Owen Wingrave, Britten's penultimate opera, is arguably his weakest. It was written for a 1970 BBC television production and has been performed on the stage, but it remains one of his least frequently performed mature operas. Part of the fault lies with the libretto by Myfanwy Piper, who provided the excellent librettos for The Turn of the Screw and Death in Venice. Based on a ghost story by Henry James, the plot concerns a young man from a military family who embraces pacifism and is rejected by everyone he cares about. To ...
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Owen Wingrave, Britten's penultimate opera, is arguably his weakest. It was written for a 1970 BBC television production and has been performed on the stage, but it remains one of his least frequently performed mature operas. Part of the fault lies with the libretto by Myfanwy Piper, who provided the excellent librettos for The Turn of the Screw and Death in Venice. Based on a ghost story by Henry James, the plot concerns a young man from a military family who embraces pacifism and is rejected by everyone he cares about. To prove that he is not simply a coward, he agrees to spend the night in a haunted room, in which he mysteriously dies. The opera has little dramatic movement; it consists almost entirely of Owen's family's and friends' outrageous insults and recriminations, and his firm adherence to his convictions. The choice of topic was clearly a reflection of Britten's pacifism, and the result seems more like a manifesto than a fully fleshed out human drama. In spite of Britten's passionate...
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