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 Dybbuk: An opera in Yiddish The Dybbuk: An opera in Yiddish The Dybbuk: An Opera in Yiddish is an opera in three acts by American composer Solomon Epstein. The libretto was adapted by the composer from S. Ansky's 1914 play "The Dybbuk" and is apparently the world's first original Yiddish language opera. It was premiered and recorded at the Suzanne Dellal Center for Dance and Theater, Tel Aviv, and at Ben-Gurion University, Beersheba, in May 1999. The opera was staged in a 70 minute abridged version using the composer's piano-vocal score. It has not yet been produced with a full orchestra. Yiddish, spoken mainly by