Voices of the Unseen: Benjamin Britten’s Reading of The Turn of the Screw

The first performance of Benjamin Britten’s opera, based on Henry James’s 1898 novella, took place in Venice, at the Teatro La Fenice in 1954. Turning the text into an opera had required major changes, owing to the transposition of a complex Jamesian narrative form into a dramatic one. However, the librettist, Myfanwy Piper, and Benjamin Britten, working in close association, had attempted to retain, to some extent, the undecipherable enigma around which the novella functions. James’s narrati..