The Faber Pocket Guide to Opera (65 page)

The most glamorous and subtle of operetta scores, notable from its hectically exhilarating prelude for its rich and fall orchestral scoring, Slavic musical effects (tambourine and guitar being among the instruments used) and seductively erotic tinge, embodied in the haunting refrain of Hanna Glawari’s ‘Vilja’, and the matchless ‘Lippen schweigen’ waltz – surely one of the most suavely perfect melodies ever composed.
All three of its acts have masterly finales.
The summerhouse duet between Camille and Valencienne has been labelled Wagnerian, and there is indeed an emotional depth and intensity here that one finds nowhere else in operetta.

In performance

An operetta said to have received over a quarter of a million performances, in twenty-five languages.
Producers today seem to be left very uncomfortable by this romance, and don’t know whether to send it all up rotten or take its background in pre-First World War Balkan politics seriously.
The casualty of both approaches is any sense of the Edwardian café-society glamour which made the opera so popular in the first place.
As with so many other operettas,
Die
Lustige
Witwe
’s sensual charm dissipates in large opera houses, and recent star-studded productions at the Metropolitan and Opéra Bastille have been unenthusiastically received.

Several pleasantly escapist film adaptations of the operetta have been made – with Jeanette Macdonald and Lana Turner among those taking the title-role – and a balletic version became a vehicle for the last years of Margot Fonteyn’s career.

Recording

CD: Cheryl Studer (Hanna Glawari); John Eliot Gardiner (cond.).
DG 439 911 2

PART SIX

English Opera

English opera grew out of the theatrical tradition of the court masque and the custom of introducing songs and dances into spoken plays.
John Blow’s
Venus
and
Adonis
(
c
.1683) is probably the first true opera in English, ‘through-composed’ on the Italian model, followed shortly afterwards by Henry Purcell’s
Dido
and
Aeneas.

With the arrival of Handel in London in 1710, Italian operas became all the rage – a vogue satirized by
The
Beggar’s
Opera
(1728), an old-style play with songs, written by John Gay with music culled from popular ballads and folk tunes.
Throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, opera in England continued to be largely an Italian import, though composers like Thomas Arne continued to produce works in the native tongue, often pastoral in subject-matter and, like
The
Beggar’s
Opera,
drawn from music taken from a variety of sources (such operas were known as
pasticcios
or pastiches).

More sophisticated in their musical language and more dramatically ambitious were hugely successful operas on romantic themes by two Irish-born composers – Michael Balfe’s
The
Bohemian
Girl
(1843) and Vincent Wallace’s
Maritana
(1845), often linked in a trilogy with Julius Benedict’s
The
Lily
of
Killarney
(1862).
With
Ivanhoe,
a romantic opera first performed in 1891, Sir Arthur Sullivan made his sole, unsuccessful attempt to produce something in a similarly grand style.

Composers of the early twentieth century struggled to find a satisfactory operatic form.
Edward Elgar left only sketches; in
Sir
John
in
Love,
Hugh
the
Drover
and
The
Pilgrim’s
Progress,
Ralph Vaughan Williams composed beautiful and lyrically evocative music that lacks theatrical punch; in
Savitri
and
At
the
Boar’s
Head,
Gustav Hoist made interesting experiments in a post-Wagnerian idiom that led nowhere.

It was only with Benjamin Britten – and in particular,
Peter
Grimes
– that English opera found a truly confident and distinctive voice.
As a young man, Britten honed his craft writing songs, film and radio scores before moving into the theatre.
His early operas contain elements of the old ballad style, filtered through the influence of Berg’s
Wozzeck
and Gershwin’s
Porgy
and
Bess,
but by the time of
Billy
Budd
and
Gloriana
(written for the coronation of Elizabeth II in 1953) he had found a way of writing full-scale grand operas in a twentieth-century idiom.
He also relished the challenge of working with the English Opera Group, a company which made a virtue of its limited resources to perform outside conventional opera houses.
A trilogy of one-act works, written in the early 1960s and known as the ‘Church Parables’ (
Curlew
River,
The
Burning
Fiery
Furnace
and
The
Prodigal
Son
) demonstrate an increasing fascination with East Asian music and theatrical devices.
Britten’s other great gift was an almost flawless instinct for holding an audience’s attention and making opera a vivid and immediately communicative dramatic experience.

Britten’s great contemporary, Sir Michael Tippett, was more of a maverick.
He wrote his own libretti, and many find his poetic prose baffling and pretentious.
But Tippett had blazing musical inspiration and his operas address profound human issues.
Following the mystical and ecstatic
The
Midsummer
Marriage,
his next opera,
King
Priam,
is a complex exploration of the havoc that a state of war plays on the human heart, and in
The
Knot
Garden
and
The
Ice
Break
he made brave if confused attempts to bring crises of the modern world into the opera house.

The outstanding figure among Britten’s and Tippett’s successors is Harrison Birtwistle:
Punch
and
Judy,
his violent, parodic and ritualistic first opera scandalized Britten at its first performance in 1966.
Later Birtwistle operas such as
The
Mask
of
Orpheus,
Gawain
and
The
Last
Supper
have all been musically preoccupied with variation within repetition – an idea expressed theatrically by recourse to elements of religious
ritual.
This ruggedly independent and uncompromising composer also explores the possibilities presented by electronically produced sound.
Another significant experimenter is Alexander Goehr, whose
Arianna
constructs a new work around surviving fragments of an otherwise lost work by Monteverdi.

Younger British composers have been brilliantly diverse and inventive.
Oliver Knussen’s
Where
the
Wild
Things
Are
is a rumbustious children’s opera, full of charm and energy.
Judith Weir’s
A
Night
at
the
Chinese
Opera
and
Blond
Eckbert
are weird and sinister fantasies.
Thomas Adès’s
Powder
her
Face
is a poignant satire on the scandalous life story of Margaret, Duchess of Argyll.
Most impressive of all is Mark Anthony Turnage, whose funky, jazz-coloured style and demotic edge has animated both the dark surrealist nightmare of
Greek,
a reworking the Oedipus legend in a setting of modern urban desolation, and
The
Silver
Tassie,
an adaptation of Sean O’Casey’s moving play about the victims of the First World War trenches.

Henry Purcell

(1659–95)

Dido and Aeneas

Three acts (normally performed without an interval).

First performed London,?1689.

Libretto by Nahum Tate

It is often said that the first performance of this opera was given in 1689 at Josias Priest’s boarding school for girls, but it seems likely that it was composed some four years earlier and perhaps performed like a masque on some ceremonial royal occasion.

Plot

Dido, the widowed Queen of Carthage, is reluctant to declare her love for Prince Aeneas, a fugitive from ruined Troy.
Belinda, her lady-in-waiting, and the court urge her on, and when Aeneas presses his suit, she yields, amid general rejoicing.

Malevolent witches plot havoc.
They raise a storm, and one of the coven, disguised as Mercury, reminds Aeneas that he must sail on to Italy.
To the witches’ delight, Aeneas heeds the injunction and leaves Carthage.
Dismayed at his betrayal, Dido bids farewell to life.

What to listen for

In its modest way, this opera is a model in terms of its dramatic pace, contrast and development.
It also contains a wealth of richly charged and supple melody, set to the text with an unforced grace and ease which avoids predictable emphases and subtly shades the implication of particular words with the genius of a poet.
All the numbers are short, based on the principle of a solo aria followed or answered by a chorus, with danced interludes in each of the three acts.
The most substantial number comes in the last scene – Dido’s lament, ‘When I am laid in earth’, sung over a repeated five-bar phrase (or ground bass) and culminating in cries of
‘Remember me’ which can seem as heart-rending as anything in Wagner or Verdi.

The Sorceress is a boldly melodramatic character, who declaims recitative rather than singing arias; Aeneas, in contrast, seems stiff and weak, the mere victim of her unexplained malevolence.
The scene for the witches ends very abruptly, and some music is thought to have been lost at this point.