Between ghosts and fantasies, a hallucinatory camera, with oppressive atmospheres, where the unsaid weigh an ever heavier weight: the fourth of the seven Britten operas is undoubtedly one of the most fascinating.
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Inspired by a famous news from Henry James published in 1898, The Turn of the Screw stages the memories of an anonymous governess, engaged by an invisible tutor to succeed a certain Miss Jessel, recently died in unexplained circumstances, in order to to watch over two young children, Miles and Flora. Little by little, it appears that the house, isolated in the English countryside, is haunted by Miss Jessel as well as by a second no less disturbing figure: that of the late Peter V, which was her lover. What are they doing with children? Why do they seek to attract them away? Do ghosts exist? Between the strange and the marvelous opens an undecidable interval, as narrow as it is fertile artistically - the crack of the fantastic, which is, according to the definition that Tsvetan Todorov gives, "the hesitation experienced by a being who does not know that natural laws, faced with an apparently supernatural event ”. Britten, with an astonishing economy of means, brings James' "disturbing strangeness" to its climax.