ARTS & AMUSEMENTS
Arabella's Sister
By CHARLES REID
WITHIN two days a new Arabella (Richard Strauss, 1933) came up at Covent Garden and a new Masked Ball (Verdi, 1859) at Sadler's Wells. The first was a case of performance out- shining the thing performed, the second a case of means falling short of ends. While mindful of the theory that unlikes shouldn't be compared, I stick to the view that, musically considered, a single number from Un Ballo in Maschera, say, the King's 'La rivedro nell'estasi' in the opening scene, is worth all three acts of Arabella, a score in which Strauss, then near seventy, tended to echo or adulterate his past.
Consider the end of the first act. Although it is very different in literary substance, faintly re- calling Gerty MacDowell's meditations about `Mr. Right' in the seashore scene of Ulysses, Arabella's monologue before going out for her sleigh-ride is, in its rambling way, a musical pendant to the Marschallin's monologue at the end of Der Rosenkavalier Act 1. Even more pointedly, the waltz coda to this monologue is a repeat device from Ochs's 'Mit mir' at the end of Der Rosenkavalier Act 2.
In a mediocre performance such invocations and rejigs would be something of a damper. At Covent Garden we let them pass with an indul- gent shrug. For once in a way we are completely under the spell of fourth-wall illusion, a thing that rarely happens to us in the opera house. Rudolf Hartmann is, beyond all others, the man who has worked this wonder. The ideal in opera is for production to subserve the music and for the music to bolster up and explain the words. In this case the ideal order has been re- versed. Georg Solti's conducting (fluent, sensi- tive) and the entire musical fabric are at the beck and bidding of the world which producer Hartmann has created and peopled. The world is that of upper-crust Vienna, 1860. Clustering gas-globes and capitonnd sofas. Unpaid bills and champagne. Cigar smoke, winter roses, scurry- ing hotel pages, duelling-sabres.
A particular marvel is the smoothness and piquancy with which, under Hartmann's coax- ing and that of Solti, a dozen or more home- trained singers of the resident company have fitted themselves into scenes and into an idiom so remote from their professional antecedents. They all seem to have been born or reborn under the Hapsburgs. It is, indeed, one of our own singers, Joan Carlyle, who undertakes what is arguably the opera's central and crucial role, that of Arabella's transvestite sister, Zdenka. There is nothing vicious about Zdenka. Her transvestism is innocent, even laudable. She mas- querades as a youth merely to help her kin out of the jams into which they are recurrently landed by an improvident, gambling father. Across at the Wells, Zdenka has a sort of oppo- site number in Oscar, the king's confidant, who swaggers, carries a sword and chucks under chins while singing flighty soprano numbers.
How did Zdenka contrive to dupe the town so thoroughly? One glance at Miss Carlyle's blond mop, hips and eyelashes is enough to refute the trousers and bowler hat she wears. Perhaps the upper-crust Viennese of the day were invincibly' stupid. Take the case of Matteo. Officer in a crack Austrian regiment and one of Arabella's legion of suitors, Matteo not only accepts Zdenka, man to man, as a chum (name of Zdenko), but also spends an hour in bed with her under the impression that she's her sister. Zdenka's sequence of self-sacrifice, deceit, self-fulfilment and remorse (which entails a semi- public confession, presided over by Mama and Papa, in the small hours) has overtones and in- cidentals which I find at once sentimental and slightly scabrous. But, approve of it or not, here is the nub of the drama. Miss Carlyle carried off the role in a wrought, wrung way, yet with a patina of charm. Just the thing. Her success was the more striking in that it co-existed with performances by two of opera's incomparables.
When read in cold print, Arabella is, by com- parison with her sister, ever so slightly vapid. But by this time, even more than in 1953, when she first sang the part here, Lisa della Casa is so much the mistress of its every syllable, in- flection and half-shade that she gives Arabella new stature, almost a new dimension. I shall always see her as she was on the recent first night—her smile modulating gently from thought to thought; the slim hand poised as if in query; the girlish waist; the brown fur muff; the tea roses. Although her voice hasn't quite its old fullness at all levels, I shall remember, too, the caress of her phrasing; her anique conversational ease in the dialogue pages; and the daring with which she produced sotto voce notes from an almost closed mouth, coming out on top of the orchestra by an acoustical hair's-breadth.
There were, as I said, two incomparables. The second was Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, who, though a. world-roamer for fifteen years, had never sung at Covent Garden before. Like Zdenka, Mandryka is very much a person, solid, real, rounded. Bear-hunter and serf-owner, ruler of immense forest estates, he packs a useful wallet, keeps dissipation just at bay, and com- bines touches of Baron Ochs (the only other male in the Hofmannsthal-Strauss portrait gal- lery who quite lives up to him) with galahadic tendencies. Upon these traits and upon Man- dryka's imperious, turbulent courtship of Arabella, Fischer-Dieskau draws and plays with an immersion and self-identifying powers that are almost hypnotising. I use 'hypnotising' in a restricted sense, of course. What I mead is that when he's on the stage, whether singing or not, whether moving or staying put, you can't keep your opera-glasses off him.
Here again are collector's memories. For me, the noblest and most delicate of all was the moment in Act 1 when Mandryka, who has fallen in love with Arabella on the strength of her photograph, is invited to meet her straightaway. For the moment he is dumbstruck. The grandee becomes a timorous boy. No, he answers Ara- bella's father; he is not 'prepared'; he feels just as though in church. The tone-colour Fischer- Dieskau used and the mien and minute gestures which he struck through all this were one among many factors which served to set the whole night apart. The Hartmann-Solti Arabella will long be cited as an operatic standards-test. It should be penitently seen and heard, with appro- priate breast-beatings, by all those theoreticians who have hitherto held that opera isn't a valid dramatic medium and that it never can be one.
A parting glance at the Masked Ball. There are serious defects in the staging. Most of these result from the crowding in and ubiquity of mobile pillars whose purpose is to expedite five changes of scene. On the first night, two im- portant voices were out of hand often or all the time. But who, on the morrow of an Arabella, would be so unkind as to bring out his cane? Enough to say that, out of seven principals, Elizabeth Fretwell (Amelia), Donald Smith (Gustavus) and three others are good Verdi value on the ear.
Colin Davis conducted without convincing me that this is, as yet, his line of country. Were the court frivols a thought too frenzied, the sterner things a bit too explosive? I fear so. The big 'heart' melodies, however, went well enough. At least one of them had a young woman on the row below me sniffing.
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