Music, Image and Ideology in Britten's 'Owen Wingrave': Conflict in a Fissured Text

Author(s): Shannon McKellar

Source: Music & Letters , Aug., 1999, Vol. 80, No. 3 (Aug., 1999), pp. 390-410
Published by: Oxford University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/855029

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(? Oxford University Press

MUSIC, IMAGE AND IDEOLOGY IN BRITTEN'S

'OWEN WINGRAVE': CONFLICT IN
A FISSURED TEXT

BY SHANNON McKELLAR

THE CASE put forward in Britten's opera Owen Wingrave is plain: it argue
and extols the virtues of peace.' In the wake of deconstruction
endorsement of pacifist values by contemporary society, today's
typically pays less attention to the widely accepted message than
various textual elements in the work argue the point.2 Within these b
that what has held commentators' interest in particular is a considera
we as the audience find tonal and dramatic resolution-'narrative closure' is a close
literary equivalent-in the process of the argument for peace. Representative accounts
are those that-after finding little 'closure' in plot-turn to musical structures: both
short- and long-range tonal progressions, as well as smaller motifs, that might plausibly
contain-or at least work themselves towards-convincing resolution.3 On balance,
here too Owen Wingrave is often found wanting in that critics consider the opera one of
Britten's less successful in musical, structural and dramatic terms. Commentators most
often identify the problem as one that originates in the Henry James novella on which
the opera is based: Britten and his librettist Myfanwy Piper did much to expunge the
'flaw' in the original, but not enough to eradicate it entirely.4
' Benjamin Britten, Owen Wingrave: an Opera in Two Acts, Op. 85, London, 1995. All references to locations within the
score of the opera cite the figure numbers printed in the vocal score (London, 1970) in the form 'vs fig. 2'; additional
superscript numbers preceded by minus or plus signs indicate respectively the number of bars before or after the figure
number. I am grateful to Pam Wheeler for facilitating my study of film procedures in this opera.
2 However, there is one notable exception that has looked beyond surface meaning. In his 'Benjamin Britten, Owen
Wingrave and the Politics of the Closet; or, "He Shall be Straightened Out at Paramore"', Cambridge Opera Journal, viii
(1996), 59-75, Stephen McClatchie argues that Owen Wingrave, through its overt pacifism, is also 'Britten's exploration
of the possibility of coming out [as a homosexual]' (p. 61): 'because the figure of "coming out" forms the basis for the
conflict in [the] opera (Owen comes out as a pacifist) it seems reasonable, given the close intertwining of pacifism and
homosexuality in Britten's life, to suggest that the latter is displaced on to the former in Owen Wingrave' (p. 74). In this
regard, see also Philip Brett, 'The Authority of Difference', The Musical Times, cxxxiv (1993), 633-6, at p. 634; 'Owen
Wingrave', Brett's notes to the CD reissue of the complete recording, conducted by Britten (London 433 200-2 (1993));
and Humphrey Carpenter, Benjamin Britten: a Biography, London, 1992, p. 513. These are compelling readings,
convincingly argued. This article, which explores forms, rather than the subject, of address, in no way attempts to
contradict these arguments. Indeed one could, if one so wished, substitute 'gayness' for 'pacifism' throughout; the tenor
of the article remains the same.
3 See, for example, Stanley Sadie, 'Owen Wingrave', The Musical Times, cxii (1971), 663-6, at p. 665; Peter Evans, The
Music of Benjamin Britten, rev. edn., Oxford, 1996, p. 603; Arnold Whittall, The Music of Britten and Tippett: Studies in
Themes and Techniques, Cambridge, 1982, pp. 250-55; Carpenter, Benjamin Britten, loc. cit.; and McClatchie, 'Benjamin
Britten, Owen Wingrave and the Politics of the Closet', p. 72.
4Virginia Woolf, 'The Ghost Stories', in Henry James: a Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Leon Edel, Englewood Cliffs,
1963, pp. 47-54; Leon Edel, The Life of Henry James, ii (Harmondsworth, 1977), 664-8 (containing George Bernard
Shaw's criticism of James's stage version of Owen Wingrave, entitled The Saloon); Evans, The Music of Benjamin Britten,
loc. cit; Whittall, The Music of Britten and Tippett, pp. 249-50; Sandra Corse, Opera and the Uses of Language: Mozart, Verdi
and Britten, London, 1987, p. 111; Roland Jordan & Emma Kafalenos, 'The Double Trajectory: Ambiguity in Brahms
and Henry James', 19th Century Music, xii (1988-9), 129-44, at p. 130; Carpenter, Benjamin Britten, p. 508; and Michael
Kennedy, Britten, rev. edn, London, 1993, pp. 249-50.

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 I aim to readdress this 'problem' of irresolution in the opera but to angle the
argument differently, using an approach that combines an examination of music and
text with a further set of ideas. For what the audience experienced as the premiere on
16 May 1971 was not an opera but a musical-dramatic assignment written for
television. In one sense, my approach may be described as textual: as other essays
have done with various compositions, this article reads the contents of a work which is
now accessible on video as 'text'. However-and specific to Owen Wingrave-the
argument also suggests contextual insight into the time of the making of a particular
film-opera. Film-makers' unspoken attitudes perhaps intrude more on the work than
they are often given credit for, and by considering the opera as text crucially intersected
by non-musical techniques of film, the article turns up signifying conventions that
potentially have their own story to tell of the Snape Maltings (the BBC's studio for the
opera) in the last months of 1970.
While Owen Wingrave was not Britten's first brush with film, it was his first and last
unequivocal 'television opera', composed expressly as a BBC commission. Today it still
holds a special place among the most idiomatic of all the early operatic compositions for
this medium. In 1951 NBC transmitted Menotti's Amahl and the Night Visitors,s the first
opera composed specifically for television. Owen Wingrave and Amahl are alike in their
straightforward plots and small casts. However, with music arguably more suited to
electronic reproduction, and the presence of sophisticated film techniques, Owen Win-
grave is a more televisually-inspired composition than Amahl. Menotti did not think
particularly of television when he wrote his opera, but more of an ideal stage, and this is
doubtless one of the reasons why it has seen over 3,000 stage productions since its first
transmission. Owen Wingrave, on the other hand, presents the producer of the stage
version with difficult obstacles, such as the cross-cutting technique used to portray
Coyle's conversation with Miss Wingrave simultaneously with Owen's monologue in
Hyde Park (Act I scene 2). For these reasons and others outlined below-and not-
withstanding current distrust for the word-it is useful to think of an 'original' Owen
Wingrave 'opera' as the one now captured on film. Moreover, by virtue of what H. Marshall
Leicester calls 'the video revolution',6 it is this version that can most easily be reread.
While film-as-genre has had an attendant academic focus since at least the late
1960s, and film with operatic beginnings has more recently attracted commentary from
musicologists and others,7 commentators on Owen Wingrave have thus far been wary of
incorporating any new system of codes into their interpretations. Perhaps this is
because, despite the production difficulties mentioned above, Owen Wingrave, like
Amahl, can stand alone as 'pure' opera and maintain its status (tellingly, it too has seen
many more live performances than commercial transmissions). And unlike the many
well-known film adaptations of the Carmen story, which are themselves mostly 'read-
ings' of Merimee's and Bizet's versions,8 even as 'television opera' Owen Wingrave still
remains in one sense a 'composer's' rather than a 'producer's' work. Britten's presence

s NBC premiered Amahl on 24 December 1951. Other early operas transmitted by NBC were Martinu's The Mamiage
(1953), Lukas Foss's Grifflkin (1955), Stanley Hollingsworth's La grande Bretiche (1957) and Menotti's Maria Golovin
(1958) and Labyrinth (1963). From 1956, the BBC also began commissioning operas for television, including Bliss's
Tobias and the Angel and Britten's Owen Wingrave (1971).
6 H. Marshall Leicester, Jr., 'Discourse and the Film Text: Four Readings of Carmen', Cambridge Opera Journal, vi
(1994), 245-82, at p. 247.
7 The most prominent remain Jeremy Tambling, Opera, Ideology and Film, Manchester, 1987; Susan McClary, Georges
Bizet: 'Carmen', Cambridge, 1992, pp. 130-46; and Leicester, 'Discourse and the Film Text'.
8 Such as Charles Vidor's Loves of Carmen, Jean-Luc Godard's Prinom Carmen, Carlos Saura's Carmen, Peter Brook's
La tragidie de Carmen and Francesco Rosi's Bizet's 'Carmen'. For a full listing, see Tambling, Opera, Ideology and Film,
pp. 13-40, and McClary, Georges Bizet: 'Carmen' loc. cit.

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was felt in more ways than one by all who were involved in recording the production;
but more important, critics habitually tend to regard the music alone as rich enough to
sustain investigation on purely thematic and technical grounds.
It is here that the boundary between a televised Owen Wingrave and opera-films
such as those inspired by Carmen might most usefully be drawn. In the latter, Bizet's
(or any other opera composer's) music-now chopped up, ironized, reinvented-joins
a soundtrack composed of much more.9 In Owen Wingrave, on the other hand, Britten's
music comprises all the sound, and conventions of Hollywood film, where 'diegetic'
and 'non-diegetic' music combine with speech and non-vocal, concrete sounds to
make up the soundtrack, are absent. This article departs in one crucial way from other
studies that concern reading opera-film. For while, as objects of study that give
commentators the space to pursue readings of readings, the Carmen films are
themselves already a step away from 'opera', Owen Wingrave remains above all a
stylized musical spectacle. Consequently, while commentaries on celluloid versions of
Carmen attend to signifying conventions in film only as part of larger, non-related
argument, in this article, given that techniques of filming are an integral part of
Britten's work, a consideration of the codification of the image is the main focus of a
broader musico-visual-dramatic analysis.
Of course, seeking and detecting narrative closure (or resolution) is an altogether ill-
defined musicological sport. Considerations with a toe in the shark-infested phenom-
enological waters-where senses, feelings even, are under the spotlight-turn out most
often as reception studies. How else, except, as traditional Britten criticism proves,
through analysis of 'the music itself', might one identify a convincing conclusion? Film
theory deriving from psychoanalytic criticism provides one alternative. By stepping into
the realms of the unconscious, where formalism makes space for a more phenomeno-
logical approach that takes into account so-called unstable viewpoints, and where, as
theorists such as Stephen Heath and Colin MacCabe argue, film should be viewed as
an 'ideological' operation,'1 this article will explore interactions between spectators'
perspectives and textual figurations.
After a summary of criticism that largely explores the music of the opera, I focus on
the 'Ballad' story that frames the second and final act. This narrative structure presents
the listener with a tonality wholly in contrast to the overall sound of the opera and is a
section of music that has figured strongly in commentary thus far. Its form, its position
at the end of the opera, and the presence of a narrator, weigh heavily on any
conclusions connected with tonal conflict and resolution. I then turn to a second
point of focus for many critics: the so-called Peace Aria sung by the protagonist in A
II. It is in this pivotal aria that most commentators discern maximum resolution
pinpointing the passage as the moment where the 'peace' message-the raison d'etre o
the opera-comes through most clearly.1 Yet even here, analysis of the music alone,
and a consideration of the aria's position within the dramatic structure, seem to sugge

9 See Leicester, 'Discourse and the Film Text', p. 248.

10 See for instance Jean-Louis Baudry, 'Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus', Film Quarterly
xxviii (1974-5), trans. Alan Williams, repr. in Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, ed. Gerald Mast, Marsh
Cohen & Leo Braudy, 4th edn., New York & Oxford, 1992, pp. 302-12; Stephen Heath, 'Narrative Space', in Questio
of Cinema, London, 1981, pp. 19-75; and idem, 'Screen Images, Film Memory', Edinburgh Magazine, i (1976), 33-4
For a summary, see Film Theory: an Introduction, ed. Robert Lapsley & Michael Westlake, Manchester, 1988, pp. 67-
104, 129-55.
" Evans, The Music of Benjamin Britten, pp. 504-5, 509, 513, 515-17; John Evans, 'Owen Wingrave: a Case fo
Pacifism?', The Britten Companion, ed. Christopher Palmer, London, 1984, pp. 227-37, at pp. 235-7; Carpenter, Benjami
Britten, p. 512; and McClatchie, 'Benjamin Britten, Owen Wingrave and the Politics of the Closet', pp. 69-72.

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 something different-perhaps the ambivalence that characterized Britten generally.'2
In the second part of this essay I concentrate on this passage and the message it is
designed to portray. The aria's pacifist text is transparent enough, but do other forces
interfere?

[Cinema is] a language to the extent that it orders signifying elements within ordered
arrangements different from those of spoken idioms-and to the extent that these elements
are not traced on the perceptual configurations of reality itself (which does not tell stories).
Filmic manipulation transforms what might have been a mere visual transfer of reality into
discourse.'3

Christian Metz's ideas are familiar now-even well-rehearsed-but for the purposes of
this article it is as well to bear in mind that it was the influence of semiology and the
radical 'Left' theorists of the 1960s combined with the post-Brechtian counter-cinema
movement, one which emphasized the artificial and illusionist nature of film, that first
sparked interest in the then unspoken 'codification' of the image. Studies of films in the
Hollywood mould, where levels of camera effacement are high but film techniques still
constitute 'language' able to manipulate and be manipulated, are indebted to these
origins. The differences and correlations between the two types of cinema are also a
springboard from which to begin the present reading.
By February 1969, Britten was well ahead with the composition of his latest opera.
Perhaps because of his experience of having composed for the GPO Film Unit in
1935-6, and having completed a BBC recording of Peter Grimes, Britten had strong
views on relationships between mechanical reproduction and opera on television. In a
conversation with Donald Mitchell, he was adamant that his aim was to compose an
opera for television that emphasized rather than effaced the conventional signs of
operatic 'mechanism'. He argued that 'a successful television opera is more likely to
succeed in so far as specifically musical forms predominate, and the drift away from
realism is pronounced'.14 (This, of course, is where Owen Wingrave departs so radically
from Carmen-type 'realist' films.) Indeed, arias, vocal ensembles and coloratura-all
elements contrary to the realism demanded by the classic film genre-are still present
in Owen Wingrave.
Yet the 'television opera', of course, is not a conventional production for the stage,
for despite its obvious basis in such a form, as a filmed spectacle it calls many more
forces suddenly into play. While Britten was satisfied that he had upheld opera's side
of the bargain throughout the various stages of its composition, he had less control
over the forces that were to create and transmit the impression of 'opera' on-screen. By
choosing to emphasize and elevate 'opera', but at the same time not wishing the film
to be merely an ephemeral document of a one-off staged performance, Britten, the
producer John Culshaw and co-directors Brian Large and Colin Graham opted to
obliterate any evidence of the 'proscenium arch' (e.g., when filmed operas include live
applause, or when the camera pans over the auditorium), as well as to de-emphasize
the signs of mechanical reproduction involved in the 'capturing' of the opera on film.

'2 For a discussion of Britten's ambivalence about his own sexuality-a characteristic of the composer that supports
McClatchie's reading of Owen Wingrave-see Carpenter, Benjamin Britten, pp. 178-9. For a related discussion, see Brett,
'The Authority of Difference', p. 634, in which the author writes of Britten's 'discretionary approach' to disclosing his
sexuality.
13 Christian Metz, Film Language: a Semiotics of the Cinema, New York, 1974, p. 105.
'4 Donald Mitchell, 'Mapreading', The Britten Companion, ed. Palmer, pp. 87-96, at p. 90.

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Thus, they recorded Owen Wingrave as an 'opera' but also-and in a sense
paradoxically-placed it within the boundaries of the classical Hollywood film
genre. To a large extent, the work's film techniques and apparatus remain those
one might have expected to find in the latest American movie. While the average
length of a single shot is long, and compares more with the European art film than the
Hollywood film of this era, we find all the conventions typical of this era in film-
making: a move towards the obliteration of the mediatory nature of the recording
process, comprising camera and mechanical effacement, realism, illusion, linearity,
continuity and code.15
Running through Owen Wingrave is thus a subterranean layer of meaning (film
theorists call it a 'discourse') that has not yet been fully tapped by those who consider
the opera in relation to audience reaction. The notion of film as agency, where
constructions of biases in perception offer spectators positions to accept or reject,
should surely be important in examinations of operas like this one where ideology is of
major concern. Regarding film, David Rodowick asks what forms of looking and
hearing are constructed by technology that projects images: 'what biases in perception
and identification are organized in the construction of cinematic images through the
devices of perspective, framing, editing, point of view, the relation of sound to image?'6
Some of these questions are the concerns of this article. In a work of art that contains
the mechanics of both realist Hollywood narrative film and an 'operatic' counter-
cinema, I return to my original question: how might we reread Owen Wingrave, the
film, as a multi-layered text of conflict and resolution? In terms of film techniques, are
there implicit signs advocating a favoured-'pacifist'-approach to the work?

The opera opens with a Prelude during which the orchestra provides a musical
description of a series of Wingrave portraits which hang on the walls of the family
house, Paramore. As the camera roves among the pictures, a different instrument or
instrumental group marks each visual pause with a cadenza based on a diminished
triad that at its end adds a new pitch to an accumulating twelve-note cluster. Near the
Prelude's close, Owen appears, adding the final pitch needed: a D. His instrumental
cadenza, though, is different, interspersing diminished triads with minor and then
major ones. The music already marks Owen as at odds with his past. Act I then opens
in a military establishment. Owen, destined for a career in battle, like generations of
his family before him, instead declares his stand against war. His tutor and fellow
student are horrified but do not react as strongly as his family. 'He will listen to the
House!', his grandfather, aunt and fiancee at Paramore intone when they find out, well
into the first act. Owen finds himself fighting not a national enemy, but his own kind-
and significantly, tradition as well. Act II begins with the opening stanzas of a 'Ballad'
in the Mixolydian mode: a narrator relates the story of a Wingrave ancestor who in a fit
of rage struck his son dead for refusing to defend himself in a fight with a friend. Soon
after, the story continues, the ancestor is found dead in a room of the family house. In
the closing stages of the opera, to music not significantly different from the 'diminished

15 In American and British 'Hollywood' cinema between the years 1964 and 1969, the mean value for the Average
Shot Length (ASL)-calculated by dividing the time of a section by the number of shots within it-was 7.7 seconds. The
long take is the standard mode in European art film of the same era, with common ASL's of 15-20 seconds. Statistics
are from Barry Salt, Film Style Technology: History and Analysis, London, 1992, p. 266.
16 David Rodowick, The Crisis of Political Modernism: Criticism and Ideology in Contemporary Film Theory, Berkeley, Los
Angeles & London, 1994, p. xiii.

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triad' sound-world of the beginning, and which is also reminiscent of the military
rhythms in the Prelude's percussion and later martial patterns (e.g. at vs figs. 51, 99-',
109 and 139), Kate and Sir Philip exclaim upon the sight that lies before them. We
realize that history has repeated itself: Owen, too, in acceding to his fiancee's demand
to 'be a man', meets his end mysteriously in that same room.
Searches for satisfying dramatic resolution by musical means in the final eighteen
bars have never been very successful. After the family members' discovery of Owen's
inert body, the opera concludes with a brief recapitulation of the musically altered
'ballad'. But critics, including Peter Evans and Arnold Whittall, have not been wholly
satisfied. Evans compares the ending of Owen Wingrave with that of The Turn of the
Screw, the opera's counterpart, as he points out, in more than just plot, librettist and
original author. After what he describes as a 'mounting sense of foreboding', Evans
arrives at the concluding 'Ballad' stanza, to find questions he feels are left unanswered:

Whether this suffices to invert the denouement with as overwhelming a force as that of the
Screw must, however, be doubted ... The music at the crucial moment of Kate's discovery of
the body is neither as memorable in itself nor so palpably the crisis in a musical conflict
waged throughout the work ... When Owen finally has to settle his score with (we must
assume) ghosts as well as men, the shift of dramatic level comes too late, however steady the
musical accumulation of tension has been. The end of Owen Wingrave shocks, but it leaves
questions that are not brushed away by the return of the ballad.17

Whittall, on the other hand, following tonal progression through the work, picks out a
tritone which he labels, in Allen Forte's pitch-class terminology, 0,2,5. This set
characterizes both the beginning and end of the 'Ballad' and recurs through the
work at moments of crisis. Whittall describes the final motion from D through F to G
(this being the form in which it ends the opera) as portraying a 'multiple neutrality,
fitting in view of the enormous range of technical possibilities which the language of the
work has explored, and the bleak economy with which its most hopeful and expansive
aspirations are blocked and set aside'.18 Thus, Whittall finds that the 'Ballad' ends
without direct comment on the action that precedes it by drawing tonality and
meaning together. I believe this impression is borne out not only in the music itself
but also through the accumulation of other textual forces that figure in the opera.
The significance of the ballad form, for instance, as a text carried through history,
contributes greatly to the opera's resigned atmosphere. Britten made masterly use of an
oral musical structure (where story-telling is its very function) as an allegory of the
narrative of the opera writ small, to convey the relentless history of the family and
Owen's position within it. Just as the ballad form is strophic and cyclic, ploughing
resolutely to an ending with its traditionally repetitive words, phrases and refrain, so
too is this Owen's experience of the Wingrave tradition. To him, the family militarism
is a force of the past that persists-unwelcome and all too fatal-into his present. Like
the unfolding of the narrative in the 'Ballad', where the outcome of events is
predestined and controlled by the form within which they are presented, Owen
finds that he too cannot escape from his ancestry and has no choice but to resolve the
contest through death. What the opera offers us, then, is the idea that the conflict
caused by Owen's family and the past is resolved, ballad-like, only by tradition. This is
an ending at once pessimistic and appealing to fate; that commentators have been slow
to detect convincing narrative closure is in this context almost unremarkable.
This is not, however, the whole picture, for although the opera ends bleakly, its
7 Evans, The Music of Benjamin Britten, p. 503.
,8 Whittal, The Music of Britten and Tippett, p. 255.

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affirmative pacifist leanings-as most commentators seem to agree-nevertheless carry
the day. How, one might ask, is this achieved? From a tonal perspective and via
consideration of the libretto in isolation, critics often settle on one other point in the
opera as the moment of maximum rest and resolution. It occurs in Act II and is
commonly known as Owen's 'Peace Aria', since it is here that Owen declares that his
stand against war has found him rest. Whittall, for one, describes the passage as
Owen's 'personal and brief moment of truth','9 and most hail the chordal under-
pinning of the aria (a series of major triads that unfold beneath broken chords played
by the glockenspiel, harp, vibraphone, xylophone and piano) as the positive alternative,
in musical terms, to the despondency and ambiguity of the ending.20 In considering
conflict and its resolution, let us turn, then, to the promise this scene seems to hold.
The aria falls dramatically at the moment when Owen has been snubbed,
disinherited and cast out by family, friends and fiancee. He has lost everything
material, but sings that he has 'found his peace'. Indeed, to match this musically,
the aria begins with a cadence (cadences are notable in Owen Wingrave for their scarcity)
on to an unequivocal B% major chord in the woodwind and brass (Ex. 1). As Owen sings
'In peace I have found my image, I have found myself. In peace I rejoice amongst men
and yet walk alone', a series of triads prompts the feeling of repose quite unlike any
music that has come before: the B6 chord gives way to a D minor triad and then an F
major one. This triad in turn 'resolves' on to C major, which is followed by E minor, G
and B. However, as Owen addresses the portraits not long after, at 'O you with your
bugbears, your arrogance, your greed', the diminished triad that characterizes much of
the rest of the opera again becomes prominent. The effect of the glowering family
pictures is to cut short the El chord that forms part of what, in retrospect, is another
twelve-note unfolding by the woodwind and brass. Furthermore, in the rhythm at vs fig.
254 -, listeners are reminded of the opening twelve bars of the opera-distinguished by
uneasy, tense rhythms and linked in the film version to an image of a shield-but it is
not long before Owen reverts once more to his description of peace. He begins this
section accompanied by an F# minor triad, and then major triads on A and C": 'Peace is
not confused, not sentimental, not afraid', Owen sings. However, at fig. 257 the
portraits again interrupt his reverie and the unfolding diatonic chords. In a Sprech-
stimme, facing a portrait of the boy and man from the 'Ballad', Owen issues a challenge.
The two figures become alive and walk out of their frame towards the haunted room
where Owen will later die: 'Ah! I'd forgotten you!', Owen shouts, 'Come on, then,
come on, I tell you'. They disappear in silence through the door to the room. Owen,
having apparently exorcized the ghosts, sings the last two bars of his aria, 'and at last I
shall have peace'. He comes to comparative tonal rest on the final AI major triad with
added sixth. The Aria-albeit with some doubt by the end-is diatonic enough to push
home the message that Owen has found momentary inner peace.
Like the 'court sentence' sequence of chords for which Billy Budd is so well known,21
19 Ibid., p. 250.
"0 McClatchie (and others) go on to link the orchestration of this aria with other Britten operas (The Turn of the Screw,
A Midsummer Night's Dream and Death in Venice), and its effect to the Balinese gamelan. McClatchie is thus led to read
the 'Peace Aria' as representing Otherness, and, by association, a positive assertion of homosexuality.
21 What Britten is portraying in the 'missing' scene from Billy Budd, between Scenes 2 and 3 of Act II of the revised
1960 version, has been the subject of much debate and varying interpretation. The purely musical interlude made up of
34 chords of contrasting dynamic intensity covers the period of time, or a portion of it, when Captain Vere tells Billy the
verdict and the sentence of the court. Many commentators have offered interpretations of what these chords might
represent See Arnold Whittall, "'Twisted Relations": Method and Meaning in Britten's Billy Budd', Cambridge Opera
3ournal, ii (1990), 145-71, for a review of the literature; Barry Emslie, 'Billy Budd and the Fear of Words', Cambridge
Opera Journal, iv (1992), 43-59; and Shannon McKellar, 'Re-Visioning the "Missing" Scene: Critical and Tonal
Trajectories in Britten's Billy Budd', Journal of the Royal Musical Association, cxxii (1997), 258-80.

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Ex. 1 Owen Wingrave, 'Peace Aria': description of shot composition before
and after each shot transition

2 -calm Clmo (J = c120)

-x - K?r r p r f
- well. In peace I have found my
glock.,
hp., vib.

9:. PP? _ rfrr :f rFrr rFr:rfr

-4 ' - 4 4 4 4

f'bf ( ?itlz pe
(with pedal)

Owen 247'7

-; 2 : i-nt t r n: r
i- mage, I have found my-self. In peace I re -joice

L i Lr
t'---- $ 3
-"--J-~~iS ; 4

Medium shot. Owen facing f

slightly left

Owen 248

a-mongst men and yet walk a-lone, in peace I will guard this

4 3 - 4$

V. t 2

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Owen

^ r r p I ? - i - r
ba - lance so that it is not bro- ken.

(t-, M'~ rr~L r 'rr n

4 1w T cregc.
f 3 r---- - 3---3 - - S
of

__ g' f7 ? ? - - - I*
f249|
Owen livelier
4:2f r ::r r __ For peace is not la - zy, but vi-gi-lant,

.P 0

[250]
Owen

Xt , r r p : :#Um; Y $ X
peace is not ac - qui - es-cent, but search -ing,

-3 3 3 l, 3

cresc. slowly

p:e 2.

O2511
Owen ___.------

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 Owen . r- 3 3 - I _

- r r p n :- r rr - r r :?.^ _i
bird's wing bear - ing its weight in the daz - zling air.

3 3 ' 3 3 3 3

f -t

owe h yo .- ar ccel.

7 iz. ;T v il b f
Peace is not si-lent, it is the voice of love.

It *' J ^ 3W3

5 f f ^

-. . - -- -- -agitat:ed agitato

Oh you with your bug-bears, your ar-ro gance,

5 25s-

I^~ ' ^St

I
^^^ -*-^ ^

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Owen
l -C
f--- -- 3
f p a
short

your greed, your in - tol-er-ance, your self-ish mo-rals

fpp cresc.

f cresc.

Close up. Owen facing left, side view. Medium close up. Owen facing front,
slightly left.

C h rven"r L B f----I fr
and pet-ty vic - to-ries, peace is not won by your

w.w., bras perc

a A ?

- A . if l

ffQ

yP W

Close up. Owen facing front, slightly left. ()

A portrait behind.

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Owen A-:.i. . * 255- 1 f
^-p 7 v^-fr ? r - r-pip PT D r
- men-tal, not a - fraid. Peace is pos-i-tive, is
--- 4 t

up
_ ^f r p ?yy v ft * 1 4 r *

T I Iw Z X 7 1 1
t v ($X ) 3 i1. v vf5
Owen f
r ^^ ? "6r .p:^ - .i -. .r n
pas-sion - ate, com-mit-ting- more than war_ it- self. On - ly in

i 4 i

_1 IF J [ g Medium close up. Owen facing back,

slightly right He looks at a portrait
\ \I/ which fills most of the frame. - -

Medium shot. Owen

facing front, slightly
right. Same portrait
filling half of frame.

1256>
Owen 3 r --

r r I.' n r f
peace can I be free, And I am fin-ished, fin-ished with you all

', ,

v J

I dim.
MP

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 The apparitiops of the old man and the boy slowly walk
Slow Lento

12571 speaking excitedly

Owen _ ( (J = 74\ f /-, -

y p Y ? - ! i u^t g Ahl_ I'd for-got-ten youl

gli' . t- bJJ- b-

[p\ FN F Ff , -" . -I
?v . S fA brass ( marked

v f t f , Portrait of boy and father 4 brass(muted),str.

occupies centre of frame.
v^~~ ~ Owen in frame facing back,
Big close up. Owen's bottom left, looking at portrait.
face fills entire frame.

across the hall, and up the stairs.

Owen r----

v U P t P pa pp p- p p pp pp
Come on then, come on, I tell you. You two will nev-er walk_ for me a-

i*b -b JT v. 6"

, 3,

Owen -3---- p f / B B P Pp

v r t p P 7 p 7 Y P p p p
- gain. I'm re-ject-ed, re-ject-ed- the Win-graves have turned me out and you

b--=sy -- - - - -r s ,

: f, (t), (i _ (, J) I 6
Very long shot Owen facing back,
down landing, with boy and father
Very long shot.
in his vision. A portrait behind.
Owen in front of
boy/father portrait,
facing left, down
landing.

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Owen The boy turns and looks at OWEN
r 3 ---- --3 I-- [2588 r- 3

: p PiPPP r , p pi r - - r , p p
don't be-long to me, _ nor I to you. Poor boy, you made your

ob. ,

|v4~~~ o4~~ ~~ratherf S

- . J R - - r. J* ~,. J. '-j
24l ' ) J) () (1,)
Very long shot. Owen looks through door at (O O
end of landing. Side view. Boy and father not le
in picture. what Owen sees. Door at end of passage.

Owen /
y P'
stand too young- but I have done it for you- for us all.
p Y

? L 5 cresc. 5 3 f f f
. - b b - b b , t
o, $

cresc.
,3 1I

t?: 'CY
(3g) ()> # (',

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 The apparitions disappear into the room

Long shot. Owen in frame facing bad

Door in Owen's vision.
Owen not in
frame. Boy Medium long shot. Owen in frame. Boy and father
and father, in gone. Door in Owen's vision.
long shot, still
in Owen's field
of vision, closer
to door.

KATE comes down the

stairs sadly
She does not see OWEN
260 Gently Tranquilo KATE (sadhl PP9

6 -a - - ' 1
Owen Ah,
O PPa - ZAh,
peace

_: ^ ^^ ----^f . ____ pp cold _ -

Reproduced by kind permission of Faber Music Limited

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 these chords in Owen Wingrave have had their share of explanatory literature. Typical of
prevailing feeling, Evans describes the aria as follows:

In Owen's apostrophe to Peace, the articulation by richly spaced wind triads that cover a
span of all twelve roots . . . may suggest a parallel with the twelve transfigured triads of the
lovers' awakening [in A Midsummer Night's Dream]. Yet by the end of Owen Wingrave it is
possible to feel that the triads of the famous interlude in Billy Budd offer a closer emotional
parallel; in both contexts an innocent victim is vouchsafed a rarefied, even beatific vision
before he faces his ordeal.22

Whittall regards the chords (unfolding BK-d-F-C-e-G-B; then EF-F#-A-C#; then

AN) as harmonizations of the notes of the triads of B6, C, B and A major, but remarks
that this process breaks down at the last moment (AS major 'replaces' E major at the
end). To him, it is this faltering-played out on a larger scale by the breaking down of
the twelve-note inevitability set up in the very first bar of the opera (the three
tetrachords contain all twelve notes of the chromatic scale)-that portrays Owen's
state of calm and rest, yet paradoxically presages his defeat.23 Like Evans, he compares
the chords dramatically with the parallel series in Billy Budd, but to different-and for
me, intriguing-ends:
These chords range majestically across the tonal spectrum ... until the scheme breaks down
. . and is left incomplete; this confirms as surely as the celebrated chord-sequence in Billy
Budd, that what is 'resolved' is the fact that the hero must die. Owen has not defeated the
curse, but he has banished, if only temporarily, the mindless violence of the twelve-note
chords.24

Whittall's is a compelling reading, advocating a less pat interpretation of one of

Britten's best-known passages. What is more, another long-range tonal connection
between the chord series in the 'Peace Aria' and the three opening tetrachords of the
work suggests a further link that takes Whittall's harmonizations of the unfolding series
(as B6, C, B and A major triads) to its extremes. Stacked in thirds, the chords of the first
bar of the opera form dominant sevenths or ninths, on F, F# and G. 'Resolution' from
here, of course, would be to the major chords on B1, B and C, and these are precisely
the paradigmatic 'triads' outlined by the woodwind and brass in the 'Peace Aria'. But
only the opening chords on F and G find 'unadulterated' resolution.25 The ES triad
sounds amid Owen's first address to the portraits, where they interrupt his reverie.
Ancestry distracts Owen, and mars the hitherto neat (too neat?) tonal resolution of the
conflict set up in the first bar. Even here, in the resolution that is suggested, Owen
cannot escape his past. And a further consideration that takes into account the
intrusions of the 'Ballad' in the 'Peace Aria' by extra-musical means indicates still
other ways that this latter may be more paradoxical than it first appears.
As a starting-point we might compare Owen's narrative of events in the 'Peace Aria'
with the story from the 'Ballad' itself. In the latter's initial appearance at the start of Act
II, it is mostly a narrative account of an occasion in the Wingrave's family history. By
the end of the opera, however, it has accumulated significance beyond its status as
'tale' to reflect and parallel the plight of Owen. Like the boy in the 'Ballad', Owen, too,
comes to die in the same room making his stand for peace, killed through the force of
22 Evans, The Music of Benjamin Britten, pp. 515-16.
23 Whittall, The Music of Britten and Tippett, pp. 251-4.
24 Loc. cit.

25 Whittall (ibid., p. 254) follows a similar, but less metaphorical, line of thinking, to different ends. He points out that
the first of the three tetrachords recurs just before vs fig. 246, with an added G, and that it resolves on to the following B&
triad. However, 'the other two chords of the initial twelve-note complex are not treated in similar fashion'.

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the 'father' figure. Owen really is the boy of the 'Ballad'.26 With Owen's 'Peace Aria',
however, we find at the same time a marked difference in the unfolding of their tales. In
what we might think of as 'Owen's story', the protagonist ends in a state of peace and
thus affirms his stand for pacifism. Conversely, in the 'Ballad' we witness a narrative of
violence and death. As an examination of the music suggests, the alignment of the boy
and Owen begins to conflict with Owen's testimony. Fissures creep into the greater
text. Underlying equivocation-running in parallel with the smooth, diatonic chord
progression-leaves it open, then, for the spectator to ask, at a point in the opera where
music and libretto on the one hand, and structural forms on the other, resist
correspondence, whether Owen's claim that he has found rest is convincing. Just
what topples the balance, steering us towards hearing this aria as an overriding
testimony for peace?

Jeremy Tambling's assertion that 'The ways in which different values permeate
narratives reflect ideological considerations; the dominant views of a society means
that a society gets the narratives its ideological presuppositions support'27 is difficult to
prove in general but provides an interesting springboard from which to approach the
problem of Owen Wingrave. It might, for example, suggest that in this opera
unacknowledged ideological sympathies drive our understanding as much as do
chord choice or text, and not only for critics and listeners but also for the band of
people involved in Owen Wingrave's conception: the film-makers or 'TV guys', as Colin
Graham once described the BBC team.28
I began by considering Britten's wish to preserve the status of 'opera' in the work he
was writing for television. Despite its two-dimensional existence, Britten was concerned
to retain the intangible 'aura'-like ambience of opera that arises only if the audience is
able to see visible signs of effort in live performance. Of course, in stage opera this is
especially noticeable in arias, where the character puts all of his or her powers into
expressing the emotion of the moment, temporarily stepping out of the realism of the
scene into a suspended state: pure expression of sound. What Britten was demanding
of the film-makers was sensitivity to the musical and dramatic flux. In practical terms,
the directors needed to match degrees of realism to the action and reflection of
respective moments in the opera. Britten seemed satisfied that this would be
achieved,29 and he was largely proved correct; in general, the patterns of shot transition
in Owen Wingrave mirror the changes in dramatic pace between the narrative
momentum of recitative and the static reflection of aria typical of opera since the
seventeenth century. A relatively faster rate of transition between shots-said to speed
up narrative momentum-characterizes the recitative and ensemble sections of Owen
Wingrave, while the lengths of shots in the arias are generally much greater. The
'inactivity' of the latter establishes a feeling of repose and generally allows the arias to
work their full operatic effect. As a normally unremarkable technique of setting opera
26 As Nicholas Marston has pointed out to me, this analogy is strengthened by the recurrence of the 'Ballad' at the
end of the opera. Because Act II essentially falls between stanzas of the 'Ballad', it is not inconceivable to 'hear' the
entire second act as an extended penultimate balladic stanza. This would make the events of Act II a mere episode in
the greater progression of the narratively stronger 'Ballad'. Placing Owen and the boy within the same narrative
framework creates even greater connection between them.
27 Jeremy Tambling, Narrative and Ideology, Milton Keynes, 1991, p. 8.
8 Carpenter, Benjamin Britten, p. 514. Along with Large, Graham and Culshaw, the BBC team included David
Myerscough-Jones as designer, advised by John Piper.
29 See Mitchell, 'Mapreading', pp. 87-90.

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 on film, this trend of shot-transition speed would hardly be worth further thought were
it not for Owen's 'Peace Aria'. Here, putting our expectations in disarray, conventions
are inverted.
Owen, Coyle, Mrs Coyle, Kate, Mrs Julian and Miss Wingrave have solos that, for
the purposes of this article, I am calling 'arias'. Coyle sings his, beginning 'Straight out
of school', immediately after Owen has announced his intention to leave military
training. Mrs Coyle reflects on her relationship to Owen and his fellow pupil
Lechmere, in 'After a long day'. Mrs Julian shows her agitation when she hears the
news of Owen's decision in her aria 'Oh, oh, how unforeseen'. So, too, does Miss
Wingrave in 'Wingraves are soldiers'. In moments of nostalgia and distress Kate sings
arias beginning 'How strange to abandon the dreams of our childhood' and, later, 'Ah,
Owen, what shall I do?'. Apart from the famous 'Peace Aria', already described, Owen
sings 'And now to face them' and 'Oh Kate, Kate, you too? Is there not one of you to
help me?'. A maximum of three shot transitions divide each of the arias of Coyle, Mrs
Coyle, Kate, Mrs Julian and Miss Wingrave; by contrast, Owen's 'Peace Aria' has
nine. Furthermore, the average shot length is at least twice as short as that of the other
characters' arias in all but three cases: two in which dramatic situation and character
take precedence (Mrs Julian and Miss Wingrave) and one in which a mirror's
reflection of the singer increases the number of shots (Mrs Coyle).30 While we might
liken the average shot length in Owen's 'Peace Aria' to the arias of Mrs Julian and Miss
Wingrave and explain away the faster rates of cutting as technical portrayals of
heightened emotional tension, other techniques which work a much subtler effect in
the positioning of the spectator caution against such easy explanation.
First, still working with the hypothesis that a long shot length contributes towards
slowing the momentum of the work, the contrast in average shot length between Owen
and his colleagues suggests shifts in the narrative texture of the opera. While most of
the characters sing arias-conspicuous 'art forms' from unmoving frames-that film
techniques work to abstract from the action, the unchanging narrative momentum
propelled by a constant and quickened change of shot finds Owen in the opposite
situation: he sings, instead, much more as part of the unfolding narrative's events and
of the realistic cinema of the Hollywood mould. His sentiments form part-indeed the
apex-of pacifism in both the plot and the opera as a whole. Not only shot length,
however, but the entire mechanism of the image here seems to work to this effect. The
multiply varied methods of shot transition, for instance, also contribute towards
embedding Owen's aria within the narrative energy of the text. While the other
characters' arias-where methods of change from one shot to another are limited-are
static and artificial, and thus removed from the momentum of the work, those in the
'Peace Aria' cover the gamut of Hollywood practice, ranging from the dissolve and fade
to the standard continuous cut, and a whip pan on cut 5 (see Fig. 1). The shots of the
arias of the minor characters, on the other hand, are generally joined by one, or at most
two, types of cut. In comparison to the dynamism in Owen's 'Peace Aria', their static
mode of change emphasizes, once again, the artifice of the aria as 'song'.
The larger number and variety of shots in Owen's aria also works in another way.
One could take into account the theory that asymmetries opened up by plot
30 The exact values of the average shot lengths of the arias in the work, in seconds, are as follows: Coyle, 'Straight out
of school', vs figs. 32-6: 52. 5; Mrs Coyle, 'After a long day', figs. 69-75: 33.3; Mrs Julian, 'Oh, oh, how unforeseen',
figs. 101-5: 16.25; Kate, 'How strange to abandon the dreams of our childhood', figs. 105-8'1: 65; Miss Wingrave,
'Wingraves are soldiers', figs. 110-1-12: 19; Owen, 'And now to face them', fig. 115-21-1: 13.125; Owen, 'Oh Kate,
Kate, you too? Is there not one of you to help me?', figs. 128 "-30: 15; Owen, the 'Peace Aria' 'In peace, I have found
my image', figs. 246-60: 25; Kate, 'Ah, Owen, what shall I do?', figs. 260-262+4: 85.

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 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

dissolve cut cut cut whip pan cut cut fade dissolve
l I
I I
l I

Fig.

prog
ries
(The
secu
shot
have
oper
is re
the
inst
mod
pers
tran
the
shot
tech
char
othe
Perh
aria
exis
take
effe

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

VI cn C cnA cA Ecn wCA X t) c *) c v cn

Fig. 2 Owen Wingrave, 'Peace Aria': camer

31 See Film Theory, ed. Lapsley & Westlake, p. 137.

3 Clearly it would be useful here to reproduce 'stills' of
prepared to grant me permission to do so. My thanks to

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Owen's sweeping gaze around the room, suggests a heightening of emotional tension.33
It is the point at which Owen has addressed the portraits of his ancestors and has
disavowed them as no longer having power over him: 'And I am finished, finished with
you all'. It is also, however, the point at which he turns to face the figures of the man
and his son from the 'Ballad' story ('Ah! I'd forgotten you!'). Together, they embody
not just ancestry but tradition: the force with which in the end Owen has most to
contend. By the closing bars of the opera, the spectator will realize that the turning-
point in Owen's aria created by camera techniques is also the crux around which the
opera revolves. Owen fights and dies having to prove his courage, not because of the
living Wingraves but because of tradition (formally encapsulated in the 'Ballad'), which
is inescapable and unchangeable.
Owen's ancestral figures in the portraits-and in the 'Ballad'-thus paradoxically
lend their own emphasis to the main character's ways of thinking, additionally leading
the spectator along this same path. Other devices also work to this effect. The Lacanian
psychoanalyst Michel Poizat is well known for his association of traditional 'aria' with
the qualities ofjouissance: the experience of ecstatic containment in a sound-world, and
a self-forgetfulness.3 This aspect of aria, in which the character experiences self-
enclosure and a corresponding suppression of critical awareness in relation to his or
her surroundings or the other characters, is represented as a type of leitmotiv
throughout Owen Wingrave. There is often a mirror or reflective pane of glass in the
background to a scene, especially in moments of pure 'song'. This idea is most
obviously played out in Mrs Coyle's aria when she stands, in close-up, in front of a
mirror. It reflects her image as she sings to herself in front of it. However, by
embedding Owen's song within the actual diegesis of the work-with symmetrical
design and shot length, and the greater amount of attention that the camera eye pays to
the portraits-film techniques deny Owen the very quality that characterizes solo song
as aria. His song for peace is neither reflective nor wholly enclosed; he builds
awareness only in relation to others, and sings, in effect, to the portraits and not to
himself. His voice echoes from within the narrative space of the film, and not, like the
others during moments of aria, from without.
The large percentage of shot/reverse-shot cutting itself works to emphasize Owen's
visual perspective and point of view. Instead of the subject looking voyeuristically at the
object, he or she takes up Owen's position, shadowing him and looking with his eyes at
the world he sees. Even in Mrs Julian's solo, an aria close in editing techniques and
average shot length to Owen's, there are no shot/reverse-shot patterns of cutting. The
almost motionless camera focuses on an unchanging singer for large parts of each shot.
Mrs Julian faces front or slightly right every time; the spectator finds less sympathy for
her cause than for Owen's.

With film techniques that register a favoured identification in Owen Wingrave and-
crucially-embed Owen's aria within the narrative, we begin to recognize 'ideal
consumption' pointers-ideological forces-at work that emphasize Owen's message
above any other and set the spectator to hear it most clearly. In the end, despite the
textual conflict of the 'Ballad' narrative that intrudes through both text and music in
the 'Peace Aria', various techniques present the spectator with a work that encourages
a certain perspective and fixed interaction. Rather than abstracting Owen's sense of
peace and fulfilment from the action of the opera, systems of filming make Owen's
pacifist thoughts the crucial point-indeed the apex-of the (pacifist) opera's
33 It is also close to the temporal mid-point of the aria, occurring at 2'14" of an aria 4'1" long.
4 See Michel Poizat, The Angel's Cry: beyond the Pleasure Principle in Opera, Ithaca & London, 1992.

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progression. The climax offered by the 'Peace Aria' leads us to believe that at this
point there is indeed resolution in the work as a whole. Pacifism is tenable. In the
absence of a wholly convincing resolution at the end of the work, it is in the 'Peace
Aria' that this message comes through most clearly. Here, camera editing-a
language largely unwritten-displaces our feeling of irresolution and sets firm the
ideological basis on which the opera rests.

Is there resolution? In the absence of a firm conclusion in the closing bars of the opera,
and leaving aside the influence the ballad form has on an overriding message, do we
find it in the 'Peace Aria', and, if so, does this affirmation have enough force to carry
through to the end of the work and beyond? Tambling draws attention to the fact that
these, in themselves, are questions typical of the commentator already immersed in
ideology:
The desire to find a resolution is a fine example of liberal-humanist criticism to wish to
suggest that the author of a text can solve some crises in his/her art: thus suggesting that the
terms in which the author sets up the debate are the appropriate ones to resolve it in, as
though those terms could be complete.35

Perhaps, though, one might counter that it is this very ideology within which we work
that allows and encourages the interaction of the spectator with the text; it is exactly
where the text differs most from itself, and thereby presents a puzzle, that the viewer is
most engaged; it is where the concept of a single, responsible authorial hand dissolves,
rather, into a web of interconnecting forces-where Britten's personal ambivalences
come to the fore and his works' well-known unanswerable questions remain-that the
aesthetic object attains its fullest form and makes the operas living texts, pertinent to
us now.

In general terms, Owen Wingrave also offers us the chance to look more
signifying conventions that contribute towards creating the aesthetic objec
to grips with most opera-on-film, camera techniques can be additiona
than-transparent hermeneutic windows on to interpretation. By paying a
signifying codes and foregrounding operations of film in screened opera,
even be able to suggest ways that might beneficially alter the balance in
scholarship. Stage opera is already diffuse and multi-authored, split betw
poser and librettist at the one end and producer, director, designer,
conductor at the other. Filmed opera and opera-film have added dim
mechanisms that perform significant perceptual functions. With the diss
such works, we may come to a richer appreciation of how cinematic tech
in muted but meaningful-perhaps even crucial-undertones.

3S Tambling, Opera, Ideology and Film, p. 123.

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