimension lacking in her words. In the libretto one of James’ ambiguities is lost – there is never any doubt that the two children and the Governess see Quint and Miss Jessel, and so do the audience – but this does not deprive the ghosts of their suggestive power.
In the opera, the intimations of evil coming from the ghosts are beyond the capacity of simple Mrs Grose to experience, but they are real enough as perceived by both the Governess and the children. The ghosts’ reality is even more concrete in scenes where they sing to the children, and the Governess is not present. The accumulating suggestive effect is greatly enhanced by Britten’s music, as Piper points out, which ‘builds up the weight of musical experience, as, in this story, Henry James builds up the weight of evidence and fantasy’. And although the opera inevitably makes more specific statements than the story, it leaves enough unexplained to preserve the mystery James’ reader feels at the end.
Britten was not inhibited by his admiration for James’ tale, and was prepared to run risks in adapting it. He and his librettist give theatrical and musical substance to James’ psychological insights, without distorting them. The opera juxtaposes incidents in a cinematic manner, using the interludes to ‘float’ them, as it were, in a tissue of suggestion and allusion, keeping causal inference deliberately vague.
There needed to be links, and cumulative movement towards the catastrophe of the end, where the Governess ‘wins’ the fight with Peter Quint for the boy Miles’ soul, only to find to her horror that the struggle has destroyed him. For a composer, these links needed to be full of musical potential, and we have already noted Britten’s brilliant idea of making the successive interludes turns of a musical screw.
A lucky accident gifted what may be the single most memorable musical idea in the opera, and the most revealing. Looking for Latin tags for the schoolroom scene, Myfanwy Piper found an old Latin grammar, and Britten discovered in it a rhyme for teaching the various different meanings of ‘malo’
Malo....I would rather be
Malo….in an apple tree
Malo….than a naughty boy
Malo….in adversity
Miles’ singing of this song offers a musical study of the boy’s simultaneous attraction towards evil and yearning to resist it. The ‘malo’ theme becomes almost an idée fixe, and at last, as the Governess sings the song nursing Miles’ dead body, it becomes a kind of requiem for him – the screw takes a final turn. The Governess reveals, almost confessionally, that she too feels involved in the corruption, that she is bad.
Other additional material not in Henry James and introduced for its musical-dramatic possibilities helps underline the contrast of innocence and corrupting evil: the children’s nursery rhymes, their mocking of the Benedicite, and Flora’s lullaby to her doll, with its unsettling reference to the Dead Sea, linked with the lake across which she ‘sees’ Miss Jessel.
Unlike James’ story, Britten’s opera has to take place not only in the mind, but on the stage. The atmosphere of suspended time, of ghosts who appear and sing, had to be maintained across many scenes, separated by musical interludes. The same basic stage set had to serve many purposes – fortunately the requirements of mystery and the nocturnal setting of much of the action enabled the designer, the librettist’s husband John Piper, to use screens and lighting to good effect.
The opera is economical in more ways than one. Britten, in the wake of his large-scale operas Peter Grimes (1944-5), Billy Budd (1950-1), and Gloriana (1952-3) had become suspicious of the attitudes of the large companies and the powers that controlled them. In the late 1940s he and others established the English Opera Group, which in addition to becoming the house company at the Aldeburgh Festival was small and flexible enough to tour. They gave the first performance of The Turn of the Screw in the Teatro La Fenice, Venice, as part of the Venice Biennale of 1954, which had commissioned the opera.
The orchestra comprises 13 players, and a great part of Britten’s achievement lies in how he uses these resources, turning to advantage spare colours and individual instrumental textures – in particular harp, low woodwind, and piano.
The opera begins with a Prologue, which can be sung by the tenor who plays Peter Quint. This Prologue was not part of the original plan, and was added because the opera seemed in danger of being too short. As it turns out, it is an ideal way of dealing with the distancing effect of James’ story (an effect carefully created in the original): ‘It is a curious story. I have it written in faded ink – a woman’s hand, governess to two children…’. Accompanied at first only by piano, a domestic instrument, this Prologue creates the expectant, uneasy atmosphere for an opera which, as Wilfrid Mellers suggests, is Britten’s most claustrophobically close-knit.
The piano goes on to play an important part, especially in the scene where Miles plays a piece of mock rococo/classical piano music, creating a diversion under cover of which Flora manages to slip away unnoticed to an encounter with Miss Jessel. As Miles shows off and exults in his clever deceit, the music he plays incorporates elements of the tone-row, or screw. The virtuosity required is beyond that of most orchestral piano parts, and the player also doubles on the celesta. This ethereal instrument, first hinting that there is something uncanny in this rural Eden, manifests itself decisively when the Governess realises that the figure on the tower is not the children’s guardian, but the apparition she will soon learn to recognise as Peter Quint.
Although Britten and Myfanwy Piper decided the ghosts should have words, Britten by no means renounced giving the ghosts’ singing a supernatural dimension, especially Peter Quint’s. Composing with the special sound and flexibility of his friend Peter Pears in mind, Britten gave Quint melismatic siren-calls, seductive and evil in their luring of Miles, but also fascinating and beautiful with their Moorish arabesques, especially associated with the sound of the celesta.
Britten asked that Miles, whose part he felt must be sung by a boy, should have a very little, simple song. The tune, he suggested to Mrs Piper, and echoes of it, would steer and steady him throughout the work. Britten’s unusual understanding of the capabilities of a boy’s voice led him to write a part whose interpreters (David Hemmings was the first Miles) have contributed tellingly to the impact of the opera, helped by the memorable ‘Malo’ song.
This Miles is a worthy object for Peter Quint, whose evil, thought Myfanwy Piper, comes from his immense passion for power. The scream the Governess finally wrings from Miles: ‘Peter Quint, you devil!’ remains slightly ambiguous in the opera, as in Henry James’ story: does ‘you devil!’, apparently addressed to the ghost, perhaps mean the Governess? Which is Miles’ tormentor?
Britten hints in his music, just as James does in his writing, that the children’s innocence includes frightening self-knowledge, as in Miles’ teasing intimations that he is considered bad, or that he actually is. But the great power of the ending comes from the experience of the Governess – it is on her that the screw is most turned. In her failure she senses she has lost her own innocence: ‘there is no more innocence in me’ she laments as she realises that Flora now hates her. This is the savagely ironic outcome of the task the Governess determined on at the start, underlined in the Prologue by the orchestra entering for the first time at her words: ‘I will’.
Even those who experienced the story first by reading Henry James will be emotionally drained by its presentation as an opera. The cleverness of Britten’s musical devices can be exposed by analysis, but what stays in the mind is a powerful alliance of words, drama and music. As in another of the great musical treatments of a distinguished literary source, Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande, the images and music of Britten’s The Turn of the Screw convey one meaning while suggesting vast but somehow elusive meanings beyond. This is a transcendent achievement.
First published by Opera~Opera, 2001