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
The Turn of the Screw (2009 film) Sandy Welch, who set the film in the early 1920s, in contrast to the novella's 1840s setting. This allowed the introduction of the Freudian psychiatrist interviewing the main character; this framing device is not used by James, but both the novella and the film share a first-person narrator. The updated setting also allowed the First World War to account for the lack of male staff at the house. The Freudian and libidinous elements some literary theorists have seen in James's story are particularly prevalent in the film, with Ann's repressed sexual feelings for the Master resulting in a number of