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Benjamin Britten: A Musical Life [Part 2]

January 25, 2010

We left off a month ago (sorry for the delay!) with Benjamin Britten as a young man at the Royal College of Music in London beginning to find his musical voice. In 1933, he composed the choral variations for unaccompanied voices A Boy was Born. When the work was broadcast by the BBC in February 1934, Britten immediately gained recognition as a composer of great promise. The same year, his Phantasy was chosen for performance at the International Society for Contemporary Music Festival in Florence. While away at the festival, Britten’s father passed away.

By this time Britten was already signed up as a composer for Boosey and Hawkes publishing house, and he soon also was employed by the General Post Office Film Unit. The GPO produced a series of documentaries that examined aspects of English life, particularly in the world of industry. It was here that Britten first collaborated with the poet W.H. Auden, who wrote the narrative for some of the films with Britten’s music. During this period, Britten also used a text by Auden for his symphonic song cycle Our Hunting Fathers, written for the Norwich Festival in 1936. A new play by Alan Bennett, titled “The Habit of Art,” examines the creative relationship between Britten and Auden (pictured left).

In 1937, Britten was devastated by the sudden death of his mother. Shortly after, a close friend of his, Peter Burra, was killed in a plane crash. However it was out of this latter tragedy that he came to know the young singer Peter Pears: they were both left to sort out Burra’s papers, and in turn became friends. This friendship would develop into a life-long personal and artistic partnership. Throughout the late 1930s, Britten was receiving commissions for film music from the BBC and for incidental music for the theatre.

Despite new fame in his native country, Britten was frustrated by the opportunities or lack thereof available in England and so in 1939, he and Peter Pears followed Auden and the playwright Christopher Isherwood to the United States. They gave concerts throughout the US and Canada, with the goal of ending up in Hollywood where they had a tentative film commission. However, they ended up on Long Island, and when war broke out in September 1939, despite their wanting to return home, they were encouraged to stay in the US in order to increase sympathy for Britain there. After the US entered the war, Britten and Pears tried to go home again but faced enormous difficulty getting visas.

Britten and Pears at Jones Beach on Long Island, NY

And so their little trip across the Atlantic would last three years, until 1942. While in America, Britten write his Violin Concerto, which was premiered by the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, and other instrument works including Young Apollo for piano, string quartet and string orchestra, Canadian Carnival and the Sinfonia da Requiem in memory of his parents. Most significantly, however, was another collaboration with Auden.

In 1940, Britten and Pears moved into a house in Brooklyn Heights with Auden and other artists, where they collaborated on the operetta Paul Bunyan, based on the classic American folk tale. It premiered at Columbia University and was well received, though both Britten and Auden would distance themselves from the work later. This was Britten’s first full music drama, though there would be many more to come as he matured into the mid-twentieth century’s most prolific and arguably most popular operatic composer.

Come back to the MadOpera Blog throughout the week as we examine Britten’s life and work in anticipation of The Turn of the Screw, which opens Thursday, and visit the wonderful Britten-Pears Foundation website for much more information on the composer.

The Turn of the Screw in rehearsal

January 20, 2010

Last night, our fantastic cast was at work rehearsing the final scenes of Act II of The Turn of the Screw in the Rotunda Studio at Overture.

“Easy to take, easy to take…take it! take it!”
Alistair Sewell as Miles and Gregory Schmidt as Quint.

“You’re cruel, horrible, hateful, nasty. Why did you come here?”
Jennifer DeMain as Flora and Jamie Van Eyck as Miss Jessel.

“Ah! Don’t leave me now!”
Caroline Worra as The Governess holds Miles in the final moments of the opera, directed by Doug Scholz-Carlson.

New video: The Turn of the Screw interviews

January 19, 2010

Director Doug Scholz-Carlson, soprano Caroline Worra, and tenor Gregory Schmidt take a few minutes to talk about Madison Opera’s new production of Britten’s The Turn of the Screw:

Opera Up Close: New time & details

January 8, 2010

For the rest of the 2009-2010 Season, Opera Up Close will begin at 1 p.m. at the Museum of Contemporary Art Lecture Hall, instead of the traditional 4 p.m. start time.

Additionally, Opera Up Close: The Turn of the Screw Preview will offer a slightly different program than usual. As in the past, General Director Allan Naplan will offer an engaging presentation on the music and history of the opera and host a discussion with our guest artists, including Caroline Worra, Gregory Schmidt, John DeMain and Doug Scholz-Carlson. However, following this segment, we are excited to offer a complimentary screening of the classic 1961 film The Innocents. Based on The Turn of the Screw, the film is a masterful telling of Henry James’ chilling ghost story, which of course also serves as the basis for Benjamin Britten’s opera.

Opera Up Close: The Turn of the Screw Preview

New time: 1:00 – 3:30 p.m.
Same date: Sunday, January 17th
Same location & price: MMoCA Lecture Hall, $20 (FREE with valid student ID)
Special addition: a complimentary screening of The Innocents

Madison Opera Book Club, Take 2

January 7, 2010

Last year, the Madison Opera Book Club was started in conjunction with our spring production of Faust. A fun discussion took place at the Sequoya Library on the classic “deal with the devil” myth as retold in the book The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant. This year, the Book Club is back to read The Turn of the Screw by Henry James in preparation for our production of Benjamin Britten’s operatic adaptation of the ghostly tale. Anyone can join: just pick up a copy of the text, read it, and come to the Sequoya Library on Saturday, January 16th at 2 p.m., preferably with some things to say!

The novella is short by nature and the chilling tale makes for a quick read. But though the page count is thin, James’ writing is rich. Some of the key questions to consider when reading The Turn of the Screw include:

Are the ghosts real?
How reliable is the governess as a narrator?
What is the nature of the children’s corruption by Quint and Miss Jessel?
Do they maintain any innocence?

In Claire Seymour’s controversial analysis, The Operas of Benjamin Britten: Expression and Evasion, she discusses potential reasons Britten might have been attracted to the story, based on patterns in his other operas:

themes of innocence and experience
battle of good vs. evil, with a morally ambiguous moderator in between
no moral absolutes, James’ texts offers an “unstable ethical field”
the novella is “full of emptiness”, literally and metaphorically, which invites a theatrical version to fill in gaps

If you know the text, perhaps you will contend some of these assumptions. But either way, in transferring this particular work to the stage, Britten and his librettist Myfanwy Piper faced numerous difficult decisions right from the start. For one, Britten decided almost immediately that the ghosts were real, and in the opera they are characters with fully articulated words and music, even though they do not speak in the book. Would another interpretation have worked on stage?

This and more, next Saturday, January 16th, at the Sequoya Library meeting room, 2 p.m.

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