MUSIC
To most people in this country Egon Wellesz is little more than a name. Those who do know his musie rate him very high. Wilfrid
Mellers, in an essay devoted to him in Studies in Contemporary Music, refers to him as "the one great exiled European composer we have amongst us," ranking him with Schoenberg, Bartok and Stravinsky.
The announcement by the Oxford University Opera Club of the first world performance at the Town Hall, Oxford, on December 5th, of Incognita, a new opera by Wellesz to a libretto by Elizabeth Mackenzie based on a novel by Congreve, therefore excited much interest, and sent us all searching again through Wellesz's recently published collection of Essays on Opera—in which he discusses, among other topics, some of his own earlier operas—to see what we might expect. His main thesis there (the essays all date from the period of composition of his own operas in Germany) was that opera at the end of the nineteenth century had reached a point where the concentration of interest in the orchestra had become harmful, and that the time was ripe for a new Gluck to bring about a radical reform of operatic conceptions. He deplored the substi- tution of sentimental and pathetic subjects for true tragedy, and maintained that only the representation of heroic events of a signifi- cance transcending their temporal setting, for which mastery of structure and creative discipline are essential, could raise opera again to a higher aesthetic plane.
Clearly he has now revised some of his ideas and extended his sympathies. He still adheres to his conviction that the size of the
operatic orchestra muTt be reduced to " classical " dimensions, and that the audience's attention must be concentrated on the singers and The stage action, not on the orchestral accompaniment. This is certainly achieved in incognita. But there is nothing of the heroic about it. The libretto is a, reach-me-down comic-opera plot of mistaken identity that leaves everything to the composer,, having neither wit nor comedy of its own. Unfortunately Wellesz fails to
provide these qualities either. In fact it is hard to find any character in the music at all. In the twenty years since his last opera he has totally abandoned his former " advanced " idiom for an -eighteenth- century one into which nineteenth-century romantic extensions of classical tonality are incorporated with such mastery that there is no violation of the spirit of eighteenth-century harmony, and seems to be none even of the letter.
Such indeed is Wellests fluency in handling this language that it appears positively imaginative; for so assured a use of so wide a vocabulary is now rare. But his melody betrays him. Here no amount of mastery will ever compensate for original- imagination, and the best-disposed listener would be hard put to find a song, a tune, or even _a sustained melodic period Of any length. Perhaps there is something significant in -Wellesz's admiration for Gluck, who, he says, "never at any time possessed a really fertile musical inventiveness." The same deficiency is what leaves us disappointedly
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