Opera
Hollow Crown
By DAVID CAIRNS
THE new production of Car- men, though greeted tetchily by the press, has been doing excellent business at Sadler's Wells. In this the public shows D better sense than the critics.espite its faults the show is enjoyable. One reason is that the marvellously fresh and piquant invention of Bizet's scoring is very well realised. Bizet, like Mozart, Beethoven, Berlioz and Stravinsky, is one of music's great instinctive, idiosyncratic composers for orchestra; and at Sadler's Wells the orchestra—profiting by some changes in its ranks and by a slight improvement in acous- tics—is continually reminding us of the fact.
The critic, however, while enjoying, cannot help registering certain disturbing morals. I do not mean the moral drawn by some, that spoken dialogue in English is death to opera; all that can be said is that these particular singers have not learnt how to deliver it. The moral I chiefly mean is the hazard—into which our opera managements seem to rush with the nalvest un- awareness of what they are doing—of inviting any theatre producer who is at a loose end to produce an opera for them. It is true that good opera producers are not exactly so common that we need not look for them outside the profession; true also that there are in the theatre one or two producers, like Mr. Frank Hauser, the infre- quency of whose engagements in opera is a matter for keen regret. But the astonished question re- mains: what possessed Sadler's Wells to award the producer's crown to Mr. John Barton?
Mr. Barton's splendid anthology The Hollow Crown at the Aldwych is just the kind of enter- tainment that a gifted don might think up (it is fair to add that he is the first gifted don to have done so); and his experience as duelling master for the Stratford company has resulted in a powerfully exciting sword fight between Jose and Zuniga in Act 2. But what evidence was there that he was likely to make a lively recruit to opera? The two basic requirements of the craft are an understanding of the music, out of which' the production must grow; and, secondly, an ability to make opera singers act. In this second respect Mr. Barton is found no less wanting than Mr. Michael Benthall in Macbeth at Covent Garden, while he shows his musicality by drown- ing the beautiful passage for piccolos and trum- pet in Act I in an orgy of banging and stamping and shuffling. He does not seem to have made up his mind whether Carmen is a musical or an opera. It can be argued that Carmen itself never makes up its mind on this point. But whereas Carmen gets the best of both, Mr. Barton gets the best of neither. He gives us the confusion of realism without the animation : a stage jostling with often distracting movement and at the final curtain—to take one example—a tableau which, for all the sense it gives of a crowd reacting to anything, is as expressive as a royal photograph.
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