Maschinist Hopkins (Queen Elizabeth Flail)
Synthetic stuff
Michael Tanner
Max Brand's opera Maschinist Hopkins (Engineer Hopkins) was premiered in 1929 in Duisberg, and three years later it had notched up 37 productions, in several countries and languages. It was suppressed by the Nazis, and has only very occasionally been revived. I know it only through the BBC's broadcast of it in English in 1986, which I listened to in eager anticipation but without much enjoyment.
I can say the same for the performance mounted in the Queen Elizabeth Hall last Sunday. It was the climax of a day devoted to 'Thwarted Voices: Music Suppressed by the Third Reich', though it was in the afternoon, and was followed by three concerts (two of them simultaneous). This kind of enterprise always involves a good deal of special pleading, as Decca's largely magnificent series 'Entartete Musik' showed. It's rather surprising that Hopkins wasn't in it, since it is a work so utterly characteristic of its time and place.
It deals with the confrontation between man and machine, or at any rate offers to. Brand was his own librettist, and a very home-made product he turned out. As the Cambridge don Peter Tregear, the musical director of the performance, points out in his programme note, 'the three principal characters in the opera, Bill, Nell and Hopkins, are recognisable as adaptations of operatic archety, pes'. or perhaps stereotypes would be a better word. The drama that is played out between them, which results in Bill murdering Nell and being crushed to death in machinery, as another character had earlier been (summaries of the plot disagree whether the first death was accident or murder), is not significantly related to their work or their class, so the gestures towards social conscience that the work makes are superficial. True, there are Sprechstimme parts for various machines — a spoke, two wheels, a belt-drive and so on — but that is mere 1920s chic, and it is no surprise to find that George Antheil contributed to the text.
Unfortunately this production, which was winningly introduced by that enthusiast for degenerate art Barn' Humphries, who oversold the piece, did little service to a work which needs lucid presentation. It is a Cambridge University Opera Society affair, but doesn't show that body at its best. The orchestra and chorus play behind screens with gaps in between. In front of them, on the shallow stage of the QEH, the action was played out. One had idea was to use several video screens simultaneously, one setting the scene — a working-class suburb, mainly — others showing pictures, now concrete, now abstract. At the extreme opposite from the permanent screen were two sets of lockers on which different scenes were shown. Not only is this difficult to take in while trying to concentrate on the action, but what one saw was in itself uninteresting and unhelpful. There was almost no scenery, and only the odd prop, most conspicuously a PC on which Hopkins typed in a way suggesting he had never touched a keyboard, an updated version of the operatic heroine dashing off a letter in one continuous, enormous word.
The three singers of the main roles are professionals, though none of them has learned how to enunciate. It would be an exaggeration to say I couldn't hear one word, when probably I was able to understand one in 50. I felt a quite desperate need for surtitles, especially when the chorus was singing, too. I got the impression that the singers were amplified from the really deafening sounds that both Bill and Nell incessantly produced, but smaller roles were sung very quietly. James Hancock, the Bill, is an aspiring Heldentenor, and perhaps that is how he thinks they should sound. Neither he nor Carmel Gutteridge, the Nell, made any attempt to act. Nor, for that matter, did Stephen Brown, who sang Hopkins. They'd have been more at home in the contemporaneous Oedipus Rex.
Despite all this, I don't mean to imply that it struck me as a bad amateur performance. It was much more like a bad professional one. And there were some strong
features, especially taking into account the complicated nature of the piece. The orchestra acquitted itself so well that the programme's talk of a 'courageous' production is absurd. Cambridge is full of highly gifted instrumentalists, many of whom turned up for the occasion. The choral singing was of a high standard too, though in places all too demure. And the jazzy sections didn't come off well, nor was there adequate Schwung in the luscious stretches which might have been written at the dictation of Schreker. One might have expected that a predominantly student affair would mean some happy abandonment, but the young couple who danced across the stage during Act I gave the impression that neither of them had touched another person since puberty.
This kind of synthetic stuff, reminding one of many of the famous names of the period — Strauss, Berg (who thought very highly of it), some neo-classicists, Weill of course — can be enjoyable if its performers sound as if they believe in every last note. Otherwise it is only a dutiful and in the end tiresome exercise. Not for the first time with suppressed music, I felt that the Nazis need only to have waited a few years for time to do its work for them.
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