Benjamin Britten the apex of his reputation: it was almost universally hailed as a masterpiece." Shostakovich told Rostropovich that he believed it to be "the greatest work of the twentieth century". In 1967 the BBC commissioned Britten to write an opera specially for television. "Owen Wingrave" was based, like "The Turn of the Screw", on a ghost story by Henry James. By the 1960s Britten found composition much slower than in his prolific youth; he told the 28-year-old composer Nicholas Maw, "Get as much done now as you can, because it gets much, much more difficult as you grow older." He did
The Turn of the Screw everyday reality, "the strange and sinister embroidered on the very type of the normal and easy", as he put it in the "New York Edition" preface to his final ghost story, "The Jolly Corner". With "The Turn of the Screw", many critics have wondered if the "strange and sinister" were only in the governess's mind and not part of reality. The result has been a longstanding critical dispute about the reality of the ghosts and the sanity of the governess. Beyond the dispute, critics have closely examined James's narrative technique for the story. The framing introduction and subsequent first-person narrative