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 Cenci the UK was by the Trinity College of Music on July 9-11, 1998. In 1951, British classical composer Havergal Brian composed an opera based on the Shelley play entitled "The Cenci", an opera in eight scenes. The opera premiered in 1997 in the UK in a performance in London by the Millennium Sinfonia conducted by James Kelleher.. In 1971, "Beatrix Cenci" premiered, an opera in two acts by Alberto Ginastera to a Spanish libretto by the composer William Shand. Other works titled "The Cenci" include an 1837 novella by Stendhal and an 1840 true crime essay by Alexandre Dumas, père,