The Impresario and the English Opera Group

Abstract

Abstract The history of opera in this country is curious and complicated; it is also very characteristically English in its mixture of amateurish enthusiasm, professional indifference, occasional bright ideas without the least sense of planning for the future, commercial routine and-from the general public-complete ignorance and bewilderment. For Britten himself, this triumph meant something more than the immediacy of being an internationally recognised composer. It meant for him that he was now willing in himself, and, indeed, determined to be, within the 20th century, a professional opera composer. While touring Canada with the English Opera Group in I 957, Britten was asked by a music critic to describe the difference between The Rape of Lucretia and The Turn of the Screw. ‘The title is different, and the story ’, replied Britten. ‘ Oh yes, of course, but the music, Mr. Britten-what would you say was the difference between the music of “The Rape of Lucretia “ and “The Turn of the Screw “? ‘ ‘The notes are the same, but they are in a different order. ’ The comparison between the two works is a profitable one, although not in the sense intended by the music critic, nor in Britten ‘s precise if dismissive reply. The Rape of Lucretia, Britten ‘s first opera after Peter Grimes, owed its presentation at Glyndebourne in 1946 to private patronage. Britain then was just beginning to explore the institutionalization of national culture through its new Arts Council.