Opera
R oots
By OA VID CAIRNS
ENGLISH opera after fifteen years of official blessing, re- mains a frail, str uggling, 'under- nourished plant. cropping up thinly on the bomb-sites of the musical scene. There is, of course, Britten, who after a period of al surd neglect is in favour at Covent Garden, arm'. thanks to commis- sions by the Coventry Cathedral Festival, a new work by Tippett, King Priam, and a first opera by Fricker, are to be heard next summer. But the soil which might grow not the occasional splendid bloom but a regular crop of sturdy competence has been barely scratched.
Considering what a poor subsidy, State or pri- vate, goes to support new works, it is surprising how much manages to get done. I refer rather to the New Opera Company's Sunday evening 'workshop production of John Joubert's Silas Marner than to Monday's double bill at Morley College. This double bill was not a happy contribution to the cause. Malcolm Arnold's one- act piece The Open Window, composed in 1956, suffered partly from Mr. Arnold's understandable inability to respond with more than half-heartedly conventional gestures (among them his now familiar • wistful flirtation with old-style pop music) to the libretto which Sidney Gilliat had taken from Saki's short story about the enfant terribly who entertains the nervous guest with a made-up tale of family tragedy: for the story, with its entirely self-sufficient poetic atmosphere and its ruthless flow of epigrams, is surely the last material to make the text o: an opera.
Mr. Gilliat virtually acknowledges this when he is forced to change the denouement and sub- stitute a take surprise curtain for the girl's very Sakiesque explanation of the guest's sudden flight —a night spent in the middle of India in an open grave surrounded by pariah dogs--and the story', trenchant last word : 'Rotnance at short notice iva., her speciality. But I felt almost nostalgic about it during the succeeding longueurs of Ghost Story, in which a di, malty facetious book by Donald Cotton describes the antics of a pair of psychical researchers with a garrulous spook. Sample line : 'Death is what you make it.' Music to match was provided by James Stevens.
The sovereign virtues of an apt and intelligently worked out libretto were demonstrated in Buxton Orr's The Wager, a powerful one-acter which had a concert performance with piano at the Arts Council earlier this year, and would be well worth the New Opera Company's attention. The libretto, by Hamilton Johnston, in showing how an old blind beggar is tricked by his competitors, two pedlars, into renouncing his only support, his daughter, grows from a simple beginning into an allegory of man's cupidity and destructive illu- sions. The work, in art unpretentious way, makes genuine use of the operatic medium. Rachel Trickett's more conventional libretto for Silas Manner (adapted from George Eliot's novel) has a rather old-fashioned air about it, but it is a craftsmanlike piece of work. Joubert's score unconsciously makes his admiration for Britten so plain—even down to that most Brittenish trademark of all, the repetition of a single word \ on a descending sequence of falling intervals—" at first hearing willy-nilly the ear is off chasing after (and often finding) the exact allu- sions. But where Mr. Joubert can bear to trust his own inspiration—notably in a setting of 'A flaxen-headed cowboy,' which owes nothing to Britten—he suggests an original talent worth fostering, by himself and by the authorities.
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