ABSTRACT
This chapter examines several instances of motivic connections between opera characters in three of Benjamin Britten’s operas: The Turn of the Screw, Albert Herring, and Peter Grimes. It illustrates how motivic linkages play a structural role in clarifying the function of various narrative archetypes, where subjects, objects of desire, and opponents dynamically interact and transform across the course of the operas in question. Algirdas Julien Greimas was a prominent French-Lithuanian literary scholar and semiotician whose work can generally be characterized as an attempt to describe textual structure on a purely functional level. Within Greimas’s formulation, the actants are set in binary opposition and form three primary pairs: the subject and object, the sender and receiver, and the helper and opponent. Albert Herring is one of Britten’s rare attempts at comic opera. The opera tells the story of the titular character and events leading to his moral corruption.
