OPERA
Yugoslav Opera Ir• we had any equivalent of the so-called Yugoslav National Opera now finishing its season at the Stoll, the Welsh National Opera ought to be it. Croatian rather than Yugoslav, it is as much a regional as a national company, and its home-town Zagreb is not much differ- ent in population from Cardiff. There the parallel ends. The Welsh company is only part- time and part-professional, whereas this is similar in establishment and quality to Sadler's Wells. though with a rather wider and more adventurous repertoire. That we have no regional or provincial opera houses of this quality (or indeed, other than the Welsh, of any quality) has often been deplored, but the coincidence of the Zagreb company's produc- tion of an opera by a Croatian composer the
night after Tippett's The Midsummer Marriage at Covent Garden drew attention to a less obvious' consequence of this lack. The Croatian opera, Ero the Joker by Jakov Gotovac, proved a rather feeble piece, of which a national equivalent here would stand no chance of production. Arwel Hughes's Menna, for instance, which the Welsh com- pany produced recently, is much superior; and Berkeley's Nelson, undertaken by Sadler's Wells, is a masterpiece by comparison—and these are two works that must be considered Itieky to have reached the stage under present conditions here. But if Era the Joker is judged by the standards of countries where opera flourishes, its place in the Zagreb repertoire can be understood. It is not musically inferior to Cavalleria Rusticana, which is by no means the worst opera that holds the stage in Italy. And compared with other Slavonic operas, it is little weaker than, for instance, Smetana's The Kiss or The Secret, or Dvordk's The Jacobin, and certainly no weaker than his The Devil and Kate--all of which are regu- larly played in Prague. In this country, naturally, we do not know these minor national operas, which like Ero the Joker are unexportable; and having no experience of a national equivalent of them of our own, we have only one standard 'of operatic compari- son—that of the international, exportable operas. Our criterion for a national opera is Boris Godunov, and for a regional one Katya Kabanova (Jankek, a Moravian who lived most of his life in Brno, is the Czech equiva- lent of a Croatian or a Welsh composer). Because we have no place on our few operatic stages for anything less, even of our own, we cannot imagine a legitimate place for it in any operatic repertory. For this reason we are the last people to whom the Yugoslays should have sent Era the Joker—as in fact it seems we are the last, since the opera has already been presented, according to a claim in the programme book, on forty European stages. Our objectivity is known. But we have no cause to congratulate ourselves on it, for it is the gauche and tactless objectivity of ignor- ance, and our high standards are absurd and unrealistic. They are unfair not only to Gotovac but also to our own composers. It might be felt that if by having no national and regional operatic culture we have saved ourselves the boredom of the many weak operas that would be needed, and would certainly be written to sustain it, we have nothing to regret. But those operas are needed to provide a realistic standard by which to judge the better ones— such as The Midsummer Marriage—when they come along, so that we an appreciate them both in comparison with the less good and on their own merits, and do not judge everything by The Mastersingers and The Magic Flute. Such a standard does exist in our concert life. When Vaughan Williams writes his Eighth Symphony we shall not ask whether it is as good as Beethoven's Eighth, or is exportable, but shall welcome it as a valuable contribution to the national repertory, perhaps quietly observing without comment, its superiority to the latest symphonies of X or Y. A similar foundation in opera is essential to the realisa- tion of our current hopes for national opera.
COLIN MASON
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