Think of the children in opera. Not knowing sopranos and mezzos, pigtailed and pinafored or tightly trousered-up to look child-like, but actual children. There are Mozart’s Three Boys, Menotti’s Amahl, possibly Debussy’s Yniold and Handel’s Oberto and, if you stretch a point, Marie’s little son in Wozzeck. But that’s about it. Until, that is, you come to Benjamin Britten.
It’s a rare Britten opera that doesn’t include a child. Whether it’s Grimes’s doomed apprentice, the chattering powder monkeys of HMS Indomitable, teenage vision Tadzio in Death in Venice, Tytania’s fairies or the watchful Miles and Flora, they are ever-present, but why? There’s something about innocence, certainly, but it’s interesting just how often Britten muddies their symbolism, swapping simple purity for something altogether murkier.
There’s an otherness, an uncanny, ungraspable quality to many of these children. How much do they see, know, understand? And how much do we really know of them? These questions reach their peak in The Turn of the Screw, Britten and Myfanwy Piper’s lean, telling adaptation of Henry James’s ghost story.
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