Text 5 britten's operas

Throughout his career, Britten showed a special feeling for the voice and poured forth in profusion songs, song cycles, part songs, and every kind of choral work and cantata. The choice of words to set - whether English, French, Italian, German, or Latin - was always a matter of serious importance to him, for he realized that syllables, words, phrases, and sentences can serve as a vital point of a musical structure and enjoyed trying to reconcile the meaning that lies be­hind the literal facade with the musical idea behind the notational facade.

Britten's predilection for vocal music would not necessarily have led him to opera unless he also had a natural feeling for the stage and the dramatic potentialities of music. His interest was quickened by the incidental music he wrote for films in his early years, which led to commissions for incidental music for plays and radio-feature programs as well. His first operatic experiment was a choral opera, Paul Bunyan (1941), with libretto by Auden*; but this was not a success when produced at Columbia University, New York. His real chance came with Peter Crimes (1945), which was commissioned by the Koussevitzky Music Foundation and produced at Sadler's Wells Theater, London, on June 7, 1945. Its impact was decisive. It was an immediate artistic and popular success, not only in England but also abroad, for in the course of the next few years it was produced in nearly twenty countries in different parts of the world.

After this, it was natural that he should continue to exploit the operatic vein. Partly because of personal preference and partly be­cause of operatic conditions in England he decided to write some of his subsequent operas - e.g. The Rape of Lucretia (1946), Albert Herring (1947), and The Turn of the Screw (1954)-for a small chamber-music combination, i.e., a group of solo singers and an instrumental ensemble of about a dozen soloists.

Britten showed great virtuosity in the way he tackled problems of operatic structure. Like Verdi in his last two operas, he moves rapidly and easily between the various degrees of intensity needed for recitative, airs, arioso passages, and concerted ensembles; and his operas tend to be most satisfactory when the musical flow is contin­uous within the acts, sometimes with the assistance of interludes joining the different scenes. Peter Crimes, The Rape of Lucretia, The Turn of the Screw, and A Midsummer Night's Dream (I960) are specially successful examples of this gift for formal organization. The sixteen scenes into which the two acts of The Turn of the Screw are divided combine the salient features of the variations and the cycle in a particularly brilliant way. A looser and possibly less

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successful musical organization is to be found in Gloriana (1953), in which each of the eight individual scenes is a self-contained tableau.* In his operas as in his other compositions, Britten's style is eclectic, his idiom modal;* and his musical metrics often echo the familiar structure of English prosody. This should make it compara­tively easy for the public to appreciate his operas, were it not for the fact that frequently some kind of dichotomy seems to occur. An example of this can be seen in his choice of characters with split or imperfectly integrated personalities. Peter Grimes is a case in point - also the eponymous hero of the comic opera Albert Herring, and Captain Vere and Claggart in Billy Budd (1951). A favorite de­vice is the combination, not necessarily the reconciliation, of two completely different musical streams; and in this connection he fre­quently uses enharmony.

Psychological problems appeal to him as operatic subjects - the psychopath earns his sympathy and understanding; manifestations of violence and cruelty arouse his deep compassion; the theme of mal­treated youth is almost obsessional. In Peter Grimes, the fisherman's sadistic outbursts against the boy apprentice form the mainspring of the tragedy, and the boy's situation is made all the more poignant because the part is mute and his feelings can only be expressed in­directly. There is a similar problem in me children's opera The Little Sweep (1949), where the boy hero is also exploited and maltreated by his master; but on this occasion the ending is a happy one. The dominant scene of The Turn of the Screw is that of innocence be­trayed.

In this last opera, the composer has no difficulty in conducting the action on three different levels: a normal level on which the adults live and communicate with each other; an abnormal level on which the adults become aware of the ghosts but fail to establish communication with them; and a supernatural level on which the ghosts communicate with the children in a secret understanding that leads inevitably to corruption. In A Midsummer Nights Dream he shows a similar ability to deal with the three different groups of characters - the fairies, the lovers, and the mechanicals - preserving their musical identity, while subordinating their development to the plan of the opera as a musical whole.