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) are explored. Gerard Gilbert, writing both for "The Independent" and The Arts Desk, felt that Ann's relationship to the Master was "unnecessarily sexed up", and that this element added nothing to the story, and, in fact, detracted from it. In his review of the American DVD release for the "Deseret Morning News", Chris Hicks said that he could not see why the changes had been made, and that the literalisation of the sex and violence detracted from the film. Whittaker suggested that "The Turn of the Screw" was "oddly sexually explicit", and that the changes were unnecessary for the plot.