Benjamin Britten’s penultimate opera Owen Wingrave (1971) makes its first appearance on the Italian opera stage at the Festival della Valle d'Itria (27 July – 3 August) in a new production directed by Andrea De Rosa. Daniel Cohen conducts the Orchestra dell’Accademia del Teatro alla Scala, with the cast including Äneas Humm as Owen, Kristian Lindroos as Spencer Coyle, Ruari Bowen as Lechmere, and Charlotte-Anne Shipley as Mrs. Coyle.
The opera, cast in two acts and written at the height of the Vietnam War, reflects Britten’s deeply felt pacifist impulses and is an austere and outspoken essay against militarism, formulated with lyrical eloquence in the protagonist’s Act two monologue. With a libretto by Myfanwy Piper adapted from Henry James’ ghost story, it shows the titular baritone refuse the tradition of military service that has defined the family.
As the family splinters at their country home of Paramore, supernatural forces – the Wingrave ancestors – persecute Owen, eerily stepping out of their portraits. One of its musical highlights is the haunting Act two sequence ‘The Ballad Singer’, which retells the tragic family history. Britten’s only opera to have been written for television, it was commissioned for the BBC by Sir David Attenborough and filmed at Snape Maltings.
Though only now making its Italian debut, the opera has graced the stages of the world’s major houses over the last five decades, including recent stagings at the Opéra national de Paris (dir. Tom Creed), Theater Osnabrück (dir. Floris Visser), Opéra national de Lorraine (dir. Marie-Eve Signeyrole) and Oper Frankfurt (dir. Walter Sutcliffe).
David Matthews’ chamber sized-version opera was mounted at the Royal Northern College of Music from 30 March – 5 April 2025, in a new production directed by Orpha Phelan, performed by students at the conservatoire and conducted by conducted by Rory Macdonald and Ben Voce (5 April). Martin Dreyer, writing in Opera magazine, praised Matthews’ “lucidly-reduced orchestration”.
Since premiering at the Royal Opera’s Linbury Theatre in 2007 it has received over 120 performances and reinvigorated interest in Britten’s late masterpiece. Scored for fifteen players – single woodwinds, horn, trumpet and trombone, two percussionists, piano and string quintet – it captures the mood and intimacy of Britten’s chamber operas The Turn of the Screw and Albert Herring – especially apt given the domestic focus of the drama.