From Time Out Chicago's review:"Based on the gothic novella by Henry James and composed to a libretto by Myfanwy Piper in 1970, Benjamin Britten’s Owen Wingrave was originally commissioned as a BBC television production, although Britten always intended for it to be performed onstage.
Rejecting the soldier’s life he has been primed for since birth and casting aside the fate determined by his ancestors, Owen Wingrave enters one of the most ferocious battlefields of all—the family argument. Matthew Worth, in the title role, portrays the young pacifist with all the necessary fortitude and stoic courage one expects from such a character, and his fine, bright baritone expresses the most poetic lines in what is otherwise a fairly dry and serious opera.
It’s a timely choice for COT to produce an opera about liberation from oppression, and it certainly got the audience talking. During the intermission I overheard the crowd discuss everything from Britten’s pacifist views in a contemporary context to the opera’s various possible readings: “It’s a metaphor for coming out of the closet!”
There’s very little action in Owen Wingrave, but Britten’s hostility toward war provides the backbone for much of his art. As Wingrave declares in Act 1: “Courage in peace, the kind that poets know, wins everything.” Tonight was no exception."
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