Music: Opera Mundi

Four years ago, the BBC found it no easy job getting Benjamin Britten to accept a commission for a TV opera. He was still unhappy about the 1952 NBC Opera production of his Billy Budd, and remained skeptical about the compatibility of TV and opera. But accept Britten did, and began looking for a story that would show individuals reacting to each other and events of a “personal, private kind, rather than big and public, which a big stage obviously needs.”

In Henry James’ short story Owen Wingrave, he found what he was looking for. On the surface it is a preposterous tale about the scion of a military family who rejects a soldiering career on principle, finds himself rejected by his family, and finally meets a mysterious death in a haunted room. But Owen Wingrave’s* opportunities for face-to-face confrontation seemed virtually limitless. Beyond that, it offered themes that have preoccupied Britten in much of his work: innocence betrayed, antimilitarism, the struggle of the individual against the group.

Snares and Trumpets. The result, a two-act, two-hour TV opera, was broadcast jointly last weekend by the BBC and America’s NET. As it turned out, Owen Wingrave was something less than Britten’s best. Though carefully modulated for the home listener, the vocal writing showed little warmth or melodic appeal. The score, for a busy 46-piece orchestra, with snares and trumpets to underline the military motif and bright, chiming, exotic percussive passages more suggestive of Bali than Victorian England, rarely conveyed resonances of gothic mystery.

A fine cast of acting singers, headed by Janet Baker, Peter Pears, Sylvia Fisher and Benjamin Luxon in the title role, could not quite breathe passionate life into dialogue that often consisted of abstract arguments for war or peace. Britten, moreover, chose not to set to music the one scene that might have brought the story to a dramatic focus—a furious confrontation in which Owen is first berated then disinherited by his old-warrior grandfather.

Despite its faults, Owen Wingrave is a stimulating example of how technology, tape and the small screen may someday acquire a highly useful role in opera. A switch to slow motion, with an accompanying abrupt shift from color to monochrome, helps evoke real horror as the legend is retold of how a young ancestor of Owen’s was killed by his father for refusing to fight a friend. Limitations of time and space virtually dissolve as the camera crosscuts between—or juxtaposes on a split screen—characters who are in fact separated by days and miles. This enabled Britten to compose duos and other ensembles that would have been impossible on the stage. Time and again, with closeups and soft focuses that blurred out other actors, he added visual detail to characterizations without the customary operatic formality of bringing singers to stage center for old-fashioned recitative and aria.

Most of today’s leading composers lament the current state of opera. Most opera managers return the favor, justly abhorring the quality of the operas usually produced by today’s leading composers. As a way out of this impasse, Pierre Boulez, the aging enfant terrible of French music, once suggested blowing up all the old opera houses and starting anew. Britten’s Owen Wingrave at least suggests that less draconian musical measures are possible.

* A literary pun. “Owen” in old Scottish means “young soldier,” so that James’ title suggests “young soldier who wins his grave.”