Opera mundi
TABLE TALK DENIS BROGAN
New York—I was recently taken to the new Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center and was given occasion to reflect on the odd art of opera and my intermittent brushes with it. I had been shown over the new main concert hall and other parts of the vast and enormously complex centre for 'the performing arts' by a very eminent musicologist who reported many criticisms to me, but denied their validity. I re- called the charge that the Festival Hall's acoustics were too good. No such charge had been brought against the Lincoln Center hall, whose misadventures were the subject of some ill-natured jokes. The failure of modern science to solve acoustical problems gratified old `Luddites,' as Lord Snow calls them.
I had been told that a mission had been sent to discover the secret of good acoustics in Europe and had reported that the two best solu- tions had been found in Amsterdam and Glas- gow. And it is certain that the designers of the Concertgebouw Hall and St Andrew's Hall had not had the benefit of modern acoustical science or any electronic aids. Alas, some barbarian left a burning cigarette in a padded seat and St Andrew's Hall was burned down. The present financial straits of Great Britain happily pre- vented the establishment of an imitation of Lincoln Center in Glasgow. (The maquette chilled the blood and made one wonder if Glas- gow can afford much more Labour rule.) My memories of St Andrew's Hall are mixed. I have heard many good orchestral concerts there under very distinguished conductors—and some less distinguished. I have heard some un- consciously funny political meetings there, but I cherish most the occasion of Raymond Poincares installation as Lord Rector of the university and the magnificent sight of Lord Reith at the biggest event of the university's fifth centenary beano. Poincare had been elected in 1914 in a fit of entente cordiality after the outbreak of war. By the time he arrived in 1919, the honeymoon was over, though there was more Francophily in Scotland than in England. Taking extremely bad advice, the President of the French Republic had decided to speak in English (which he didn't speak). He had his speech translated and the text typed in some alleged phonetic script.
Alas, nobody could understand a word he was saying. Many in the audience complained that it was absurd that after years of studying French and getting a pass in it in 'the highers,' they could not understand a word of a speech by a great French orator in his native tongue. How- ever, there was a lot of probably irrelevant applause and the Lord Rector was whisked away before the students could display their customary bad manners.
Opera was performed erratically in the Royal Theatre, a vast building dating back from the early nineteenth century, and most famous for its sumptuous pantomimes. The first opera • I ever saw (barring Gilbert and Sullivan) was a Carl Rosa performance of The Daughter of the Regiment. It was not a first-class company and I was a tiresomely pedantic schoolboy, so I sniffed at the plot and, I suspect, at the plump, middle-aged 'daughter.' My first real opera was a year or two later. It was Tristan, conducted by Sir Thomas Beecham. That was something else again. I indulged in no pedantic criticisms of the political arrangements of Cornwall and Ireland and Brittany.
I saw more Beecham operas and the operas of the companies that carried on the tradition, but my more living memories are of opera in Rome at the old Costanzi. Rome was then sneered at not only by Milan and Naples, but by most Italian cities. And I must say that the only first night of an opera that I ever saw was in Rome and remarkably bad. It was a mon- strosity called Cristoforo Colombo. Columbus was in love with Queen Isabella. She was in love with him. The scenery would have dis- graced a `geggie' in a small Scottish town. A white sheet was shaken by some stage hand: something like washing powder was sprinkled on the sheet to simulate foam and the future `Admiral of the Ocean Sea' sang loudly and badly about his love for the Queen and his desire to find the Indies for her. That was zero.
The new Metropolitan is not, I am glad to say, like the old red brick barracks, which was splendid inside, in a lush and tawdry way, but which was designed to show off the box-holders in 'the Golden Horseshoe.' It had more dead seats than any other opera house I have ever been in and, being hard up in my steady opera- going days, I usually had to settle for one of them. The New Metropolitan is very different. There is no golden horseshoe. I am told there are no dead seats. I wouldn't know, because I was taken by friends to very expensive seats. The traditional opera shape is abandoned and the only relics of the Golden Horseshoe are a set of narrow stage boxes on each side of the proscenium. These were filled by stooges dressed up to the nines. The males looked like diplomats out of an old de Reszke cigarette ad, the -ladies like dowagers hired to present debs at Court in the bad old days. They didn't seem to chatter as they should have done. ('I'm going to Lohengrin next week."0, Duchess, I must go, too, I have never heard you in Lo'hengrin.')
But the stooges in the boxes were no funnier than the opera. It was Verdi's deservedly neg- lected Luisa Miller, a rather far-removed musi- cal version of Schiller's Kabale and Liebe. I don't think I should have liked the non-musical version, although the Nazis during the last war pnt it on at the Comedic Francaise to show the Maison de Moliere that they were just as cul- tured as the degenerate French. Perhaps the plot was no sillier than most opera plots. It was a kind of Tyrolean Romeo and Juliet (not a village Romeo and Juliet, for the hero was a young nobleman disguised as a Merrie Peasant). The peasants were very merry indeed, and the very realistic scene outside the Gasthaus re- minded me of how badly, in my experience. these establishments used to smell. But other
scenes, again magnificently realistic, seemed to me appropriate for Don Carlos, or some less Teutonic background.
But the singing -was magnificent, the music was melodious; and the lesson was plain. My
daughter is now working in Munich. I have instructed her to keep well away from young noblemen passing as Merrie Peasants and in- deed from genuine Merrie Peasants. The new German opera houses I have seen are more attractive and functionally better planned than the new Metropolitan and, if my daughter wants
an uncovenanted laugh, let her see Figaros Hochzeit. The galumphing of a German chorus passing as Andalusian girls almost distracts attention from the divine music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mcizart.
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