Opera
Charm is not enough
Michael Tanner
It seems unfair that Gorecki and Arvo Part should be credited with, if not the invention, then the major exploitation of `holy minimalism' when Benjamin Britten not only got there first, but might even be thought to have exhausted the possibilities of the medium. Have those who sit and lis- ten to the fashionable contemporary pur- veyors of it never heard or witnessed the three church parables, now three decades old? There are some things that these com- posers have in common, plainchant for instance, which is guaranteed to make a modern audience of non-believers feel spir- itual and to lead them to think that they know what timelessness means. A proces- sion of monks and choirboys singing it as they make their way to the performance area is an infallible recipe, even if that area is not in the centre of a well-lit Suffolk church, but the stage of the Albert Hall, dimly lit for a late-night Prom in steamy conditions.
Actually, I found the atmosphere, though in the literal sense extremely enervating, figuratively just right, with a small group of performers enacting the drama in the huge old barn, sending their eternal message off into invisible corners of the auditorium. Paradoxically, these parables seem more churchly when they aren't being performed in one: the claustrophobia that some of us, still a truculent minority, feel in the face of Britten's music and its cult is somewhat relieved by these less copyrighted places.
One of my favourite moments in John Lucas's excellent biography of Reginald Goodall is that in which the composer's one-time champion rails against his giving way to 'that East Anglicanism'. Almost cer- tainly a slip of the tongue, but all the more sublimely accurate for it. The setting, the adulation, the exact tailoring of what Brit- ten produced to what his devotees wanted him to produce, all reached a culminating point in the church parables, and it is important to see to what extent those pieces can survive without the framework into which they fitted so snugly.
It would have been easier to tell at the Prom if the director Mark Milder, himself once a distinguished Billy Budd, hadn't decided to set the Birmingham Music Group's production in the 1930s, with the `monks' looking like extras from Brighton Rock. Both the Father and the Elder Son wore thick tweed suits, while the Younger Son, who should bear at least a mild resem- blance to Tom Rakewell, surely, was alto- gether too plump and jolly-looking to head for vice. The Tempter, on the other hand, played by Ivan Sharpe as a short-haired executive type, was disconcertingly right and the triumph of the evening. His voice, as in the recording, where Pears and Tear sound so similar, is so like Andrew Bur- den's as to create the exact effect called for and explained in Tinlder's highly intelligent note. The Tempter makes the Prodigal come to terms with himself, and whether it is impertinent biographical speculation or not, Tinlder's suggestion is that Britten was engaged in the same process. In giving the Tempter the job of revealing to the Prodi- gal what he can cope with and what he can't pay for, he shows that simply sup- pressing the urges of which one is ashamed is, as Auden explained to Britten, no wise way to handle them.
The trouble with this is that it leads us to expect more from the musical drama than it is able to deliver. The 'dark' side of life, figured by sex, drink and gambling, steps forth in genteel tones in Britten's score. Maybe that has something to do with his basing the whole musical material on the plainsong which introduces the action. This means, first, that over and over again the characters sing in what comes to seem an affected idiom, with their voices rising like Americans' turning every statement into a question. Second, the interesting but highly restricted set of instruments for which Brit- ten wrote is hardly able to explore any feel- ing, rather than ingeniously seeming to imitate it. The onomatopoeia which is so tiresomely omnipresent a feature of the War Requiem resonates through this very different work, as if the composer has only an external grasp of what these things are that is, what they sound like.
In opposition to such meagre depictions of any complex psychological state he can easily move back to explicit recall of the continuously if subterraneanly present plainchant and reassert the value of holi- ness. The battle doesn't seem hard-won enough. After all, it is not pusillanimous to feel that the Elder Son has a point in his indignation at the killing of the fatted calf. We need not only to be reminded of all that rejoicing about repentant sinners, but some elucidation of why those who refrain from sinning in the first place are appar- ently taken for granted as much in heaven as on earth. The Prodigal Son gives us no insight into that, but merely reminds us of what is surely still a familiar story. It has its charms, perhaps more in this production than in the one the composer wanted. Charm, however, is not enough, unless one takes it as the secular parallel of grace, potent but inexplicable. That isn't what Britten has provided, and what he has has surely come to seem rather stale.
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