Britten: Owen Wingrave; Six H?lderlin fragments; The Poet's Echo
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CD Details
Composer: Benjamin BrittenConductor: Benjamin Britten
Performer: Benjamin Britten
Orchestra: English Chamber Orchestra
Performer: Mstislav Rostropovich
Performer: Galina Vishnevskaya
Performer: Peter Pears
Performer: Benjamin Luxon
Performer: Heather Harper
Performer: Janet Baker
Performer: Jennifer Vyvyan
Performer: John Shirley-Quirk
Performer: Nigel Douglas
Performer: Sylvia Fisher
Edition: Music CD
Format: Original recording reissued
CD Release Date: 1993-08-10
Music Label: Decca
Soundtracks:
Music CD 1
- Act 1. Prelude
- Act 1. Scene 1. You've got your maps there?
- Act 1. Scene 2. At last it's out
- Act 1. Scene 3. Your sherry, Mrs Coyle
- Act 1. Scene 4. Oh, how unforeseen
- Act 1. Scene 5. Sirrah! How dare you!
- Act 1. Scene 6. Coyle, I wish I had not come
- Act 1. Scene 7. May God bless the Queen
- Act 2. Prologue / Scene 1. There was a boy, a Wingrave born
- Menschenbeifall (The approval of men)
- Die Heimat (Homeland)
- Sokrates und Alcibiades (Socrates and Alcibiades)
- Die Jugend (Youth)
- H?lfte des Leben (The middle of life)
- Die Linien des Lebens (The lines of life)
- Ekko (Echo)
- Ya dumal, serdtse pozabilo... (My heart, I thought you had forgotten...)
- Angel (The angel)
- Solovyei i roza (The nightingale and the rose)
- Epigramma (Epigram)
- Stikhi, sochinyonniye nochyu vo vremya bessonnitsi (Lines written during a sleepless night)
Music reviews of Britten: Owen Wingrave; Six H?lderlin fragments; The Poet's Echo
Music Review: Unexpectedly enjoyable music yoked to a muddled libretto
Rating: 4 Stars
I can't add much to the two previous reviews except to note that 'Owen Wingrave" was a notable failure when it was premiered on the BBC in 1971, just as Stravinsky's 'The Flood" had been on CBS the decade previously. In part both works are too demanding harmonically; they share a quasi-serial idiom that is light-years beyond a television audience. But Britten had hoped, I think, to reproduce the success of his "Turn of the Screw," another chamber opera adapted from a Henry James ghost story. In that instance, we see and hear the ghost of Quint, but in "Owen Wingrave" the passive role played by a row of ancentral portraits (shades of "Ruddigore") lacks dramatic impact.
It was also futile of Britten to try to portray a pacifist as braver than a warrior, because by its nature pacifism is inward, a matter of conscience. There's a lot of emoting about war and peace on Owen's part but little drama, and the climax, his death "without a wound" in a locked room, may work as a fictional device whose believability can be controlled by James's prose. As a stark event on stage, however, it's a little ridiculous. (Since Owen's death is a psychological symbol, I could be proved wrong by the right surrealist-symbolist production.) Britten suffered for his conscientious objection during WW II, but I'm not sure if Owen feels as noble to us as he does to the composer -- I find him a mudle between a real person and a ghost-story contraption.
To fight against these weaknesses, we get brilliant singing and vocal acting from the cream of British singers at the time, all of whom were closely associated with Britten. He did them proud with every signature role he wrote for them, and as music per se, there's much to marvel at. Unfortunately, opera isn't music per se, and I foresee "Owen Wingrave" being given a new staging only sporadically, as in the past. You hve to embrace the music before the plot can be swallowed whole.
Note: The only economical way to buy this opera in the composer's definitive performance is to buy Decca's second box set of Britten's complete operas or to download it, as I did.
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