ARTS
Music
The Duenna (Gran Teatre del Liceu, Barcelona)
Poised for take-off
Robin Holloway on the long-awaited premiere of Roberto Gerhard's first opera
Roberto Gerhard was born and lived his first 46 years (apart from six spent studying with Schoenberg) in Catalonia. In 1939 he escaped Franco's victory, settling the next year in Cambridge, where he remained the 30 years until his death. The Duenna, Sheridan's Seville-placed 'comic opera' of 1775, was thus set up to appeal to both halves of a dual nationality. Having chanced on a copy in the ' Cambridge market-place in 1945, Gerhard adapted the text and completed the music two years later. It belongs to the richest period of his creative life, lasting for a decade or so from the ballet Don Quixote (1940-1), when the exile celebrated his country in a final burst of Spanish musical nationalism which has behind it, as well as the colouristic atmo- sphere of Bizet, Chabrier, Ravel and Debussy, the more abstract treatment of their folk material evinced by Bartok and Stravinsky, together with a rigorous touch of the Second Viennese School.
Precisely this combination caused the opera, when heard (in concert form) at Wiesbaden in 1951, to fall foul of the aggressively emergent avant-garde. Nor had it any future in his motherland so long as the fascists held power. The reasons for its failure to make headway in England, after a broadcast first performance in 1949, are less clear. As if shrugging it off, Ger- hard turned quickly himself into a thor- oughly modern composer, with a crop of large orchestral works alongside ensemble pieces inspired by the signs of the zodiac. This music, streamlined and crackling with electricity, also harbours an ever-diminish- ing ghost of his Spanish heritage. The First Symphony (1952-3) holds new and old in breathtaking equipoise. Eventually the deliberate abstraction is so extreme that the result is two-dimensional: music with- out shadow.
And it was upon this latest style that his reputation was based.-But in a more toler- , ant age his nationalistic side becomes something to rejoice over rather than con- ceal. When deploying constructivistic sonority, Gerhard is all virtuosity in a void; as successor to Albeniz, Pedrell and Falla he is natural in every sense. This shows itself immediately in The Duenna's gen- erosity; this blast of colour and warmth is without parallel in the works from the hun- gry Forties that can be legitimately com- pared: Stravinsky's brilliant but emotionally meagre Rake's Progress (1948-51) and the scrawny gaiety of Britten's Albert Herring (1947). Equivalent musical ebullience can be found more readily on contemporary Broadway (Oklahoma!, 1943; Street Scene, 1946). The Duenna contains better music than any of these famous shows. Yet they
are all, 40 years on and more, repertoire (in their respective ways), while Gerhard's opera has languished unseen until its stage premiere this January in Madrid (broadcast live by the BBC on 30 January). Unfortu- nately the first night of this production's transfer to Barcelona blacked out after some 25 minutes and never recovered. But having heard the broadcast, and seen most of the dress rehearsal two days previously, I think I have enough to go on.
It looks extremely, perhaps excessively, pretty, with a large, sumptuously costumed company vividly positioned amongst hand- some hunks of rotting baroquerie cunning- ly rotated to make ever-changing spaces. The Liccu's acoustic is warmer and its orchestra more confident that their Madrid counterparts; only the most experienced of the all-English cast — particularly Felicity Palmer, arch and voluptuous as the Duen- na herself — came over with strength and clarity. That the work has problems is instantly revealed by the producer's would- be solutions. Pert wenches or serving boys underline the arias, and there is an inces- sant background of flouncing nuns, pro- cessing monks, lounging soldiers, whining beggars and flaunting gypsies. This manic activity devalues the principal action, 'He's got his father's mask!' whose movement is slowish. Gerhard's best music, mostly lyrical and pensive, flowers in arias (the women's particularly) and set numbers that culminate in the Act HI dou- ble wedding. This, the musical summit, serves also to demonstrate the distinctive character of the orchestration throughout: the mixture of Falla's skin-tight tension with Bergian bloom produces a dry lumi- nosity all his own. But there is not much brio in the pacing; situations are spread out rather than piled upon each other in the way that makes Italian opera buffa 'go'. One is constantly aware of holes and hold- ups, plugged with choreographic excres- cences whose incessant busyness pre-empts the two concerted finales. The problem is the reconciliation of detailed orchestral commentary a la Wagner with forward momentum. Richard Strauss addressed it all his life, wholly solving it only in his last opera Capriccio (1940); small wonder that Gerhard doesn't in his first!
A more fundamental worry is that the one potentially deeper element in Sheri- dan's flimsy original is fudged. The courtship of two ugly people — the Duen- na's play, with cunning born of desperation, upon the vanity, greed, lust yet erotic timidity of the Portuguese Jew — could delve far deeper by comic means into human strangeness than the ostensibly sig- nificant monastic chanting in Act I and the layer of Goya-esque caricature in the cele- brations concluding Act III. Though Ger- hard sets this central relationship sympathetically, he doesn't distinguish it much from that of the two pairs of nice- looking lovers with their conventional dis- guises and jealousies. The music for all of them is beautiful in the same way. The one opportunity to explore the 'heavy father' more inwardly is also evaded, yet elsewhere there is sometimes a sense that the music's inherent intensity is more than Sheridan's slight frame can bear.
But far worse criticisms can be made of operas that enjoy the universal success which is also due to The Duenna. The solu- tion is surely to make the musical sacrifices that will get the piece moving. This first production has been born of love for Ger- hard's score and devotion to its cause, so it is right that every note should be included. He himself recognised the need to cut, and indeed set about the process with less mercy than his admirers. It is bitter that he was unable to base his revisions upon the lessons that any production could have taught. The Duenna is not like a Roi malgre lui, Chabrier's dodo stuffed with marvel- lous music that will never be able to fly. It is poised for take-off; but only if it sheds a lot of weight.
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