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Publishing Wrongs
By DAVID CAIRNS I AM certain that 1 have written a great work.
But to Berlioz's work was denied even Posthumously the hare right of existence: it was never 'published. Even when a lawsuit was brought by his executors the pachydermatous firm of Choudens, after rootling in its basement, could not stir itself to do more than engrave and print the full score; it was not put on sale, and to this day, long'after copyright has expired: it remains unpublished. (The orchestral parts hired this year were riddled with errors, and rehearsal time had to be squandered putting them right.) There is no more extraordinary case in musical history of the strangling of art by commerce. If M. Malraux really wants to do something for la Rioire he will arrange for official publication of The Trojans at the State's expense.
The consequences of this virtual suppression of Berlioz's greatest work have been enormous. Boschot, wrong as only he knew how to be, could hardly have got away with his famous canard—'plus Spontinien one spontanti'—if its beauties had been perused and known. Would Stravinsky still be applying to Berlioz the damning distinction between 'instrumentation' and instrumental thought if he could study The Trojans? The Septet, in its complete fusion fof scoring and music, in the.inevitability with which flutes in octaves, low horns and bass drum in- carnate the musical idea, would alone be enough to show him that in Berlioz at his best and maturest the orchestra is as integral to the music as in any work of Beethoven. That 'the first thing we notice about a work [of his) is its instrumenta- tion' merely shows how little his work is under- stood. Berlioz's reputation as a brilliant orchestra- tor has come about because, to the man who is bewildered by everything else about him, the orchestration' is the one feature he thinks he can grasp with certainty. But such a failure of com- Prehension could not haVe survived a study of Berlioz's masterpiece.
Thanks to Covent Garden the days of such blindness are numbered, in England at least. The tragedy of The Trojans has almost run its course. If the French Government or, perhaps less Utopianly, one of those admirable 'pirate' firms in America, can be persuaded to issue the full score, justice, as far as is possible, will at last have been done. Already no serious musician has any longer, if he ever ,had, any excuse for trotting out the stale, pale ghosts of critical patter that were never much more than prejudice and obscurantism in borrowed cap and gown. The Trojans has its inequalities, but if they strike us at first more forcibly than the inequalities of The Ring, that is because the Berliozian style is less familiar than the Wagnerian and the work's structure, with its partial division into separate `numbers' and its frequent formal closes, makes us demand to be persuaded and convinced afresh by each section of the music. It is an objection that fades as we grow into the idiom of the work.
What can be done to make it better at Covent Garden? Ideally, new sets and costumes con- ceived by a designer of genius in the spirit and style of Claude; perhaps no less ideally, Madame Callas as Cassandra. More practically, a Cassan- dra who unites Miss Shuard's splendid energy to a more fiery temperament and a. voice which is strong and full in the mezzo-soprano range. We are committed to the present decor, but there are ways in which some of its more headlong disasters could be corrected. We badly need a new horse; the present cardboard two-dimen- sional animal, by Kellogg out of Frankenstein, is ripe for the knackers. Something must be done about the chorus costumes in Part One; at the moment they are grouped, with a perverse in- genuity amounting to genius, so as to afford the greatest possible clash of colours. The ballet boys should be fed on pigs' knuckles and raw steak and sent on a commando course to North Wales before they next venture to per- form before Priam and his court. The cyclorama in the last scene should be furnished with its picture of the Capitol to conform with Dido's vision and the stage directions; Berlioz's idea may not be perfect or easily realisible, but it is better than nothing, which is literally what Covent Garden offers for its final curtain. If the Royal Hunt is to be played against a drop curtain (and I am not persuaded that the musical advantages of having the brass on stage are great enough to justify it), let it at least be a curtain neutral and not explicitly antithetical to the mood of the music; but better still a new drop curtain repre- senting some Poussin-like scene of forest land- scape. And for the scene in the tent of /Eneas, lighting which does some justice to the wonder- ful conception of Hector `recalled for a moment to life by the will of the gods, then sinking back into oblivion, his mission accomplished.'
In such and similar ways we might still get, even within the context of the old production, a representation reasonably faithful to Virgil and Berlioz, 'not unbecoming men that strove with gods.' On the musical side the disposition of the procession with the Trojan Horse must be revised and the microphones abandoned; at the moment there is no climax. We need clearer diction from most of the singers concerned; most of Dent's translation fully bears hearing, and in this opera words matter. In the Laocoon scene the chorus and the principals need to be regrouped towards the front of the stage, so as to give the ensemble the chance of cohesion and tension it lacks. The voice of Mercury ought to be entrusted to the best bass in the company; a kind of cavernous, Warrington Minge wobble amplified by mega- phone is a risibly inadequate approximation to the divine summons that tears fEneas from the arms of his queen. With the pres .nt iEneas and Dido we are probably as well off as we can hope to be. Jon Vickers has deepened his understanding of the part; the farewell to Ascanius in Act 3 has moving and truly heroic dignity. If a producer can convert his natural, sense of stage freedom from casualness to presence and authority he will become an almost perfect /Eneas. Kerstin Meyer, it must honestly be said, is a long way still from the Dido of Virgil and Berlioz. But although her big, creamy voice has so little edge and attack that the dramatic recitatives in Acts 4 and 5 were almost wholly beyond her scope, her sing- ing of Dido's more lyrical music improved so remarkably throughout the revival that I ended by being convinced. On the last night of all her `Adieu, fibre cite' was superb—restrained yet charged to heartbreaking, finely drawn, truly classical, full of that spirit of which it has been said, of Poussin, that there lies beneath it 'not frozen or stilted emotions, but passions too great to be expressed in any other way.'
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