8 - ‘The Minstrel Boy to the War is Gone’: Father Figures and Fighting Sons in Britten's Owen Wingrave

Summary

Britten's Owen Wingrave, first broadcast as a television opera on 16 May 1971, is generally regarded as one of his weaker dramatic works and remains one of his least performed. In part this is due to a number of visual sequences, conceived by Britten and his librettist Myfanwy Piper specifically for the television premiere, which turned out to be ill-suited to the medium. Piper herself later conceded that the split screen and crossfades of the Horse Guards sequence (Act I scene 2), filmic rather than televisual in nature, were ‘a typical amateur’s idea, over-elaborate and impractical’. These elements also create problems for stage productions of the opera. Although Britten clearly saw the future of the work on the stage and was planning to make ‘certain adjustments’ to the televised version, Owen Wingrave eventually opened at Covent Garden on 10 May 1973 unchanged, presumably due to Britten's ill health and preoccupation with Death in Venice. Thus stage directors are left with a dramatic work that is scenically awkward.

Much harsher criticism, however, has been levelled at the subject matter of the work and at Britten's and Piper's portrayal of their operatic characters. Against the historical backdrop of the Vietnam War, early critics perceived Owen Wingrave primarily as a political statement, and subsequent writers continued to place the emphasis on the pacifist ‘message’ of the opera; Michael Kennedy, for instance, regarded the work as ‘blatant propaganda’. Even sympathetic reviewers admit that there are problems with the way that Britten and Piper argue their supposed point. First, Owen's attitude is considered intellectually inconsistent: ‘A pacifist ought never say (as he does twice) “I’d hang the lot” ‘, as Stanley Sadie remarks. Secondly, the opera is said to neutralize the counter-argument, allegedly represented by the Wingraves and Julians, because it turns ‘the Paramore contingent into cardboard devils’. This ‘contingent’ includes Kate, whose cold and unsympathetic portrayal renders it unlikely that Owen would accept her challenge to sleep in the haunted room. And finally, the political message is at odds with, or at best unrelated to, the supernatural element of the opera. Donald Mitchell, in his sleeve-note for Britten's 1971 recording of Owen Wingrave, first put forward the ‘two-story’ idea, i.e. the notion that a ‘public’ pacifist story (Owen's stance against war) and a ‘private’ one (his fight against the ghosts of Paramore) co-exist in Owen Wingrave.