Opera
Soap opera
Rodney Milnes
The Duenna and Maria Golovin (Camden Festival) King Roger (Coliseum)
The Camden Festival's opera programmes have always been intriguing. Their postmortems on the elephantiasine corpus of unperformed operas have thrown up some valuable and unjustly neglected works. This year they have been instructive as well. A coincidence, I am sure, but the operas staged recently had a great deal to teach us about the relationship between words and music in the service of drama.
Sheridan's The Duenna was and always has been billed as a comic opera, and the interest of the Camden revival was centred upon the first performance since the eighteenth century of the original score, painstakingly reconstructed by Roger Fiske. This phenomenally successful work even matched The Beggar's Opera in popularity, and it too is a musical pastiche in the tradition of the time. About half of the music was composed or arranged by the two Thomas Linleys, father and son, and the rest was cobbled together from popular Scottish songs and arias lifted from Italian opera.
But Sheridan's name is always associated with The Duenna and that says it all : this is a brilliantly witty play with, incidentally, music. In twentieth century terms, the work is a musical comedy rather than an operetta. Although the song texts are well integrated with the plot, and indeed advance it, the music is not. The circumstances of the composition help to explain this. The action tells of a double elopement, with the heavy
father made to look a perfect idiot. Sheridan had shortly before eloped with Linley senior's daughter, and although they had been reconciled, the writer was obviously not going to push his luck. So Linley was sent the verses alone, with no indication of their dramatic context—hardly the ideal basis for opera composition. Linley was unenthusiastic, and farmed some of the work out on his greatly talented son Thomas junior, a friend of Mozart. He was similarly in the dark. Thus it is the folk song arrangements and Linley senior's simple strophic numbers that work best, while the formal Italian numbers and the indubitably 'better' music by Thomas junior are scarcely welded into the dramatic whole, fine though they are.
The piece was mounted by Opera da Camera. Bruno Santini, perhaps seeking to counter a not undeserved reputation for garish glitter, provided determinedly grey' yet elegant sets and costumes. The music was winningly performed by Lionel Friend and his orchestra and William Royston, the producer, ensured that his cast of singers handled the spoken text with a fluency that would not have disgraced any repertory company in the land. As the all-too-eager abductees, whose barbed-wire repartee is on the Gwendolyn and Cecily level, Elisabeth Gale and Kate Flowers were wholly enchanting. John Fryatt's studious underplaying of Isaac Mendoza defused the potentially unpleasant anti-semitism, but unfortunately Sheila Rex correspondingly overplayed the title-role, one which was created by the first Mrs Malaprop and would repay more careful interpretation. John Gibbs was a lovable heavy father, and Stuart Kale the funniest drunken monk ever.
Park Lane Opera's Maria Golovin was also beautifully designed and lit (Anthony Holland and Robert Bryan), well sung, carefully played (under Nicholas Braithwaite) and quite brilliantly produced by Gian Carlo Menotti. Mr Menotti also supplied the words and music. His stock as an opera composer does not stand high in this country and so, professional trimmer that I am, I went with a resolutely open mind. It snapped shut with the force of a man-trap before the first act was out. Again, words and music. The text is like an interminable episode from a 'fifties TV soap opera with almost every line carefully culled from the Oxford Dictionary of Clichés. The plot tells of a blind man's obsessive love for a married woman, but unlike other potentially sentimental operas, it is set in a vacuum 'near a European frontier a few years after a recent war'. Soap opera only makes sense in a specific social context (vide Traviata, Butterfly etc).
Now this might pass muster if it were spoken—and it is written to be spoken— with Menotti's thoroughly well-made music tinkling away in the background as in any good B-feature movie. But no, Menotti sets every damned word, and the one thing that through-composed opera cannot do is tell a
story. Stories, as Goldwyn never said, is for skyscrapers. There are only two passages of lyrical expansion: there is no time for more as the characters are too busy intoning deathless exchanges like 'May I attempt to revive you with a strong cup of tea'/'Just what I need'. In fact, only two, as opposed to sixteen, words are operatically necessary— 'some tea ?'; the librettist's job is to pare away such useless verbiage and let the music do the work. But in this piece the music relentlessly underlines the action, which is a waste of one whole element at the opera cpmposer's command. Why duplicate? For die purposes of the plot, an escaped prisoner co\-icronts our hero. 'What meaning has your sor\thw in such a world as ours?' he asks. (What world, I ask.) 'Who has ever been known to reason with the human heart,' the hero answers, and I presume we are meant to be on his side. 'What romantic drivel,' someone remarks later on. Ho hum.
The New Opera Company's production of Szymanowski's King Roger has very properly turned up at the Coliseum, where the score—luscious enough to make Strauss sound like Czerny—sounds quite sniffing. This reworking of the Bacchae with a happy ending remains somewhat enigmatic, but seems to suggest that you can come to terms with Dionysus without surrendering to him too abjectly. That seems good sense to me. The excellent ENO cast is dominated by Felicity Lott's Queen Roxane; her firm, bright soprano is ideally suited to the sinuous melisma of the famous second-act solo. There is one more performance, on 9 April.
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