T’was a dark and stormy night at the Santa Fe Opera on Saturday for the premiere of Benjamin Britten’s The Turn of the Screw. Fittingly so. The environs don’t naturally lend themselves to creepy source material, but between the cooperating weather and director Louisa Muller’s staging, t’was an eerie night indeed.
The chamber opera—one with fewer singers and instruments, six and 13, respectively, in this case—premiered in Italy in 1954 to great acclaim, and had its first (and until this year only) Santa Fe Opera production in 1983. The night prior to this year’s premiere, Muller discussed the opera in advance of a screening of the 1961 movie The Innocents, part of the opera and Center for Contemporary Art’s film and opera series. Both the film and the opera use as their source material Henry James’ 1898 novella The Turn of the Screw, a psychological and literary puzzle wrapped inside a gothic horror story.
“I think we’re incredibly lucky to have the Henry James’ novella as a source,” Muller said during her Q&A with psychiatrist Don Fineberg, who hosts the opera’s InSight video series (examining, for The Turn of the Screw, the narrative’s “ambiguity”). Muller said she repeatedly returned to the novella in directing the opera, in part because the latter relies so heavily on the structure James provides. Specifically, Britten’s opera lays out the story with a prologue followed by two acts, each containing eight scenes.
In the story, an unnamed governess (soprano Jacquelyn Stucker, a former Santa Fe Opera apprentice who subbed earlier this season for one night as Countess Almaviva in The Marriage of Figaro) has taken a job looking after two orphaned children who live at Bly, a grand, if abandoned, country estate in England. The interplay between Scenic and Costume Designer Christopher Oram and Lighting Designer Malcolm Rippeth magically enhanced both the sense of the estate’s expansiveness and the claustrophobic haunting that ensues.
One of the conditions of the governess’ employment is that she not bother the children’s patron and uncle (this becomes an important plot point). She arrives and meets the estate’s housekeeper (mezzo-soprano Jennifer Johnson Cano, who also will be in this season’s Die Walküre) and one of her young charges, Flora (soprano Annie Blitz in her SFO debut). All is well, until she receives a forwarded letter from said uncle written by the headmaster of the school at which her other charge, Miles (treble Everett Baumgarten, also in his SFO debut) has been dismissed for unclear, but nonetheless distressing, reasons.
To quote poet William Butler Yeats, “things fall apart; the center cannot hold” (in my defense, opera lecturer Oliver Prezant recited a portion of Yeats’ poem in his pre-opera talk, so it stuck in my head). The governess begins to see ghosts in the house, specifically the specters of the estate’s former valet and governess: Peter Quint (tenor Brenton Ryan) and Miss Jessel (soprano Wendy Bryn Harmer, who, along with Ryan and Cano appeared in last season’s The Righteous).
But does she really see them or is she just going mad? As Prezant also noted in his talk, James wrote his novella during the Victorian era and just a few years after the publication of Sigmund Freud’s Studies on Hysteria. “You know the definition of ‘hysteria,’? Prezant asked attendees (with irony). “Anything that’s related to a woman.”
Indeed, many critics have posited the governess (in James’ novel) invents the ghosts as a manifestation of her repressed sexuality. The film The Innocents’ take on the sexual subtext is less subtle than the operatic version, but undeniable in both cases. The governess’ increasing mental unrest at no point appears to stem entirely just from her fear of the supernatural or even the ghosts’ palpable threat to the children, but to her belief that the children will be corrupted in some unspecified manner. The novella relies on the governess’ unreliable narration to create psychological tension (one of the reasons the work is considered a bridge between literary realism and the modernist movement, but that’s another story).
Muller said she met the challenge of an unreliable first-person POV by always having the governess on stage, and that she hoped upon experiencing the opera, everyone would leave with a different idea and opinion of what had truly transpired.
I won’t ruin the ending (or my view of it), but will instead highly recommend the entire experience, from the beautifully eerie music, thanks to conductor Gemma New (in her SFO debut) to each of the individual performances (the young singers Blitz and Baumgarten were particularly impressive). As governess, Stucker is preternaturally emotive, just as Ryan projects supernatural menace.
Is she mad? Is he real? Be sure to catch one of the few performances and decide for yourself.
The Turn of the Screw
Music by Benjamin Britten/Libretto by Myfanwy Piper
8:30 pm, July 23; 8 pm, Aug. 1, 5
Seated ticket prices range from $37 to $409
SRO is $15
First-time buyers with New Mexico ID can receive 40% off a pair of tickets
Call or visit the Box Office for the most up to date information and pricing, or visit santafeopera.org
