DownWithTyranny!: Sunday Classics preview: "It is a curious story" -- another quick peek at Britten's sound world

Tenor Edmundas Seilius sings the Prologue to Britten's ghost opera The Turn of the Screw (with pianist Joyce Fieldsend) in what we're told is the dress rehearsal at the Opéra National du Rhin. I don't suppose any director's going to let the Narrator just stand in front of the curtain and tell what he has to tell about this "curious story," but this performance at least starts surprisingly well. (Eventually it kind of falls apart and then goes completely nuts, but never mind.)

by Ken

Oh man, nothing comes easy. The idea, en route from last night's revisiting of the Peter Grimes Sea Interludes to tomorrow's new post, was to sample another dimension of Britten's "sound world" via a quick listen to the startling little Prologue crafted by the composer and librettist Myfanwy Piper (later collaborators on Owen Wingrave and Death in Venice) for their "chamber opera" adaptation -- it's scored for an "orchestra" of 14 players -- of Henry James's ghost tale The Turn of the Screw.

It's an altogether unexpected and yet consciousness-grabbing three-minute bit of narration for tenor (often, but not necessarily, the singer who will portray the malevolent ghost of Peter Quint in the opera) with mostly just piano accompaniment. In this short span, it sets not just the plot but the tone and atmosphere of the piece, and at the Governess's "I will" introduces us to the musical theme that will be varied to form the instrumental interludes that run through the opera.

At any rate, the Prologue ought to do these things. All of our performances have aspects that drive me crazy, but each also captures some of the scene's basic qualities. (For something completely different, worth at least a good laugh -- the alternative being a good cry -- you might take a look at the opening segment of the 1982 film that uses the mediocre Colin David/Philips recording as soundtrack. It prefaces the Prologue with a six-minute music-free filmlet "inspired" by later events, which is mostly very soft-core but heavily pedophiliac porn.

The thing to remember -- and I wish performers were encouraged to -- is that there is something about this old story, which has fallen into the Narrator's possession, that he finds "curious" enough so to feel compelled to share it. It's a shame directors (and conductors) don't give their poor tenor a little help with this.

The Narrator appears in front of a drop curtain.

It is a curious story.
I have it written in faded ink -- a woman's hand, governess to two children -- long ago.

Untried, innocent, she had gone first to see their guardian in London; a young man, bold, offhand, and gay, the chlldren's only relative.

The children were in the country with an old housekeeper. There had been a governess, but she had gone. The boy, of course, we at school, but there was the girl, and the holidays, now begun.

This then would be her task.

But there was one condition: he was so much engaged: affairs, travel, friends, visits, always something, no time at all for the poor little things. She was to do everything, be responsible for everything, not to worry him at all -- no, not to write, but to be silent, and do her best.

She was full of doubts.

But she was carried away: that he, so gallant and handsome, so deep in the busy world, should need her help.

At last --

[In all three performances below we have a track change here which seems bizarre if you're going just by the text. In fact, it's quite understandable. The CD editors have inserted a cue here because as the Narrator reports the Governess's declaration "I will," the piano sounds the beginning of the theme, gradually filled out by the rest of the chamber ensemble, from which, as noted above, the composer will create the variations that make up the instrumental interludes that stretch all through the opera.] --

"I will," she said.

The lights fade and the drop curtain rises in darkness.

In this first recording, the second track gives us that first statement of "the theme" but then takes us just into the opening of Act I.

Ian Bostridge, tenor (Narrator [and Peter Quint])
Mahler Chamber Orchestra
(Tim Horton, piano)
Daniel Harding, cond.
Virgin Classics (EMI), recorded Jan. 17-19, 2002

In our remaining performances, that second track continues on into Act I, as we meet the Governess near the end of her coach journey to Bly to take up her new position.

Philip Langridge, tenor (Narrator [and Quint])
Felicity Lott, soprano (the Governess)
Aldeburgh Festival Ensemble
(David Owen Norris, piano)
Steuart Bedford, cond.
Collins, recorded October 1993

Finally, we come to the recording conducted by the composer himself early in 1955 with the English Opera Group, for which the piece was written, just months after its September 1954 Venice premiere. (Unless I've missed something, this was the first commercial recording of a full-length Britten opera.) It seems significant that Britten never remade this mono Turn of the Screw.