Britten's River of Tears

Silvia Costa directs a striking double bill based on Jûrô Motomasa's Noh play

Crossing the Curlew River: Zhengyi Bai (Madwoman), Mark Stone (Ferryman), Michael Mofidian (Traveller) Picture © Jean-Louis Fernandez

An edited and adapted version of a review that first appeared on Oper! Magazin’s website, and republished in English here by kind permission of the Editor, Dr. Ulrich Ruhnke

Between the first performances of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 1960 and the stage premiere in 1973 of the television opera Owen Wingrave (first broadcast in 1971) Benjamin Britten wrote no works for opera theatres. Instead, he invented a new genre of music theatre, to be performed in churches. These ‘Church Parables’ were inspired partly by the Japanese Noh theatre he had encountered on a tour to Asia in 1956, and partly by the English tradition of medieval Mystery (or Miracle) Plays. Their compact format surprised UK critics after the successful creation of War Requiem, Britten’s largest-scale choral work.

Between 1964 and 1968, these music-dramatic parables - Curlew River, The Burning Fiery Furnace and The Prodigal Son - appeared at regular intervals, each with a libretto by the South African writer William Plomer and a starring part for Britten’s partner and most famed interpreter, the tenor Peter Pears. The three titles are occasionally performed as a triptych, but Curlew River has long been recognised as the masterpiece of the genre.