Owen Wingrave
- Robert Beale
- 1 day ago
- 3 min read
Myfanwy Piper and Benjamin Britten, after Henry James
Royal Northern College of Music
RNCM Manchester
March 30-April 5, 2025: 2 hrs
Also on April 3,5
It’s hard to like Owen Wingrave very much. It’s known as Britten’s “pacifist” opera – based on a story by Henry James (as The Turn of the Screw was, also adapted by Myfanwy Piper), but with rather less mystery and rather more abstract discussion.
The subject is serious enough – the fatuousness of seeing war as to do with glory – but that’s something Britten had expressed clearly in his War Requiem. This came after that – it was his next-to-last opera – and was commissioned by the BBC for television, screened in 1971.
Whether that ever worked is debatable, but it has retained a toe-hold in theatrical opera performance, and Britten’s instincts were always for the theatre. The story, though, gives little opportunity for drama until its very end.
Owen Wingrave, latest of a long-established family of military men, is at the army academy but has decided he’s a pacifist (this is the late 19th Century, which Orpha Phelan’s production sticks to, but the very idea is a bit of a stretch). Wingrave's father died in battle, and his mother left him bereft, too, so he’s got good reason. His tutor tries to understand him, and the tutor’s wife is sympathetic, but Owen’s family, and his fiancee, Kate, will have none of it. His grandfather, Sir Philip, is the paterfamilias and ultimately decides to disinherit him. Kate transfers her affections to his best mate, a good soldier boy called Lechmere. What follows is a bit spooky – “Is the house haunted? That goes without saying…” – and there’s a final shock.
There’s much discussion about the idea of war in the first Act, in which Owen maintains it takes more courage to abjure it than to take part, but later on the accent tends more towards a focus on what love is. One or two lines (“In peace I have found myself… Peace is the voice of love…”) point to a slightly different connotation of the war/peace choice, and in another production some years ago I found myself wondering whether for Britten it was all a kind of code for reflection on his sexuality – as would become much more apparent in his final opera, Death in Venice, not long afterwards. The legalisation of homosexual practice in the UK came only in 1967.
There’s no hint of that in this version, though. What is notable is that the soldiering ancestors’ portraits in the family country house become the ghosts of people in Orpha Phelan’s vision – dressed in uniforms of differing historical periods. We see them, in mime, as real soldiers in the mud and terror of real battle. That’s a striking idea, and lifts the first Act considerably. There’s a single set (design by Madeleine Boyd) with differing elements of the grand old house, inside and out, including the family tomb, which enables the focus to switch seamlessly from place to place as the television original would have required.
Musically the performance is high quality and driven by Rory Macdonald’s conducting. There are two casts and I have seen only one of them, but among an accomplished team the performance of tenor Sam Rose as Lechmere stood out.
More info and tickets here
