Customer Reviews

Owen Wingrave

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If you're a fan of Britten operas, this recording is a must. As much as I like the version with Gerald Finley, this new release has to take top honors. Given than Britten was a pacifist, this must have been composted from the heart - and how brilliantly he did! This is the original recording that was shown on British television with Britten conducting and a cast chosen by him. While the picture and sound (mono) show their age (1971), they are still quite good. I can't imagine it being done better.

"Owen Wingrave," after Henry James's tale of ghosts and pacifism, was Benjamin Britten's penultimate opera, and it is perhaps his most musically complex.

This long-awaited DVD is of the world première, since it was indeed written for television, and was first seen in May 1971. Britten's cast is hand-picked and top-flight: Benjamin Luxon (Owen Wingrave), John Shirley-Quirk (Spencer Coyle), Nigel Douglas (Lechmere), Sylvia Fisher (Miss Wingrave), Heather Harper (Mrs Coyle), Jennifer Vyvyan (Mrs Julian), Dame Janet Baker (Kate Julian), and Sir Peter Pears (General Sir Philip Wingrave).

Luxon sings beautifully, but looks too mature for the rôle, and does not portray a youth very well, unlike Dame Janet and Douglas, who do very well in this regard. And despite my great admiration for Sir Peter, Sylvia Fisher triumphs in the part of the rigid Miss Wingrave. In fact, Sir Peter called Fisher's a "splendid dreadnought performance." She was a great, but underrated, singing-actress!

The composer conducts, and the film was directed by Brian Large and Colin Graham. The film has much atmosphere, considering how difficult the enterprise must have been, and is highly recommended.

The young Owen Wingrave, sung by the not-young-enough Benjamin Luxon, is the last scion of an aristocratic British family steeped in military tradition. The opera opens with Wingrave and his friend Lechmere (Nigel Douglas) studying Napoleonic tactics with their tutor Spencer Coyle (John Shirley-Quirk). Wingrave reluctantly informs Coyle that he has had an epiphany, that he despises the military ethics and refuses to become a soldier. Coyle is horrified, as are all of Wingrave's family members: his grandfather Sir Philip, sung by Peter Pears, his maiden aunt, and most distressingly his beloved cousin Kate (Janet Baker) whom he has expected to marry. Most of the opera scenes transpire in the gloomy family mansion, where the struggle of ideals is observed by portraits of generations of military forbears, including a Wingrave ancestor who accidentally killed his son in punishment for refuing to fistfight another boy.
Owen will be disinherited ...

The libretto By Myfanwy Piper was based on a short story by Henry James. The opera was commissioned specifically for television by the BBC, filmed in 1970 and first broadcast in 1971. This DVD is a hi-tech restoration of that TV film. The technical aspects are very artful: good visuals, good sound, excellent collage editing, altogether a successful exemplar of a 'new' genre, an opera not composed for the stage but for film. As such, it's an interesting experience for the viewer, but there I'm afraid my enthusiasm stops.

Owen Wingrave is a "coming out" story. The young man comes out of the very dusty family closet as a Pacifist, but the whole emotional tenor of the opera might just as easily represent another sort of "coming out." Benjamin Britten was a devote pacifist in principle; he publicly acknowledged that this opera was composed in response to his dismay at the atrocities of the Vietnam War, and clearly his anti-war passion is expressed through the voice of the character Owen. One can't help feeling, nevertheless, that Britten's sympathetic musical portrayal of Wingrave's idealism was also inspired by Britten's homosexual life experience. Unfortunately, the ending of the opera is downright dissatisfying; Owen is slain by a family ghost. That's right, a ghost! Henry james wrote several cleverly artificial 'ghost' stories for magazines, and this was one. I suppose a case could be made that Owen's death is appropriately emblematic of the death of archaic values -- honor and patriotism -- in such a hidebound British world. But it doesn't 'play' convincingly; it's abrupt and outlandish, and more comical than Britten could possibly have wanted it to be.

The music is also best described as outlandish. Britten's orchestra, chiefly of tuned percussion, contributes most of the expressivity of the opera. The vocal lines are uncomfortably awkward and arbitrary, a sad example of what befalls 'singing' when all the 'song' is exiled. If you care to analyze the vocal declamations, you'll find that Britten was experimenting, late in his career, with twelve-tone serialism. But here, to my ears anyway, it doesn't really work. It's almost a parody of pompous modernism, made slightly absurd by being sung in proper British (an unsingable dialect?) by gents in Edwardian tailoring. Eventually, after my initial disdain, I began to hear some musical values in the dry declamations, but frankly this is not an opera I would ever choose to hear for musical pleasure.