Ghost Story as Chamber Opera

New Zealand Listener, Volume 34, Issue 874, 4 May 1956, Page 21

Ghost Story as Chamber Opera

T the first performance of Benjamin Britten’s "chamber opera" The Turn of the Screw, Colin Mason, critic for the Manchester Guardian, described it as the great occasion of the 1955 Venice Festival. The audience was very responsive. "Clearly their practice in, Pirandello stood them in good stead, and they fell outside into dozens of little groups, gamely, ingeniously or obscurely explaining and counter-ex-plaining, and all ready to die rather than look blank." The opera will be introduced to New Zealand audiences from 2YC on Sunday evening, May 13. The action takes place in an English country — house

aguring summer anda autumn, and the characters concerned are Mrs, Grose, the housekeeper; Flora and Miles, the children; the new governess; and the ghosts of Peter Quint and ~- Miss Jessel, a former. manservant and governess. The opera starts with an orchestral prologue and is then neatly divided into two acts with eight scenes in each. Each scene is linked by an orchestral interlude which is in the form of varia-.

tions on a twelve-note theme introduced in the prologue. The variations of this theme have a special significance in that they represent through the revolution that the tone-row undergoes, "the turn of the screw." In the last scene the theme appears in the bass in the orchestra, first eight notes, then ten, then eleven, and finally as Miles cries "Peter Quint, you devil," the twelfth. The libretto by Myfanwy, Piper, John Piper’s wife, is very faithful to the original. She has made one important addition to the story. In the story (by Henry James) the ghosts are silent and their silence is part of their horrible quality. They constantly appear men-

acing, though apparently inactive, and yet one is conscious of their willpower steadily overcoming the sweet and the good. The governess is convinced that they do hold long conversations with the children, so the librettist decided to give words to them. As the rest of the libretto is in prose she has separated them from the ordinary world by making them speak in verse. The Turn of the Screw will be broadcast at 8.5 p.m. from 2YC on Sunday, May 13.