Unexpected ghost

Frustrated, perhaps, by the bulky requirements and dubious future of grand opera—and grand opera commissions—Benjamin Britten created some of his most intriguing and, nowadays, popular pieces for small casts and chamber orchestra. Among these operas are The Rape of Lucretia, Albert Herring and The Turn of the Screw. These smaller forces eventually put these works over very well with schools and financially pressed professionals, and Britten’s harmonic idiom, always more personal than theoretical in a time of much “academic” composition, has kept them more sympathetic to operatic audiences less enslaved to theory and, nowadays, open to an ever wider range of sound.

The last time I was in Parma, Britten’s Il Torno della Gira was playing the Teatro Regio, with Italian surtitles probably not available at the work’s world premiere in Venice in 1954. Successful at the New York City Opera for a number of seasons (I remember Lauren Flanigan’s Governess, John Lankston’s Peter Quint), The Turn of the Screw has most lately been revived hereabouts at Symphony Space by Opera Moderne, a small, new-ish and, on the evidence of last Saturday’s performance, quite exceptional company. Across the board, the singers were able, musical, a pleasure to the ear, and the orchestra handled Britten’s teasing astringencies gracefully.

Besides outsize and malfunctioning titles, only a cluttered staging that seemed to take pleasure in making obvious what Britten carefully left unclear marred the evening. (Makeup out of the zombie jamboree was also intrusive.) Why bother with titles at all (and in such very large type) when an English-language opera is performed in a small theater for an English-speaking audience by English-speaking singers with first-rate diction? Because audiences expect it nowadays? Ladies and gents—get over it. Focus on the singers and the story. That’ll tell you all you need to know.

Like Britten, who made operas from two of his stories, Henry James throve on ambiguity, implying everything while never quite stating anything. Too, James delighted in contrasting the make-believe knowingness of children with the self-deception of adults. Does the child ever really know what she pretends to know (or not to know) in James’s What Maisie Knew? And, “What are you hiding, John?” Ellen Orford demands of the taciturn apprentice in Britten’s Peter Grimes—who dies leaving a larger question unanswered.

John foreshadows Miles in Turn of the Screw, but this time the composer let the boy speak, or sing, for himself—saying nothing clearly while singing very clearly indeed. “I am bad,” Miles insists. I waited for the Governess to reply, “How bad are you are this moment? On a scale from one to ten, where one is naïve and ten satanic?” But I waited in vain. (You can’t do a good Screw without a good Miles. Opera Moderne had a very distinctive and able one, Benjamin P. Wenzelberg.)

“The Turn of the Screw” was published in 1898 in the era of the High Victorian ghost story of subliminal sexual import (Dorian Grey, Dr. Jekyll, Dracula, Carmila). Rather more artistically than most of that genre (and appropriately from the brother of the historian-psychologist of mysticism and religion), James’s “Turn of the Screw” leaves vague such questions as whether the ghosts exist, who sees them, what motivates their visitations—and also the motivations of the virginal hysteric who may or may not be hallucinating. Not the least of the tale’s hints and obscurities is the matter, in that day barely broached, of the sexuality of children and the feelings adults might unconsciously harbor for them.

By the time Britten composed his opera, the cat of child sexuality was out of the bag, as was scientific discussion of the unconscious. As for sexual predation upon children or the innocent or the helpless, this had long been, and would remain, a red flag in Britten’s oeuvre, a significant trope—almost always ambiguous—in Peter Grimes, Billy Budd, Lucretia, Midsummer Night’s Dream, Curlew River and Death in Venice. Who is being victimized here, the child or the adult? is also, of course, at the center of Salome, another creation of the naughty nineties.

Britten’s Turn of the Screw, being a stage work, necessarily makes distinct much of what James casually, though with infinite skill, hinted. In the story, the ghosts, Peter Quint and Miss Jessel, whose wickedness is never quite defined, may or may not be figments of the imagination of the Governess—indeed, the children whom she hopes to protect accuse her of projecting her fantasies upon their innocent if unorthodox playtimes. Several films have been made from the story, most impressively The Innocents (1961), with Deborah Kerr, and though filmmakers have learned how to tell ghost stories and subtle tall tales through hints and distractions, the medium delights in feigning a spooky reality and supplying a “realistic” explanation quite alien to James’s, or Britten’s, aesthetic.

Thus, in the opera, Quint sings and Miles hears him, even acts on his improper suggestions, and sings of his “badness” in a song derived from a Latin mnemonic. We overhear a lovers’ quarrel among the ghosts derived from the barest hint of a whisper in James: Did Miss Jessel indeed drown herself on being seduced and abandoned by Quint? A glancing implication in the story, but in the opera she has a brief, lovely aria to that effect.

The gradual doubts of the Governess’s state of mind are made explicit: We hear her singing in reassuring concords with Mrs. Grose, the housekeeper. Only later, as the simple woman begins to doubt the Governess’s hold on reality, does their music grow subtly more distant, less parallel. Britten might have got the idea, though hardly the musical language, from Donizetti. More obviously, he parodies Beethoven in the piano sonata that Miles practices.

At the Opera Moderne performance on May 26, the Governess was sung by Anna Noggle, a handsome woman with a sizable soprano and good dramatic instincts, who gave the evening a nicely progressive unease. Julia Teitel’s thrilling mezzo suited Mrs. Grose, the kindly housekeeper driven to suspect the ghosts, then the children and at last the sanity of her ally. Grose has a way of biting off words that should be bitten in order to hit us with them effectively that, combined with her womanly timbre, made me a fan.

Vivian Krich-Brinton seemed a bit mature for Flora (the punk hair, too, seemed anachronistic), her technique adult in a good way, perhaps too good. Wenzelberg (lose the middle initial, kid—and switch to “Ben”) sang the haunted Miles with a voice high and thin but true and sweet. Peter Quint is a role difficult to imagine in any voice but that of Peter Pears at his most seductively weird. Glenn Seven Allen did not try to match this, but gave us a fierce, disordered madness, demonstrated by controlled outbursts and long, serpentine chromatic runs.

Elspeth Davis knew when to pull out the stops and let the dark yearnings of Miss Jessel fly. Conductor and music director Pacien Mazzagatti (Crazycats? Can that really be his name?) shaped a fluid, emotionally varied performance with a very tight and able ensemble.

The meaning of Marie Yakoyama’s lighting design was not always evident and may owe something to recent horror movies. Rebecca Greenstein’s makeup was perhaps predicated on a stage larger than the Symphony Space: Little Miles should not have looked like a ghoul, Mrs. Grose like a sufferer of some charcoal fungus, Peter Quint the victim of a tattoo artist with a scarlatina kink.

Luke Leonard, obliged to place the action in front and behind the orchestra (which therefore stood in for a rural tarn), was clear to a fault, dissipating itself in blackfaced ghostly doubles, clutching hands behind a scrim and the one truly startling moment, when ghostly Peter Quint (whom we have been led to believe is either a ghost or a pederast) seizes the Governess for a major smack on the lips. No wonder she was confused about his intentions; so was I.

Opera Moderne will be presenting Viktor Ullmann’s Der Kaiser von Atlantis next November for, I believe, its New York premiere. Keep an ear out for it.