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
Henry Forbes (composer) Henry Forbes (composer) Henry Forbes (1804–1859) was an English pianist, organist and composer. Forbes was a pupil of George Thomas Smart, Johann Nepomuk Hummel, Ignaz Moscheles, and Henri Herz, and had greater success as executant and teacher than as composer. While organist of St Luke's Church, Chelsea, a London church, he published (1843) "National Psalmody", containing some original numbers. His opera "The Fairy Oak" was disliked by the critics, but had a run of a week or two after its production at Drury Lane, 18 October 1845. A cantata, "Ruth", was performed in 1847. Forbes frequently associated with his brother