Owen Wingrave

Britten's Anti-War Opera Not a Complete Success But Has Worthwhile Pleasures
Even a lesser work from a late-period Benjamin Britten is worthy of a look and listen, and this 2001 production from Germany directed by Margaret Williams certainly has the quality production values to do justice to the composer's 1971 opera, a work originally developed for television. Based on an 1892 ghost story by Henry James, it's a relatively straightforward anti-war story set in 1958 about a soldier who turns into a conscientious objector and consequently a family outcast. The piece reminds me a lot of Britten's anti-violence masterwork "Billy Budd", as I was struck by the central irony of Owen's predicament - that the traditional source of support, his family, turns into a more virulent war than any combat he would have faced on the battlefield.

The actual filming locations help immeasurably to build the context of the story, but the downside is the lack of adjustment made by singers who are used to delivering their voices full-blast onstage. I imagine part of the...

The bonus is real
I agree very much with Mr Chilson's comments on the opera itself. I would just like to add that the accompanying documentary is very well worth watching by anybody with even the slightest interest in Britten.

Britten's pacifist plea
This is my least familiar Britten opera and it is generally known as his least successful. Here is a new film of the opera which preserves the fluency of the original which was written for TV. It has lots of similarities with the Church Parables but even more with the War Requiem with which it shares the anti-war theme. It is a very good performance - significantly quicker than the original. And the film does justice to the work - updating it to the 1950s. But it still seems musically thin to me. And it is also shrill: basically Owen comes out as a pacifist and his family and fiance reject and disown him. Only his teacher and his wife have sympathy for him. That is not much for a plot. And there's a lot of shouting from his family who are pretty one dimensional.

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