The Turn of the Screw (opera) composer conducting. Described as one of the most dramatically appealing English operas, the opera in two acts has a prologue and sixteen scenes, each preceded by a variation on the twelve-note 'Screw' theme. Typically of Britten, the music mixes tonality and dissonance, with Britten's recurrent use of a twelve-tone figure being perhaps a nod to the approach of Arnold Schoenberg. Thematically, the play gives a central role to a line borrowed from W. B. Yeats' poem "The Second Coming": "The ceremony of innocence is drowned." The opera was given its British premiere on 6 October 1954 by the Sadler's Wells
Dream of the Red Chamber (opera) 2 bassoons (1 doubling on contrabassoon), 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, 1 tuba, 1 timpani, 3 percussion, 1 harp, 1 qin, 39 strings (12 first violins, 9 second violins, 7 viola, 6 cellos, 5 basses); 64 total. Dream of the Red Chamber (opera) Dream of the Red Chamber is an English-language opera in two acts composed by Chinese American composer Bright Sheng, with libretto by Sheng and David Henry Hwang. Based on the classic 18th-century Chinese novel of the same name by Cao Xueqin, the three-hour English-language opera had its world premiere on September 10, 2016, by the San