MUSIC.

A CHRISTMAS OPERA AT THE REGENT THEATRE.

FAR from being a blest pair of sirens, voice and verse prove more often an irreconcilable pair of scolds, and it is in opera that they most display their tantrums. Opera is but a long quarrel for precedence between the two, and it so happens in the melee that reams of good music are preordained to failure and oblivion by weak or preposterous librettos, while on more than one tolerable libretto the music hangs like a mill- stone. Without Fidelio there might have been ten Beethoven symphonies, and but for the vogue of the murder story we ,should never have been dragged to hear Mascagni. But the sins of opera can be laid at the door of the Miracle Play, for, in a sense, the Miracle Play is the beginning of opera, and, as father, it should be blamed for begetting a naughty child. Mr. Boughton, though, has not accomplished a belated triumph of justice by turning a good nativity play into a bad opera ; the danger is that the misapplied ingenuity of the present production may lead people to think so. To the average person, perhaps, there is nothing glaringly wrong, but a cease- less undercurrent of perversities may well have the same effect.

Of all places, one might f_ uppeke that arachronisms were permissible in a Miracle Play, for we may be sure themediaeval actors did not stop short at the errors of the text. Had Bethlehem been produced in a mediaeval manner all would have been well, but something far more elaborate has been attempted. The scenery consists of variations in the back

ground of a set piece—three Gothic arches somewhat like a simplified interior of a cathedral. Into this the producer, aided and abetted no doubt by the general demeanour of Miss Ffrangeon-Davies, introduces a Virgin Mary who hesitates between the tenets of Mr. Arming Bell and the worst period of Italian painting, when all the fine impulse of the Renais- sance had run to seed and Madonnas had become the willowy, wistful creations of Sassofenato. Then the Archangel- s bad version of Fra Angelico—conflicts with a stocky pseudo- mediaeval Joseph in a brown blanket and a crew of realistic shepherds, who, by the way, sing that species of rural English

known only to novelists and Lyceum melodrama. But this is not all, and I say nothing of the angelic host. The scene

with Herod is an experiment in the Russian ballet manner, but the result is far from authentic Bakst. And the actual ballet indulges only in the very mildest of orgies, for who would not be irked by the extreme propriety of their costumes In short, the artistic unities have been completely overlooked.

The Coventry Nativity Play in its original form had a certain amount of music, songs by shepherds and angels, and a Lullaby by the Mothers of the Innocents. Doubtless, too, there was plenty of carol-singing by the audiences who gathered round the pageant-carts, so Mr. Boughton has abused no traditions by turning the play into a fully-fledged opera. Choral-drama,* as he culls it, it is not, any more than the grandiloquent title of " music-drama " fitted the lilting

tunefulness of The Immortal Hour. But, although less likely to be as successful, it is in every way an advance on that work. The first act curiously enough opens with an echo of the faery chorus of the earlier opera, and in spite of its charms I have always felt that this particular phrase had better been left in Schumann's Die Stine.

After blaming the producer for the Herod episode, I must add that he and Mr. Boughton are brothers in crime. Like a good artist Mr. Boughton provides relief to the purely

religious side of the play in his Herod scene ; but unfortunately he follows the Tanuhauser tradition in turning for contrast to

the sensuous and gross. Moreover, effective as this orgy of colour and music is, it is not the true Mr. Boughton speaking but the mingled voices of Rimsky-Korsakof and others of the Sheherazade School. The music is clever, original except for its style, but wrong. Mr. Boughton has adapted the bulk of his music so aptly to the spirit of the play that it is a pity he did not conceive Herod as a comic character, for

the mediaeval writers of the play were instinctively right in providing comic relief. There are touches of humour in Bethlehem, one is the tune the shivering shepherd plays on his pipe, but the Miracle Play makers went in wholeheartedly for fun. In one play a shepherd steals a sheep, and conceals

the theft by carrying the sheep home, putting it in a cradle and passing it off as a new born baby. This horse-play is the natural obverse of the biblical picture which it serves to intensify, but there is nothing equivalent to it in the music.

Mr. Boughton has made appropriate use of traditional tunes, and the highest praise that can be given his music is

that it does not suffer by comparison with them. From tho Choral Prelude that opens the opera so well to the final chorus the choral writing is good, and there is plenty of it. Mr. Boughton does not ruin the character of his tunes by over- chromaticism, and the " fa-las " used us a choral accom- paniment are indisputably English. There is no evading the music, for without any attempt at contrapuntal complexity it holds one's interest, although the opera is almost devoid of action. In a few weeks Mr. Boughton's Alkestis will be performed by the British National Opera Company at Covent Garden, and will provide another opportunity to estimate his artistic growth since Bethlehem was written ten years ago. It seems that Mr. Boughton, by waking all manner of people to the existence of a national opera here, is fulfilling the

function of a Glinka in English music. Cr.cir. JItNN.