Opera
The Critics' Revenge
By DAVID CAIRNS KNOWING better than the creative artist is a favourite obsession of our neurotically analytical age. The habit is growing among music critics of telling the composer that he has no idea what he is talking about. It is the revenge of the uncreative--to present the great masters as men who did what they did without knowing why, inspired infants sublimely unaware of the effects they were achieving or muddle-headed cranks whose best work was done in defiance of their own theories. The critics' place, is assured in this convenient scheme, since it arrogates to them the monopoly of intelligence. The masterpiece, once created, becomes independent of its uncom- prehending creator and the property of everyone -=-but chiefly of the critic. That the composer, if he thinks about his work at all, is capable of thinking correctly, is considered a misconception too naïve to be tolerated.
In patronising earlier composers the critic calls in hoary notions of Progress to bolster his argu- ment. The poor things were born before psycho- logy was discovered; to suggest, therefore, that Mozart could have implied a conscious double meaning in Susanna's aria in the fourth act of Figaro is to be denounced for gross anachronism —as if it were not infinitely more absurd, not to say incredible, that the subtle and highly percep- tive creator of Donna Anna and Donna Elvira could have conceivably written such an aria with- out intending or even being aware of the clear implications.
With the more articulate composer the tech- nique is to praise his works at the expense of the theories that begat them. Wagner's much-derided belief in the dramatic genesis of his operas has had gallons of critical cold water poured on it although it is obviously true. The latest .victim of these guilt-ridden presumptions is Stravinsky. People who ought to know better have been assur- ing us that, while (Edipus Rex is of course a masterpiece, it triumphs in despite of the modish influences which produced it; these belonged strictly to their. time, the age of anti-Wagnerism and arid neoclassicism, and can be seen from our superior vantage point as no more than the cast- off chrysalis of a work of art that has broken free of them. In particular, we are told, the part of the narrator, that gimmicky anomaly in a dinner jacket, a tiresomely Twentyish intruder in the modern opera house, has long ago served its transient purpose and should be discarded—it only comes between us and the direct impact of the work.
But that is precisely the point; and critics have no cause to trumpet the greatness of (Edipus if they cannot perceive it. Stravinsky and Cocteau knew exactly what they were doing when they conceived their opera-oratorio with a narrator (just as they did when they demanded a Latin text, masked singers, stylisation and a minimum of movement on the stage). The narrator is abso- lutely vital to the dramatic effect of (Edipus Rex; the Sadler's Wells production, which puts CEdipus on the London stage for the first time in its thirty- two years of existence, proves this, even though Michael Hordern's delivery of the part is, to my mind, rather too hectoring, too 'actorish' and heavily loaded with obvious irony for the style of a, 'conferencier, presentant l'action dune voix passive' which is asked for in the score (I would like to hear this part spoken by Christopher Logue). The narrator's purpose is precisely to come between us and the action, to place it at a ritual distance, to petrify it into an ageless frieze, so that we do not identify ourselves with the characters as individuals and shed on their per- sonal fates indulgent but irrelevant tears of pity and fellow-feeling, but are enabled to compre- hend, standing apart, appalled,' the universality of the tragedy, the eternal human truths it con- tains (to which the Freudian implications of the myth are secondary in importance) of the arro- gance and nemesis of power and the inescapable trap that _a man's acts set for him. We do not have to agree with Stravinsky that his way is right and the romantics' wrong; but we have to admit that Edipus works, superbly, in the opera house, yet that without its 'upemotionalism,' the monumentalism and liturgical severity on which Stravinsky insisted, and the means he devised :0 achieve them, it would not do so.
As it is, I cannot help feeling that Michel St. Denis's production and Abd'elkader Farrah's ddcor, powerfully conceived and carried out'with uncommon mastery, should have kept more severely to the austerity of the composer'; scheme. The masks are brilliantly successful, but some of the costumes are picturesque in just the way that Stravinsky and Cocteau were seek- ing to avoid when they demanded that the actors 'give the impression of living statues.' The Shepherd is too realistically a shepherd, the chorus of Thebans wear gruesome rubber-like draperies, with scaly growths like sloughed-off snakes' skins, which externalise their sufferings and catch at the , spectator's emotions in the wrong way. Within the framework of stylisa- tion there is a good deal of semi-realistic move- ment: the chorus hold out their hands in pleading movements, Jocasta waves her arms distractedly, and in this context, distractingly, as the terrifying truth strikes her.
These are perhaps arguable points. What is not in dispute is the power of tOe production as a whole. The musical ensemble, astonishingly pre- cise and assured, must be one of the finest in the annals of Sadler's Wells. Ronald Dowd's imposing cEdipus, Raimund Herincx's Creon and Messen- ger and David Ward's Tiresias are all heroic achievements. Colin Davis's taut, intensely rhythmical conducting reveals many expressive beauties in the music without trespassing on thz forbidden territory of espressivo; some of his tempi are faster than those of Stravinsky him- self in last year's concert performance—notably the vivo section of Jocasta's aria and the Messenger's 'Repperam in monte'--but in the theatre they seem exactly necessary for the dramatic proportions of the work.
All in all, this is something that cannot be missed. Future performances are on the twenty- third and twenty-seventh of this month.
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