Time to reappraise

“Find a good song and then build an opera around it.”  Umberto Giordano’s prescription for operatic success paid off more than once. Even Britten, who professed to despise the Puccini school of compositon,  realised that it had its uses.  He found a good song - a haunting ballad -  for his television opera  Owen Wingrave and placed it, with Peter Pears as singer, at the start of Act Two, from where it seemed to radiate in all directions over the entire opera. 

It’s what I remember best about the original BBC performance in 1971, and it’s what helped to persuade me at the time that the work was a masterpiece. Yet. though it won immediate friends, Owen Wingrave proved a failure in the long run. People showed no desire to see it again. What went wrong? Its subject - the fate of a young pacifist who is a member of a brazenly militaristic family - was thoroughly Brittenish. Its ghostly atmosphere harked nack to The Turn of the Screw, based on a novella by he same author, Henry James.  

Coming from a composer whose favourite game was Happy Families, a card-game that, when played by Britten, could end on what seemed like the brink of violence, its portrait of a family in ferocious disarray suited him to pefection. Yet Owen’s exquisite Peace aria, one of its highlights,  was not enough to save it. Its ending was pronounced weak. Scottish Opera, when the possibility came to add it to the Britten cycle that was one of its early glories, declined the opportunity.  

Yet, like other admirers, I continued to believe that there was something there. Not for nothing, it seemed to me, did those who had praised it decided to do so.  Gloriana, Britten’s royal opera, is no longer the dud it was once deemed to be. Is Owen Wingrave not similarly retrievable? When Britten’s hundredth birthday was celebrated last year, his reputation was on an international roll. Owen Wingrace was ready and waiting for the reappraisal which will come  later this month when it is staged at the Aldeburgh Festival before coming north to Edinburgh.

Neil Bartlett, who has been invited to direct it, asserts that the time is right to give it another chance. But it’s the music I am longing to hear again in a production that fully understands what the work is about. So let’s hope that Bartlett gets it right.

11 June 2014