The stars making music in a haunted house
Rupert Christiansen reports from the set of a new film of ghostly opera ‘Owen Wingrave’
When author AN Wilson went to dinner in July chez Grange Park Opera’s director Wasfi Kani, he presented her not with a bottle of wine but a first edition of Myfanwy Piper’s libretto for Benjamin Britten’s opera Owen Wingrave.
For Kani, the gift led to a eureka! moment. Having just commissioned a new opera for Grange Park (A Feast
in the Time of Plague had its stage premiere last weekend) and successfully programmed a series of small-scale online concerts, she was in search of another project. As she trenchantly puts it, “we have to do as much as we can, up to the limit of what’s permissible or possible. Otherwise we’re sunk.”
A new film version of Britten’s opera, originally composed for television and involving a modest cast of eight, provided the perfect answer, and has become a highlight of a season of streamed musical events up to Christmas and including everything from an accordion recital to a new production of Ravel’s L’heure espagnole.
Financing Owen Wingrave hasn’t been an obstacle. Ever resourceful and unabashed, Kani approached two of her most munificent donors who readily provided her with enough money to remunerate the singers as well as throwing open their two splendid (and purportedly haunted) houses, one in the Surrey Hills, one near Hampstead Heath, as locations. A reduction of the orchestration from a band of 46 to piano, percussion and trumpet was approved by Britten’s publishers and executors, who also agreed after a bit of arm-twisting to waive most of their usual fee for performing rights.
One melancholy effect of the pandemic crisis is empty diaries, so Kani could then call at very short notice on the services of Stephen Medcalf, a richly experienced director of Britten’s work, and a crack cast including Susan Bullock and William Dazeley, most of whom had sung their roles in previous productions. So despite a technical crew of only three, a tight shooting schedule of four days and a budget of £25,000, Kani is presenting something of very high quality, to be streamed online and free as a highlight of Grange Park’s autumn season.
Originally commissioned by David Attenborough for BBC Two in 1971 and filmed at the Snape Maltings with a cast including Britten’s partner Peter Pears and Janet Baker, Owen Wingrave is a problem child. Britten did not at the time own a television and although broadcasts of Peter Grimes and Billy Budd had opened his eyes to the possibilities and stimulated him to play with cinematic cross-cuts and fades, he lacked any instinctive affinity with the medium. The filming proved an unhappy experience for all concerned, marred by arcane working practices and quarrels among the creatives. Britten hated the result. He was only mollified when the opera was revised for a staging at Covent Garden in 1973.
Its critical reputation has always been mixed. The plot is based on an obscure short story by Henry James, set in the 1890s, concerning a young man who is ostracised by his fiercely militaristic family when he refuses to enter the army on moral grounds: many reviewers found the premise preachy and the tone unsubtle, loading the dice too heavily in favour of Owen’s milk-white idealism by making his brutal grandfather, aunt and fiancée gung-ho caricatures. The Sunday Telegraph’s Jeremy Noble was left “cold, and even faintly repelled” while others were irritated at the score’s resort to clichés and a weak dramatic climax in which Owen dies offstage, apparently felled by a vengeful ancestral ghost.
But many have found much to admire, too, not least the brilliantly composed scene at a tense dinner party and a greatly moving aria sung by Owen towards the opera’s end, glowing with the passion of Britten’s pacifist beliefs, inflamed at the time of composition by the horrors of the war in Vietnam. Half a century later, when all our certainties and values are in chaotic upheaval, the clarity of Owen
Wingrave’s message assumes a new power. Stephen Medcalf ’s film is locating the opera in the context of the post-2001 wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. This was a decision partly motivated by economy and necessity (at the moment all costume and prop-hire warehouses remain closed), but also an opportunity to explore the characters’ dilemmas from a perspective different to that of late Victorians solidly immersed in the British Empire. What was conceived for a panelled gaslit drawing room has been translated to a modern chintzy lounge in the stockbroker belt, in which the cast looks naturally at home. For one scene, Janis Kelly, as the wife of Owen’s tutor, is shown musing in the bath. In between takes, they slip into the kitchen and chat over coffee or sit out in the sun.
“I want it to seem quite edgy,”
Medcalf says when I visit the set in Surrey. “In any case, we aren’t in a position to do anything elegant or polished. It’s going to be rough and ready and I’m relying on the intelligence of this great cast to feed in any finer points of interpretation. But what I hope will come through strongly is the idea of someone being pushed by their family down a certain path who then turns round to say, ‘Stop this madness; we’re in danger of making ourselves extinct’. That seems very immediate to me, and I think all of us can identify with it.”
In a spirit of black humour, Medcalf is also mining into the tropes of our computer-obsessed age: so Owen’s battleaxe of an aunt will be seen furiously addicted to hideous war-games on her laptop, and, as a “homage to lockdown”, the scene in which Owen is harangued by his family now takes place on a Zoom split screen.
Playing Owen himself, Ross Ramgobin wants to downplay any sense that the boy is simply a prig who’s read a couple of tracts and succumbed to a fit of adolescent rebellion. “I think he’s very bottled up, very stubborn, very afraid of his own inner anger,” says Ramgobin. “He knows that if he lets it all out and gives in to it, he could be as violent as his forefathers. He becomes much more interesting if you can suggest that anxiety.”
The filming presents unusual challenges: all members of the cast are wearing their own clothes in a socially distanced environment that makes great demands on their patience; and rather than a studio dubbing, the voices are being recorded live on location and then integrated on to a pre-recorded instrumental track. It’s a painstaking process that involves multiple short takes in order to get the ensemble right and means that there are few chances to sing out in a sustained way. Wasfi Kani scuttles around doing menial odd jobs, trying to keep out of the way while ensuring that the timetable doesn’t fall fatally behind: this is a project that depends a lot on good will, but the pressure is intense.
And so it will continue: Kani’s fund of energy and ideas seems inexhaustible. “It’s crazy, of course,” she laughs. “But doing nothing just isn’t an option.”
Owen Wingrave will be streamed free in October as part of Grange Park Opera’s Interim Season running until Christmas; grangeparkopera.org
Britten wrote the opera for BBC Two even though, at the time, he didn’t own a television