opera in two acts with prologue
This is a strange story… Called to a manor house in the English countryside to take care of two orphans, a governess must face extraordinary phenomena: what happened to her predecessor and her lover? Where do the voices that the children hear come from? What is this past they can never seem to heal from?
Inhabited by the writing of Henry James – author of the short story that inspired it – The Turn of the Screw plunges us into a disturbing world where the concept of objective reality gradually dissolves.
In a musical 20th century that was bidding farewell to tonality, Britten took a different path. In the aftermath of the Second World War, he created the English Opera Group, which sought to re-found the lyric art with the economy of means implied by a world in ruins. For The Turn of the Screw, he composed music where harmony flirts with dissonance, just as ghosts rub shoulders with the living on the misty shores of Lake Bly.