Owen Wingrave - Aldeburgh Festival

In 1968, as protests against the Vietnam War dominated the news, Britten responded to a BBC commission for a television opera by returning to a theme which had haunted him since the 1930s – pacifism. Using a libretto by Myfanwy Piper – his collaborator on Turn of the Screw and Death in Venice – Owen Wingrave sets Henry James’s story of one troubled young man’s fight to escape from his family’s militarism to music of angry intensity and desolate beauty.

This new production by Neil Bartlett (previously at Aldeburgh: The Rake’s Progress, The Turn of the Screw, The Canticles) staged to coincide with the commemorations of the outbreak of the First World War, offers a rare chance to reassess this controversial work.