Britten: The Turn of the Screw

This performance is nothing short of electrifying so far as I'm concerned. Harding's very thrusting tempi are to my own taste, as the plot of this sinister and ambiguous story tumbles headlong through fear, panic and nightmare. Neither Bostridge as Quint nor Vivian Tierney as Miss Jessel try to sing in 'haunted-house' voices, nor should they in my opinion. In life both had obviously exercised personal human magnetism, however twisted or perverted Quint's personality might have been. Britten himself handles the sinister dimension through his vocal line and his orchestration, and he does not overdo it. Many years earlier Schubert had the sense and insight not to set the speeches of Goethe's Erlking to spooky music whereas Loewe did not, and interpreters should not try to force the issue here either. In any case no composer would give a bogeyman part to a tenor. Really this point is part and parcel of how one reads the story as a whole. Are Quint and Miss Jessel 'real' in the sense that you or I might have seen or heard them if we had turned up on the scene collecting for charity or in some such totally uninvolved capacity? The more 'real' they are in that sense the less they should be acted as fairground bogeys - the whole meaning of this story depends on the grip that Quint and Jessel retain on the children from the other side, and they gained that grip in the first place through being attractive human personalities in some sense. James quite explicitly refused to come off the fence as regards this, and just as explicitly said that it was for us to do our best with the question. I don't even believe that the admirable libretto by Myfanwy Piper comes off the fence either (nor should it), despite putting utterances into the mouths of the two and even giving them a ghostly dialogue - this could be perfectly well explained as dramatic licence, with the dead talking through their interaction in life as they might have been supposed to do while they still saw the sunlight. As for the rest, the Governess is a young, inexperienced and presumably nubile woman, Mrs Grose is an impressionable old biddy, and Miles is a boy on the verge of puberty, the very age most associated with recorded cases of poltergeists, telekinetic manifestations and other such problematical occurrences. What seems clear enough is that it was certainly not all just imagination or 'dreaming'. At the very least there was some kind of 'atmosphere' around the house of Bly, and I myself countenance no explanation that removes this great tale from the category of 'ghost story'.

One can nitpick in various ways if one wants to, but I don't given that I side with the production in respect of the major points of issue. Jane Henschel's voice is probably more suggestive of the Royal College of Music than of a simple uneducated countrywoman, but what really made a big impression on me was how successfully this production dealt with the practical problem of a 2-hour-plus music-drama in which there is only one resonant male voice, and that in a comparatively brief part. The fast underlying pulse contributes a lot to this particular success, I don't for a moment doubt. The youngsters do very well indeed, the orchestra, who I understand to be a handpicked group, perform quite brilliantly in a dazzlingly-written score, and the recording does them all justice.

The liner note is far better than many, but it irritated me a little through its pretentious tone. The material on the music itself is more what a BMus student might write to impress examiners rather than my idea of something that gives illumination to the listener. As regards the background, it is really quite insightful here and there despite a certain amount of psychobabble ('...a knowing innocent caught between a threatening lover and a stifling mother-figure is perhaps too down to earth...and ultimately too reductive in general') and sociobabble ('...he is at another level equally preoccupied with the issues of social control and oppression resulting from the imposition of sexuality as a controlling force in modern society - issues which are no less social for being presented in this oblique guise'). Where it does seem to me acute and to the point is in recognising the effects of a culture that met even the normal processes of sexuality with repression and with denial. That this must have been particularly stressful and confusing for a composer whose own inclinations were literally a crime if acted on in his day seems only too easy to imagine. That the tensions thus engendered were a powerful stimulus to his genius I do not doubt either, and his pain is our gain.