Period Pieces THE experimental late-night performance of Stravinsky's Tale of
a Soldier at the Festival
Hall last week was not ideal. The engagement of. Peter Ustinov and Sir Ralph Richardson was a box-office success but an artistic mistake. It was a concert performance, and the actors' admirers, who probably out- numbered Stravinsky's in the audience, must have felt poorly rewarded for their five-shilling tickets and their taxi-fare home simply to hear them speak. Ustinov as the Devil tried to give them a fraction of their money's-worth, but writhing about in tails instead of a tail he provoked the wrong responses from the theatre set and was an irritation to the musical. And the anguished effort that the synchronisation with the music cost him in the couplets before the Choral was also destructive of any dramatic 'atmosphere.' It would not have cost very much more to rig up
a backcloth and a few props, put the two actors into borrowed costumes, engage a dancer, and give the work action and all— the little that there is should.only have needed one extra rehearsal. Otherwise a purely narra- tive treatment, with lesser personalities, allow- ing more concentration on the music, would have served better.
Despite the unsatisfactory compromise, Stravinsky's work came through entertainingly and movingly. But the more familiar the music becomes, the plainer it becomes that its place s in the theatre, and that the only name for the unique and so far nameless genre to which the work belongs is 'music-drama.' The term is to be understood, of course, in something other than the Wagnerian sense to which it is normally limited, for the piece was conceived, like all Stravinsky's subsequent dramatic works, from Mavra to The Rake's Progress, in fierce and self-conscious defiance of all the ideals of the Wagnerian music-drama, which Stravinsky hated passionately. The contrast was heightened by the concurrence with the Wagner performances running at Covent Garden the same week, and there was some amusement to be had out of the idea of filling in the break between Siegfried and Gotterdani- merung by going to hear The Tale of a Soldier. Without altogether making The Ring look silly, the Stravinsky held its own as an equally convincing union of music and drama, and proved itself very much more than the eccentric 'period-piece' as which the Thirties and Forties prematurely dismissed it—along with many other masterpieces of that epoch, from Pierrot Lunaire to Die Dreigrosehenuper. These 'period-pieces' are now all being rediscovered by the inquiring young as works of musical genius. Many of the best of them, like The Tale of a Soldier, are unconventionally planned works for the theatre, generally with chamber- instrumental accompaniment, and to make their proper impact on the general public need stage-performance. Here is an opportunity for the English Opera Group to solve its most pressing problem—that of building up a reper- tory of first-class works, with a box-office appeal, to supplement those of its present mainstay, Britten. If its instrumental ensemble were made slightly more flexible many of these works would be within its resources. A first programme might be The Tale of a Soldier with Milhaud's Le Pauvre Matelot in its chamber-version. as Scherchen used to do them, with perhaps Hindemith's Hin and Zurfick thrown in. Several other programmes could be made up from similar works of the same period. Such a venture would stimulate interest in the Group by transforming it from a family affair into a broader-based interimtional opera company, and possibly into a
permanent and going concern, and would do justice at last to these Twentyish masterpieces by transforming them from `period-pieces' into repertory operas.
COLIN MASON
Previous page
