24 MAY 1935, Page 15

Music

Opera Buffa at Covent Garden

A BUBBLE of nonsense, iridescent, buoyant, alarmingly fragile yet miraculously unpricked—such was the first act of L'Itallana in Alfieri. There is a possible alternative view. Some may have thought it silly and unfunny and not worth paying sixpence to see half a dozen singers stand in a row and make noises like children imitating dog barking at a military band—" Tsing-pom-bow-wow ! " In that case it were better to stick to Wagner. The majority. at Covent Garden, however, hailed with delight the . chance of getting away from the cyclic drama and best behaviour and the cyclorama, not always so well-conducted, and the spotlights and all the other paraphernalia, and of being allowed for one evening to come and to go, to chatter and applaud as they pleased and when they pleased. For Rossini the rules of operatic deportment have been relaxed.

If that first act is a bubble, it is composed of an essence distilled from opera buffa, an essence from which every trace of worldly reality has been separated, so that the volatile bubble bounces along gaily without regard for the laws of nature or of probability. This is no place for sentiment, which, however lightly touched, would weigh the bubble down. Neither is it the place for thrills or terrors, and the very title of Bey of Algiers is sufficient to assure us that his threats are harmless and his loving mere folly. So when the Italian girl arrives with her Pomeranian and her roulades, we never doubt her ability to twist the Bey and his jealous wives and his eunuchs and his army, not to mention her own lover and her " uncle," round her little fmger.

The feat is performed with extreme delicacy and wit by Mme. Conehita Supervia, whose evening it is. Her acting of the scene in which she is introduced into the Bey's harem is as good a piece of farcical comedy as one could hope to see. To her singing may be applied words from another opera, " Una voce poco fa," if one may use the translation, " A little voice goes a long way." Mme. Supervia has an' astonishing power of throwing an exiguous amount of tone over a long distance, so that every note is clearly heard in so vast a house as Covent Garden. I should say " every note she sings," for, if one listened carefully, it was possible to detect a certain amount of skating over difficulties in some of the more florid passages.

The rest of the company played up to Mme. Supervia splendidly, and though there was some inferior singing, no one seriously disturbed the gay equilibrium of the bubble. One might argue, for instance, that not all the coloratura given to the bass is meant to be funny, and that Signor Bettoni sang it unsteadily because he could not do otherwise. But undeniably funny it was, when he mocked the vibrato in Mine. Supervia's voice with an immense wobble that would have produced on a seismograph the effect of a severe earthquake-shock.

And now alas ! we must come down to earth, namely to Acts II and III. It was Act I, heard, I confess, by wireless from Italy, that gave me the high expectations I ventured to express a few weeks ago about this opera. Act I amply fulfilled those expectations and obviously delighted the audience. I am sure I was not alone in feeling thereafter a sad falling-off, and of the rest of the opera only Isabella's two arias are worth waiting for. If anyone wishes to add the entr'acte pieces, the answer is that they do not belong to the opera in fact or in style and that, as one of them has for most of us other vivid associations, it certainly should not be used here.

More could have been made of those last two acts by the producer; One was sorry for the unfortunate Signor Scattola, who is an excellent buffo, condemned for two acts to the single joke of balancing an outsize in hats upon his head, which was only funny for one scene. The famous initiation of the Bey into the mysteries of the Pappataci proved to be a tame version 'of the standard joke of Restoration Comedy with antennae for the less equivocal horns. The settings, with one exception, and the costumes were poor in colour and design. Even Mme. Supervia was hard put to it to carry off a frock of mustard-yellow and crude pink. One would not complain of cheapness in the decor of an opera to be given only three times, but it need not have looked cheap—and rather