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Henry James's Europe

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Dennis Tredy
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Annick Duperray
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Adrian Harding

V. Performance

19. Benjamin Britten’s Appropriation of James in Owen Wingrave

Hubert Teyssandier

Texte intégral

1Henry James wrote Owen Wingrave in 1892, and published it the same year. He later revised it for the New York Edition, where it is included in volume XVII. Benjamin Britten appropriated, and transformed, Henry James’s tale in his fifteenth opera, Owen Wingrave, which was commissioned by the BBC, and shown in May 1971 as a ”television opera,” now available on DVD. The first stage performance of Owen Wingrave was given at Covent Garden in May 1973. Myfanwy Piper had written the libretto, as she had for Britten’s earlier Jamesian opera, The Turn of the Screw (1954). Britten’s Owen Wingrave is, in ideological terms, another statement of the composer’s commitment to pacifism, which had also been central to some of his major works, among others The Rape of Lucretia, a much earlier opera (1946), and War Requiem (1962).

2Both tale and opera follow the same story line, and they are both set in the English context of the late nineteenth century. The action begins in London, at the house of Mr. Spencer Coyle, a military instructor, who runs a private teaching establishment for military aspirants cramming for Sandhurst. Mr. Coyle has two sharply contrasted students: one is Lechmere, an uncritical military enthusiast; the other student, Owen Wingrave, is an intellectual, who reads Goethe’s poems in James’s tale, and Shelley’s Queen Mab in Britten and Piper’s opera. Tale and opera function around this basic contrast, which often lends itself to comic treatment, as Lechmere is a figure of comedy. Owen Wingrave, the scion of a military family, decides to break with the family tradition, and refuses to become an Army officer. He is summoned back to the ancestral seat of the Wingraves, some kind of a ’gothic’ place called Paramore, in order to be ”straightened out,” as his aunt, Miss Wingrave, a ”strenuous lady,” is made to put it (Ghostly Tales 327).

3At Paramore, Owen resists all family pressures—both that of his grandfather and of his aunt—and shows no sign of being swayed by ’the voice of the house’ nor the presence of the dead. He also resists the pressure of two ladies who live at Paramore: Mrs. Julian, an officer’s widow, and Kate Julian, her daughter, who had long been expected to marry Owen. After Owen has been a week in Paramore, showing no signs of submission, the London characters are called for their support, however problematic it might be, on the side of ancestral tradition: these are Lechmere the militarist; Mrs. Coyle, who has sympathy for Lechmere; and Mr. Coyle, who is manifesting an increasing interest in Owen’s case against violence and war. They are all invited to Paramore for what is going to prove a very memorable weekend.

4In the evening, Kate Julian dares Owen to spend the night in the haunted room, where something ghastly happened long ago. Owen accepts the challenge, to prove that he is no coward, and at his request, Kate locks him in. At dawn the next day, Kate goes to the haunted room, and unlocks the door: Owen’s dead body is then discovered, and in both tale and opera, the cause of his death belongs to the unexplained, or the unspeakable.

I.

  • 1 In The Turn of the Screw, the word ”ghost” occurs only once, in the prologue and in relation to an (...)

5I shall first discuss the ghostly and its representation, bearing in mind James’s well-known artistic aversion to conventional spectral apparitions. His own dramatisation of Owen Wingrave, a play entitled The Saloon (1908), contains no word nor stage direction that might suggest the introduction of a visible ghost, and when it was performed in 1911, with ”a pale, dimly seen figure” appearing on the stage, Henry James expressed his ”liveliest disapproval” (The Complete Plays, editor’s preface). The word ”ghost,” which is avoided in The Turn of the Screw,1 does occur in Owen Wingrave, and the protagonist is made to introduce it: ”I’ve started up all the old ghosts” (336). In this instance, however, the word is not used in its literal sense— that is, not in the sense of what Mrs. Coyle calls ”a proved ghost” (339). In Owen’s remark, the text refers to the souls of the dead, the shadows of the past and Paramore’s former glory, not to visible apparitions.

6However, at a late stage in the tale, we are made aware that Owen, before the night he meets his death in the haunted room, has spent the previous night there, for unstated reasons of his own—an important detail which is not maintained in Britten’s opera: ” ’I spent all last night in the confounded place’” (350). The information is part of a private exchange between Kate and Owen, but Lechmere, the happy militarist, who has cast himself in the role of Owen’s rival for Kate’s hand, has been eavesdropping for his own benefit and for the reader’s guidance. Though not very shrewd, Lechmere, who is Owen’s comic antagonist, has been led to the certainty that, the night before, Owen has had some unaccountable experience in the ”confounded” room, as comes out in the ensuing dialogue between Lechmere and Coyle, while Owen is spending his second and ultimate night in the ”White Room” (as it is called in James’s tale) and may even be already lying dead:

’But I’m sure he did see something or hear something,’ the youth added.
’In that ridiculous place? What makes you so sure?’
’Well, because he looks as if he had. I’ve an idea you can tell—in such a case.
He behaves as if he had.’
’Why then shouldn’t he name it?’
Young Lechmere wondered and found. ’Perhaps it’s too bad to mention’
(350-51).

7As we know from the beginning of the tale, Lechmere, contrary to Owen, is ”as a general thing uninspired” (259). So what he thinks he has read in Owen’s face can hardly be taken for a reliable judgment. On the other hand, Owen has been making jokes about the ”White Room,” calling it ” ’an awful sell,’” but at the same time he has shown signs of embarrassment when told by Lechmere that he did not believe that (347). Mr. Coyle, who is showing more and more sympathy for Owen’s pacifist opinions and has far greater insight than Lechmere, is here anxiously trying to make sense of what Lechmere thinks he has found out. Following a familiar Jamesian strategy, the text is here hovering over something that cannot be named.

  • 2 The earlier version read: ”He looked like a young soldier on a battle-field.”

8Ironically, Lechmere, in his lame remark (”’too bad to mention’”), comes quite close to saying all we can assert about the haunted room. The ghostly, whatever it is, is associated with one of the worst forms of evil: the ugliness of violence and war, which the Wingrave family has been perpetuating throughout the ages, and which will eventually cause the death of the one who tries to oppose it. Owen Wingrave is another doomed fighter, like all his ancestors, though a fighter in the cause of peace. In the sentence that concludes the New York version, Owen appears as a dead soldier, lying on the ground he has helped to conquer: ”He was all the young soldier on the gained field” (352).2

9Within the tale that leads to Owen’s death, the legend of Paramore, which is brought to the reader’s knowledge as Mr. Coyle is relating it to his wife, functions as an inset tale within the main tale. The legend is about two of Owen’s ancestors, Colonel Wingrave and his son, who both lived and died in the eighteenth century, in George II’s time (339). The boy was stricken to death by his father in the haunted room at Paramore, because he had refused to take up the challenge of another boy and to fight against him, and in the very same room, the father’s dead body was discovered the morning after. Owen’s death duplicates, in a double way, the legend of Paramore: like his young ancestor, he has refused to conform to the family tradition, and he dies the same inexplicable death as the boy’s father.

10In their rendering of the ghostly, Britten and Piper preserve the silence and mystery in which Henry James has enshrouded it—a noticeable difference of treatment compared with their operatic transposition of The Turn of the Screw, where the ”visitants” hold major singing roles. The dead Wingrave ancestors, as they appear to Owen and to the audience, are silent spectral presences becoming visible in the darkness of Paramore. I shall for the moment restrict myself to the libretto and the score, in particular as regards the stage directions, which clearly indicate that the ghostly must, in some way or other, be made visible. It is clear from the libretto and the score that there are ghostly apparitions in the opera, although they do not utter a word in reply when Owen addresses them. They intervene only in Act II, and the stage directions only mention them at the point when Owen, who has been formally disinherited by his grandfather, is left alone on the stage, all the other characters having gone to bed in some kind of funereal procession, each holding a light, up the staircase that leads to the upper level of the stage, from which they disappear into the corridors. The scene (Act II Scene I) uses the two levels of the stage, the upper level being also called ”the gallery,” as on the Elizabethan stage. ”Gallery” is simultaneously used in the sense of picture gallery (where the ancestral portraits cover the wall); the lower level is the drawing room.

11After all the family and guests have gone up the stairs, ”Owen goes up to the portraits” (Score 243), and starts apostrophising his painted ancestors:

Now you may save your scornful looks
and turn your faces to the wall […]
Now I am nothing, I bid you all farewell
(Libretto 33).

12Then Owen turns away from the portraits, to sing his peace aria or soliloquy (”’In peace I have found my image […]’”), and as he concludes with the words: ” ’I am finished with you all,’” the stage directions read: ”Apparitions of the old man and the boy appear to Owen,” and he addresses them in Sprechstimme: ” ’Ah! I’d forgotten you! Come on then, come on I’ll tell you’” (33). The spectral presences are those of earlier Wingraves, a father and his son, around whom the legend of Paramore has been woven: the boy beaten to death, and the father found inexplicably dead the morning after the son’s murder. ”The boy turns and looks at Owen” (Score 258), then ”the apparitions disappear into the [haunted] room” (Score 260). After they are gone, ”Owen sinks into a chair in the shadows.” Not only are the two spectral figures explicitly called ”apparitions,” they are also given faces, since they are listed in the cast of the original television opera, as ”Colonel Wingrave, an apparition” (played by Peter Pears) and ”Young Wingrave, his son, an apparition.” Of course there may be different ways of staging the apparitions, but it seems difficult, in the case of the opera, to represent them as Henry James would have wished for his play The Saloon: greater darkness in the midst of darkness.

13In the original television version, the ghosts actually appear twice, the first apparitions occurring right at the beginning of Act II, which opens with a ballad, sung by a tenor voice, and accompanied by a ”distant chorus of boys’ voices.” The tenor voice is that of a character called ”The narrator” (for which there is no basis in James’s tale), and the legend of Paramore, which in the tale is related by Mr. Coyle, is here conveyed in ballad form, an old narrative poetic form, revived in the days of Romanticism, which Myfanwy Piper has used as an inset narrative, which goes through all the circumstances of the boy’s cruel murder and the father’s mysterious death:

There was a boy, a Wingrave boy,
A Wingrave born to kill his foe,
Far away on sea and land
The Wingraves were a fighting band (25-26).

14While the legend of Paramore is being sung, the narrator and the distant chorus are invisible, and we are shown, inset in the main color film, ”slow-motion mime in sepia, the use of monochrome strikingly evoking an earlier historical period” (John Evans 237). In the inset monochrome film, there are three spectral figures, the father, his son (the earlier Owen), and another boy, the playmate against whom he refuses to fight, and all the episodes in the legend are mimed: the challenge, the Wingrave boy crossing his arms as a sign that he will not fight, the father taking his son by the hand, marching him up the stairs and beating him to death, until the sepia film finishes with a close-up on the head of the dead father lying on the floor.

15In the television film, the reappearance of two of the spectral figures (the father and son) continues the sepia film that has illustrated the ballad, with the difference that this time the silent slow-motion miming is watched by Owen, who, just before the ghosts disappear, addresses the boy with compassion, and as his father takes him into the ”White Room,” views himself, not without hubris, as having won against the family tradition.

II.

16The prominent role played by painted portraits in Britten’s opera amounts to an extensive development of Henry James’s pictorialism, as we can observe it at work in Owen Wingrave. The tale hints at an indefinite number of portraits, summing up the family history on the walls of Paramore: they are part of ” ”the family circle,” as Miss Wingrave calls it (336). The portraits intervene at a fairly late stage in the tale (in penultimate section 3), when the weekend guests have joined the family at Paramore, and they mark the beginning of the crucial and terminal episode. Owen refers to the portraits as stern judges manifesting their disapproval of his resolution: ”The very portraits glower at me on the walls” (336). In James’s tale only one portrait can be visualised with some distinctness, as Mr. Coyle shows it to his wife: ”On the staircase as they went her husband showed her the portrait of Colonel Wingrave—a representation, with some force and style, for the place and period, of a gentleman with a hard handsome face, in a red coat and a peruke” (340).

17We are told that Sir Philip looks like him—an ominous sign, especially as we know that this is the Wingrave ancestor that struck his son to death. From what Mr. Coyle has told his wife earlier on (339), we can date the portrait: it is an eighteenth-century painting, from the days of George II’s reign. The text does not say nor imply that his son is represented with him on the same canvas, but ghostly apparitions, which the text of the tale never mentions, begin to take shape in Mr. Coyle’s own personal imagination: ” […] if one should have the courage to walk the old corridors of Paramore at night one might meet a figure that resembled him roaming, with the restlessness of a ghost, hand in hand with the figure of a tall boy” (340). Mr. Coyle may well imagine it, but Henry James is not going to represent it. The portrait however is central to the tale, and in some way contains it all, as it refers to a point in time that contains the whole of time, past, present, and future.

18In Britten’s opera, the pictorial idea it borrows from Henry James is developed on a very large scale from the very beginning after only a few bars of music. Instead of a traditional overture, the opera starts with a prelude combining music and pictures, described as follows in Myfanwy Piper’s libretto: ”Prelude: The family portraits at Paramore. Ten are seen, of which the fifth is a double portrait” (5).

19In the original television film, the first shot is a close-up on the Wingrave coat of arms: a massive shield, with swords and other weapons arranged symmetrically across it, on top of it a medieval helmet, the metallic folds of military banners on both sides—all of a dull grey. Then the ten portraits mentioned in the libretto are shown one after the other in their thick wooden frames, each bearing the date when it was painted, the first being that of Owain Wyngrave, Knight of Paramore, c. 1536, all rough paintings with the colours all gone, except for a trace of faded red here and there. The fifth portrait—a double portrait—represents a man and a boy, and the camera slowly zooms in on the face of the boy, called Owen. The date of the painting is 1652—during the reign of Charles II. In Britten and Piper’s operatic version of the tale, the legend of Paramore has been pushed back to the early years of the Restoration period, shortly after the Civil War. The last portrait shown is that of the protagonist’s father, Colonel Oliver Wingrave, dated 1875.

20At this point there is a cross-fade from the image of the father to Owen’s face, and he is thus introduced as one more portrait continuing the series, which is another way of making the same point as Henry James in the last sentence of the New York version: ”He was all the young soldier on the gained field.” Then the camera zooms away from Owen’s face, and he appears sitting in a room (with more military paintings in it), half-listening to Mr. Coyle, who is explaining the battle of Austerlitz with tin soldiers, on a map spread on his desk. At this point the dramatic action begins, and Mr. Coyle’s voice is the first to be heard, as in the tale.

21The Wingrave coat of arms, and some of the portraits, in particular the double portrait and the portrait of Owen’s father, are made to reappear recurrently. As to the double portrait, during Owen’s soliloquy, the two spectral figures are distinctly seen detaching themselves from their painted images, which they duplicate, and walking away hand in hand, as Mr. Coyle imagines them in the tale; they disappear into the haunted room, where Owen is eventually going to rejoin them.

22The visual display, which the opera allows, combined with the impact of the music, prevents the ironic distancing which Henry James continually maintains, with its subtle balance between comedy and tragedy, and Britten’s opera is a more somber work than James’s tale. But both opera and tale function around the same ambiguity: the protagonist refuses to follow the line of his ancestors, but he does follow it all the same, and he dies a violent death, although what kills him is beyond words and defies representation.

III.

23Britten combines several kinds of music writing, which refer to different periods in the history of music: Schönberg and the twelve-tone system, based on specific arrangements of all the twelve degrees of the chromatic scale; the tonal music of the great operatic tradition from Mozart to Richard Strauss; and the far older, late medieval tradition of church music with its eight modes.

  • 3 The phrase ”nightmare rhythm” occurs in the manuscript sketches of Benjamin Britten for Owen Wingr (...)

24Britten introduces, as early as the opera’s prelude, a first schönbergian twelve-tone row, and this takes us back to the portraits, and the question of their exact number. They are said to be ten, but as one of them is a double portrait, this brings the total up to eleven. Further, since Owen is made to appear looking like one more portrait, the correct total is twelve. So the portraits work in conjunction with the twelve-tone music, which is heard in the very first bars, even before the first portrait has appeared. A first twelve-tone series opens the opera, over three bars, and the notes, played on the piano, with percussion accompaniment (including two drums) are arranged in harshly dissonant chords, which make up a refrain that is going to be heard throughout the opera. The chords, which make up a two-beat military march, indicated as ”Martial,” are arranged according to a ”nightmare rhythm” which leads to the appearance of the portraits, and will be heard again repeatedly, for example at the beginning of Owen’s soliloquy.3 So the dissonant military march, bristling with false relations, is the music of the Wingraves. Then another twelve-tone row appears as the portraits are shown, each with its own cadenza, and each portrait introduces a new pitch in the series, so that the notes pile up until we reach the total of eleven, and when Owen is seen, the one chromatic pitch that has so far been missing (D) is introduced by one of the horns.

25However, the music of Owen Wingrave is not all twelve-tone series, and as we watch Owen for the first time, we enter the tonal system, with a horn motif in D, wavering between D major (two sharps) and D minor (one flat). As John Evans has pointed it out, Owen’s tonality is ”the central pivot” around which the other tonalities are arranged (235). The conflicts around him are reflected in the tonalities ascribed to those who show sympathy for him or hostility against him: Mr. Coyle’s tonality is A major and Mrs. Coyle’s is E major (tonalities with sharps); on the other hand, Lechmere is often made to sing in B flat, and Sir Philip in E flat. So the conflict around Owen is musically rendered through a sharp/flat contrast.

Fig. 1 Kate Own.
But on — ly found the blood — soaked brack-en and trampl-ed grass.
Ex.1 fig. 265 @ 1973 by Faber Music ltd. Reproduced by kind permission of the publishers

26Leaving out most details concerning tonalities, I shall mention at this stage that the ambiguous relationship between Owen and Kate is rendered through tonal contrast (Kate’s G flat against Owen’s D). However their voices, both in the medium range (mezzo-soprano and baritone), sing in proximate registers, and at one point, in the course of what appears first as an uncertain love duet, before it turns into a quarrel, they both sing in the same (somewhat funereal) key of C minor, and for a brief while their two musical lines are made of the same notes, exactly one octave apart (Score 265 fig. 1). However, the words they sing speak of ”blood-soaked bracken and trampled grass”— the marks left by two rival stags ”fighting for their chosen hind.” It does seem that a grim kind of desire is part of Kate’s violence, as she is still trying to bring back Owen to the tradition and religion of Paramore. The tragedy of it is that the duet seals Owen’s doom, and the comedy of it is that the rival stag is Lechmere.

Fig. 2 The Ballad.
Fig. 196 @ 1973 by Faber Music ltd. Reproduced by kind permission of the publishers

  • 4 Technically, the mode used here is the mixolydian: the note on which it ends is G, its ambitus is (...)
  • 5 This is effected in particular through what Arnold Whittall has analysed as a ”wedge-shaped idea,” (...)

27With Act II, in which this scene is contained, Britten has introduced from the beginning still another kind of music writing, which is modal, and refers back to distant times. The words of the ballad which relates the legend of Paramore (”There was a boy, a Wingrave boy […]”) are sung to music written in one of the church modes—a mode in G (as for ghostly), and as soon as it begins to be heard, the ballad’s modal melody is perceived as completely different from all the music that has been heard so far in the opera.4 It is obviously not twelve-tone music, and it uses a system of intervals (starting with a second followed by a fifth) that makes it sound unlike any tonal arrangement (fig. 2). It is a doleful, eerie melody, accompanying a tale of ancient days, a ghostly music heard as if coming from far away. The ballad starts on a D (the reciting note), which of course relates the mode to Owen’s key: it is indeed both the story of the seventeenth century Owen and of his late nineteenth century namesake. So the modal system is here related to the tonal. The chorus of boys’ voices starts with a succession of semitones, also heard on the accompanying trumpet, and sings the refrain that concludes each stanza: ”Trumpet blow, Paramore shall welcome woe.” Then the chorus becomes a second narrative voice, while the trumpet sounds a final military flourish. The overall effect is chromatic, owing to the frequency of ascending and descending semitones, so that transitions are easy with the twelve-tone music system.5

28The resort to the ballad form had been foreshadowed at the beginning of Act I, as Lechmere joyfully sings the first line of a traditional ballad: ”The Minstrel boy to the war is gone / In the ranks of death you’ll find him” (Score 15). That was however a different tune, not at all doleful. Later in Act II, Owen is heard singing the Paramore ballad tune derisively, to deride Lechmere who has been flirting outrageously as well as comically with Kate Julian: ”And with his friend, young Lechmere played” (Score 236). The ballad tune is going to be heard one last time, after Owen’s death and Kate’s shriek of horror. This time, only the first stanza is heard, with the tenor voice, the chorus of boys’ voices, and the trumpet. As the music fades away into silence, the last words heard are ”Paramore shall welcome woe.”

29The opera has begun with the coat of arms of the Wingraves, in its medieval splendor—an image that sums up the glory of Paramore, but we have not been given any more clues than in Henry James’s tale as to the possible significance of this odd place name, apparently derived from the French (”par amour”). The emphatically doleful way in which the name is sounded and repeated at both ends of Act II, echoing as it were the funereal cry of Poe’s Raven, combines contradictory associations of tragic sorrow and subversive irony. The ancestral coat of arms has no motto, but Lechmere’s triumphant outcry in Act I (”La Gloire c’est Tout”) would be more suitable than ”Par Amour.” The absent motto is in itself a significant blank.

IV.

30In Owen Wingrave, Benjamin Britten’s second and last Jamesian opera, there seem to be strong affinities with the art of Henry James, and not only with the tale that is here transposed. While maintaining his opera within the same late nineteenth century context as James’s tale, Britten also evinces a Jamesian sense of the past as regards both distant historic times, and the history of his art. While dealing with the contemporary scene, James’s tale reverberates dim sounds of earlier periods—the Napoleonic wars, the ”crowded Indian past” (323), the Indian mutiny, Hannibal and Julius Caesar, Marlborough and Frederick (328). In Owen Wingrave, Britten uses and alters musical forms that are part of the great operatic tradition: both the military march that introduces us to Paramore, and the chorus of boys’ voices that seals its doom rewrite Mozartian structures, although their former associations have been altered. Britten also goes further back, beyond the seventeenth century, to the times of pre-tonal music—modal music having its origins in very distant times.

31In dramatic terms, the opera and the tale are fairly close to each other, and James’s ’scenic’ method, which often resorts to dialogues and confrontational exchanges, and uses conscious theatrical effects from the first scene to the last, easily lends itself to stage transposition, although James was unfortunate when he himself turned Owen Wingrave into a play. Britten’s opera is often remarkably close to the tale, from Coyle’s initial words (”Upon my words you must be off your head!”) to the final catastrophe. However, in the opera, Coyle’s apostrophe to Owen (Score 24) is delayed by the ”prologue,” and the beginning of scene one; at the end the music continues beyond the discovery of Owen’s dead body. Operas are expected to have some kind of ”overture,” or, as was the case in the earliest operas (Monteverdi), a ”prologue” for one or more singers. Owen Wingrave begins with an extended prologue that serves as overture, introducing a whole set of musical motifs, and a sequence of images that concentrates centuries of historic time from the days when the family coat of arms was designed to the late nineteenth century. Operas are also expected to have a finale, and while the tale comes to an abrupt end on the image of Owen’s dead body, in the opera the music goes on, after the catastrophe has happened. The ballad is resumed, serving as low-keyed finale, and the boys’ voices, fading away, ’ghostlily,’ lead to the barely audible, ultimate G that concludes the mode used in the ballad (fig. 3), after the tenor voice has stopped, and the trumpet has ceased its muted fanfare.

Fig. 3 Fig. 295. Fading away, calando...
@ 1973 by Faber Music ltd. Reproduced by kind permission of the publishers

Notes

1 In The Turn of the Screw, the word ”ghost” occurs only once, in the prologue and in relation to another story (”Griffin’s ghost”), but is never used in the course of the main story: Quint and Miss Jessel are never called ”ghosts,” but ”intruders,” ”visitors,” or ”visitants.”

2 The earlier version read: ”He looked like a young soldier on a battle-field.”

3 The phrase ”nightmare rhythm” occurs in the manuscript sketches of Benjamin Britten for Owen Wingrave, and Arnold Whittall, in his article on ”Britten’s Lament: The World of Owen Wingrave,” points out how the ”nightmare rhythm” reappears in the score as Owen speaks to the portraits (Whittall 148-52).

4 Technically, the mode used here is the mixolydian: the note on which it ends is G, its ambitus is gg, and its tenor is D (Don Michael Randel, The Harvard Dictionary of Music 533).

5 This is effected in particular through what Arnold Whittall has analysed as a ”wedge-shaped idea,” which also appears in Britten’s Owen Wingrave sketchbooks: it is made of two lines that diverge from a single pitch or converge on one. To quote Whittall: ”This idea is notable for its tonal elusiveness […] The last of [Britten’s] sketches closes on a chord that verticalizes four prominent notes from the Ballad’s modal melodic line [G—D—E—B], and this found its way directly into the score of the opera […] (Fig. 236)” (149-50).

Table des illustrations

Légende Fig. 1 Kate Own.But on — ly found the blood — soaked brack-en and trampl-ed grass.Ex.1 fig. 265 @ 1973 by Faber Music ltd. Reproduced by kind permission of the publishers
URL http://books.openedition.org/obp/docannexe/image/840/img-1.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 12k
Légende Fig. 2 The Ballad.Fig. 196 @ 1973 by Faber Music ltd. Reproduced by kind permission of the publishers
URL http://books.openedition.org/obp/docannexe/image/840/img-2.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 8,7k
Légende Fig. 3 Fig. 295. Fading away, calando...@ 1973 by Faber Music ltd. Reproduced by kind permission of the publishers
URL http://books.openedition.org/obp/docannexe/image/840/img-3.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 8,0k

Auteur

Hubert Teyssandier is professor (emeritus) of English literature at the Université Paris 3- Sorbonne Nouvelle, where he has taught the nineteenthand twentieth-century English novel since 1974. He founded and directed a research centre for studies on intertextuality in literature and the arts and has recently published articles on Henry James and Virginia Woolf. He is currently working on Henry James and Benjamin Britten.

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