From Narrative to Music: Benjamin Britten's The Turn of the Screw

Abstract

Musical and narrative structures are strikingly similar. Both take place in time, both depend upon the procession of meanings which unfold before the reader or listener, both depend upon the reader or listener participating in the process of unfolding meaning, and both are organized in layers, what Leonard Mayer calls 'hierarchical structures' and Roland Barthes refers to as the '"layeredness"' [feuilleté] of the discourse.' Barthes goes on to describe the literary text, metaphorically, as an onion, 'a construction of layers (or levels, or systems) whose body contains, finally, no heart, no kernel, no secret, no irreducible principle, nothing except the infinity of its own envelopes—which envelop nothing other than the unity of its own surface.' Barthes could very well be describing music, and indeed he does often use musical metaphors in discussing narrative forms. Musical analysis has always recognized the layeredness of the musical text; recent theorists such as Meyer and Heinrich Schenker have developed models which emphasize this layeredness more emphatically than those previously in use. These models have shown how closely related narrative and musical structures are (the major difference, of course, is the degree of referentiality possible or useful in narrative and musical forms). These similarities often almost disappear in the actual perception of an art: our experience in reading a novel or listening to a piece of music is more of differences than of similarities. However, when the two forms are combined, as in an opera, structural similarities become more obvious. They are very important to the composer, who can use them in order to create meaning; he often attempts to express meanings inherent in his text as much as possible through musical means, especially since a libretto is necessarily a much abbreviated and reduced form of literature. Benjamin Britten's operatic setting of The Turn of the Screw is an instructive example of the correlations between the literaryand musical text. Britten is a composer who does his best work in forms which combine music and words. He is always careful to retain the essential character of the literary text, and in his music we find the interplay between text and music developed to an unusual degree.