‘The Turn of the Screw’ and Its Musical Idiom

Extract

The ‘curious story’ that the Prologue promises has even as an opera preserved the character of a narrative. Neither the immediacy of the stage nor the emotional directness of music has excluded a certain detachedness of approach from the part of the storytellers—the librettist and composer. A succession of pictures passes before us: it is, in fact, the multitude of short scenes that, more than anything else, suggests a narration. The stage, on the other hand, presents the many episodes with great conciseness, as each scene is concerned with a single event—one instant, as it were, of the screw's turn.