CONTEMPORARY ARTS
Sinfonia Antartica; Romeo and Juliet.
IF, as Mahler thought, a symphony mast be a world, then it stands to reason that we must be prepared for it to be no longer a symphony, in any but an etymological sense. The world, after all, is a hetero- geneous jumble in which the beautiful and the ugly, the significant and the trivial are juxtaposed with apparently an only intermittent concern for what commends itself to the human intelligence as formal perfection. Some might think that this was a very fair description of Mahler's own symphonies. Vaughan Williams, on the other hand, has made a symphony not of the world but of what used in the school-room to be called a "zone," and that neither torrid nor temperate but uncompromisingly frigid. Sibelius has accustomed us to sub-polar winds and Cimmerian darkness, but the unlimited wastes of polar ice and snow have not hitherto been celebrated in music.
And in fact Vaughan Williams's music, written for the film Scott of the Antarctic, is less an evocation of polar scenery• than a celebra- tion of the human determination to explore and dominate even the most unrewarding tracts of the globe. Since there is no longer any generally accepted meaning of the word "symphony," there was perhaps no reason why the music of this film should not be "made over" into the usual four or five movements. In the old days it would have appeared self-evident that no musi6 composed in strips of a length determined by someone other than the composer, as a subsidiary accompaniment to what is primarily a spectacle, a visual experience, could subsequently be served up to the public as anything more than, say, a suite. The essence of a symphony lay, then, in its close logical coherence and homogeneity, the complete self-sufficiency of the music and its fundamental unity as a kind of musical monad.
Vaughan Williams's own symphonies emphatically conform to these earlier requirements; and it may be that his use of the Italian sinfonia for his Antartica is meant to signify that he intends this as something other than a symphony. It is in fact a lengthy suite of film-music, too long, too repetitive and not sufficiently interesting for the concert-hall, as the Festival Hall performance on March 11th made clear. Cut to the dimensions of an orchestral suite, the music would sustain, without adding to, Vaughan Williams's' reputation; in its present form it represents an error of judgement not in itself serious but magnified by the status of the venerable composer.
Sutermeister's Romeo and Juliet is, to me, an inexplicable choice on the part of Sadler's Wells. That Shakespeare has been butchered to make a Swiss opera is perhaps of secondary importance, though it cannot fail to irritate and disappoint the lover of Shakespeare to find this great passage omitted, that misunderstood and the whole sense of the play altered by the omission of Shakespeare's final scene of reconciliation between the warring houses. But it is the music that is the great disappointment. Lively, noisy and apt enough. as the accompaniment to street-brawls or even the Capulets' party, it falls completely flat at the great lyrical moments.
Sutermeister's is an eclectic style, a lingua franca embodying fragments of many idioms and familiar to all cinema-goers. Person- ality or distinction it has none, and a certain coarseness of fibre, particularly noticeable in the orchestration, characterises the com- poser's whole handling of the story (the gross exaggeration of old Capulet's anger with Juliet is a single example) and his musical vocabulary. The most noticeable contributor to Sutermeister's idiom is Prokofiev, who was also attracted by the story of Romeo and Juliet some years later; and had I been asked to guess the composer of the music that I heard at Sadler's Wells, I should not have hesitated to plump for some modern Russian, a gifted imitator of Prokofiev with a coarse orchestral palate and much experience of the cinema.
Victoria Elliott and Rowland Jones sang well as the lovers; Anna 't. Pollak was efficient as ever in the part of Lady Capulet and Stanley Clarkson a suitably reverend Friar Lawrence. One thing puzzled me about the production. Why was the fourteen-year-old Juliet dressed in funeral black at her parents' party, on the occasion of her betrothal? MARTIN COOPER.
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