Opera
Muses
Rodney Milnes
The Journey (WNO, Cardiff) Palestrina (Abbey Opera, Collegiate Theatre) I can't remember who it was who said that the best time to kick a man was when he was down (it must have been a politician) but my privileged upbringing, all cold baths, muscular Christianity and fair play, prevents me from agreeing. Those responsible for The Journey — John Metcalf (composer) and John Hope Mason (librettist) — have already taken a severe and, I fear, deserved drub,bing in the national dailies. I must try and think of something nice to say. Hm. Oh dear . . .
The male leads are named Scott and Craig, which may prove unappetising to most Spectator readers, though the frequent repetition of, say, Hugh Montgomery Massingberd and Alexander Chancellor might have tested the word-setting facility of Benjamin Britten himself. When the opera started Scott and Craig, together with Nicola and Gwen, were in the middle of the eponymous journey, and when it ended what felt like a week later but was in fact only two-and-a-quarter hours, they had got nowhere and done nothing, apart from meeting a Father and Daughter with their sack, a Running Man with no clothes on who mimed disaster, and an Old Man. The Sunday Times critic decided that Craig went off with the Old Man, which he found 'a curiously moving climax'; well, I don't think that's quite what happened but it's a nice thought. In fact Craig went off with the Storyteller, who had been commenting gnomically on what was not happening with the sort of lines that were extremely funny in The Rocky Horror Show, but here were for serious (`They were lost, indeed. And who could help them? No one'). Rats.
The libretto, mostly in portentous fourword lines — 'My foot is painful/I cannot do more' — makes use of I Ching, the ancient Chinese Book of Changes (a compendium of images based on hexagrams made up at random, in case you didn't know), and is prefaced by a handful of quotations from Change by Hellmut Wilhelm. 'The concept of change is not an external normative principle which imprints itself on phenomena.' Phew, that's a relief. The name of Beckett has been invoked to describe the libretto. He should sue. It doesn't matter a damn whether all this is the most appalling clap-trap known to man, or whether it has a deeply meaningful substance way above my muscular Christian head, but it does matter that it is wholly undramatic and should have been rejected out of hand by both composer and WNO management (of which more below). Instead, Metcalf, an amiably com petent composer, has set it without a murmur to dangerously slow-moving music; it is nice that a young musician should have so profound an admiration for Tippett, but as near-quotation after near-quotation from The Midsummer Marriage came tumbling forth, one felt that his admiration was being too prodigally expressed.
What we have here, alas, is the outpouring of the Subsidised Muse. New operas are a Good Thing. Subsidised companies must perform them. Composers must be paid to write them. Since they are paid for by the Arts Council, it doesn't matter whether they are any good or not; they go on for three performances before sinking without trace, playing to audiences, like this one, who fidget with barely disguised boredom throughout but applaud wildly at the end. Only nice, middle-class audiences brought up on fair play behave like this, and only a subsidised company would dare be so cynical as to put this onanistic rubbish before them. To the Subsidised Muse, communication is irrelevant.
That there is such a thing as the Conservative Muse is proved beyond doubt by Pfitzner's Palestrina, one of the few indisputable masterpieces of 20th-century opera. The composer, unsympathetic towards neo-classical and atonal experiments in pre-World-War-I Germany, identified strongly with the protagonist of the opera he completed in 1915. The widowed Palestrina, his creative powers waning, declines the commission to write a mass that will foil ultra-conservative Counter-Reformation moves to ban polyphonic church music in favour of plainsong; a good talking-to from nine dead composers fails to budge him, but the apparition of his dead wife and a choir of angels do the trick. The mass is completed in a blaze of C major. The second act, set at the Council of Trent in 1562, puts private agony in public perspective (Who's he?' asks a bishop when the name Palestrina is mentioned). Pfitzner's words for this act, with 17 named and deftly characterised ecclesiastics, is a brilliant piece of playwriting; his notes turn it into supremely gripping music-theatre. I dare say it is not unlike a meeting of the Arts Council Music Panel.
Palestrina is admittedly slow-moving; had Bruckner written an opera it might have sounded like this. But the lean score, with its ever-shifting tonality and tension based an extremely subtle pastiche of polyphonic style, is of endless fascination, and its portrayal of the loneliness of both the creator and the act of creation is profoundly moving. One can only admire Abbey Opera, a semi-professional body, for mounting the British premiere; there was, truth to tell, some pretty ropy singing and playing, but Antony Shelley's conducting and Christopher de Souza's shoestring production commanded respect, as did Stuart Kale's musical singing in the titlerole. I join with enthusiasm in the chorus of censure an the English National Opera for not staging the work years ago; they can now make amends by announcing it for their 1982/3 season — or else.
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