Benjamin Britten (1913–1976) was an English composer of extraordinary range who moved fluidly between opera, orchestral works, choral music, and song cycles. His gift for vocal writing was unmatched; he understood the human voice with an intimacy that came from deep collaboration with singers throughout his career. The Turn of the Screw, his 1954 opera based on Henry James's novella, stands as one of his most psychologically penetrating works, filled with unsettling beauty and harmonic sophistication.
Britten's approach to setting text was surgical and poetic at once. He could strip a moment down to its emotional core or lavish it with orchestral detail, always in service of the drama. In this aria, he captures a character's fleeting moment of peace with music that is deceptively simple on the surface yet harmonically restless underneath, a hallmark of his compositional voice.
