Benjamin Britten: Source Stories of Twelve Operas

Benjamin Britten drew his operas from the strangest corners of human storytelling: a Japanese ghost woman who cannot forget her jealousy, a Roman soldier torn apart by the press of a crowd, a drowned sailor whose ghost returns to claim his killer. This collection gathers twelve of the raw source texts that became some of the most performed operas in the modern repertoire. Here you will find the biblical tales that became "Saul and Jonathan" and "The Prodigal Son," the Noh drama that inspired "The Turn of the Screw," and the medieval morality play that became "The Rape of Lucretia." Britten's genius was not merely musical but dramatic: he knew that the best operas need stories with ancient, almost archetypal weight. Reading these texts, you sense the raw material he transformed. You see how a 14th-century morality play became a taut chamber opera, how Shakespeare's most ethereal comedy became something genuinely unsettling. For anyone who has sat in a opera house and wondered "where did this story come from?" this book provides the answer, and the answer is far stranger than you imagined.