Love Locked Out

MUSIC

By CHARLES REID

For the current Ring cycles, a hundred or more players crowd the Covent Garden pit. The same happens on Elektra nights. It is not to be assumed, however, that when Mr Britten writes for, say, a dozen players (e.g., The Rape of Lucretia) or for seven (e.g., Curlew River), he is handicapping himself by eighty-eight points and ninety-three respectively as compared with Wagner and Strauss. He's making a different point from theirs, the sort of point made best with a predominance in the pit of solo timbres.

Not that the Rape specification (1946) was unprecedented. Igor Stravinsky had made do with a band of twelve for The Soldier's Tale thirty years earlier. Then, as in 1946 and later, the economic factor weighed. Chamber opera is cheaper and easier to tour than 'grand' opera. But is it, after its own fashion, as good to see and hear? Does it offer as many missed heart- beats, as many bits to whistle, as many moments to carry for ever in the ear and eye of the mind? These are essential challenges. They are challenges which Mr Britten has met in a prac- tical way; that is, by writing to both scales.

Four out of his dozen are 'grand' operas. Peter Grimes (1945) was the first of these—first of the entire dozen, in fact. It was Grimes that 'made' him. Gloriana came eight years later. I skip to Gloriana for two reasons: because it has a psychological link with Grimes and because it has just been revived at Sadler's Wells, after years of virtual write-off, with a splendour and success that console veteran Brittenites for the original flop, a complete and glacial one, at Covent Garden: With a libretto based by William Plomer on Lytton Strachey's book about Queen Eliza- beth I and Essex, her favourite, Gloriana was commissioned to mark the crowning of Queen Elizabeth II and performed in the royal presence with gala pomp. Roses, redcoats, cavalry trum- pets, halberds and Yeomen of the Guard were all over the place. Unhappily, there was a hand- picked audience, too. A high proportion were official guests, including a majority, I'll swear, for whom opera, if it happened at all, began with The Mikado and ended with La Boheme.

Unable to make much or anything of Mr Britten's music, these witnesses were further irked, in view of the nature and purpose of the occasion, by an incident towards the end. Having seemed or affected to be infatuated with 'the Queen of my life,' impetuous Essex furiously draws a tiring-room curtain to reveal her in early morning light : old, unfarded and unwigged. At the Wells, admirable Sylvia Fisher shows a crop of whitish hair. In 1953, Joan Cross, equally ad- mirable in a different vein, was, if I remember rightly, bald as a coot. Mr Plomer and Mr Britten were felt to have pushed historical realism to tasteless limits.

Today the wigless queen shocks nobody. The episode is cruelly poignant; first-rate theatre, too.

The Wells production, incidentally, is first-rate theatre most of the way. A palatial all-purposes set (by Colin Graham, the adroit producer, and Alix Stone) is apt for all eight scenes except the rag-tag City Street. Yet, beyond the eye's de- lights and the musical ones cared for by Mario Bernardi (conductor), there is a thing that worries me, namely, Mr Britten's persistent side- stepping of reciprocated love-passion as we get it in, say, the Tchaikovsky operas, in Verdi (whom he adores) and in Puccini (whom he dislikes). Essex's lute-song, 'Happy were he,' at which John Wakefield made little more than a promising pass on the Wells opening night, is a hauntingly introvert essay after Tudor models; but, in the boudoir, at any rate, intro- version and true love (or pretended love, for that matter) don't fit.

That the old Queen doted on Essex before sending him to the block as a traitor, an act of self-laceration as well as of duty, is obvious.

We gather this, however, from the words and the acting rather than from anything in the music.

We are in the presence once more of Peter Grimes (less ruffianly but equally mixed-up) and an Ellen Orford who, having left middle age behind, schoolmarms not a village but the Realm. Every time Peter or Ellen broaches or approaches love theses, all we get is a duet snatch or an arioso reflecting tormented self-analysis, melancholy, renunciation or, at best, brave hope. To people who have fed on Walkiire and Aida or even on Werther, all this is undernourishing. The same inhibiting streak runs through most of the operas, chamber and 'grand' alike.

The Rape has marvels of tenderness. It is to the bedchamber Lullaby that I always return—

an incomparable page, except in so far as it anticipates or evokes the lullaby music in Billy Budd. After this miracle, Tarquinius's ravishing stride and lustings have a contrived sound. In Albert Herring's grocer-shop, Sid and Nancy flirt engagingly : not one-tenth as engagingly, however, as the lady's maid and the poet in Puccini's La Rondine. The one work which breaks away from what I conceive to be in- hibition is A Midsummer Night's Dream.

When we meet them first, Lysander and Hermia are harried and taut. When we meet him next, Lysander is bewitched and falling wildly for the wrong girl. Under a like spell, Titania fondles the translated Bottom. None of these could be called a standard love-duet situation. Yet consider, in the first case, the throb of shift- ing major seconds in the orchestra and the anguished, angular vocal line they sustain. Or in the second case, the edged and punctuating seventh-chords which Lysander's impetuosity seems to wrench or lever from woodwind and brass. Or, in the third case, the sun-drenched mingling of this vocal phrase and that with soar- ing flute-clarinet melodies and a sombre up- welling of harps. All is delusion. But since

passion is transient, delusion may be taken as a truth of the hour: an hour which, since the Dream has, it seems, just been recorded by Decca, we shall be able to whistle back at will.

Perhaps there are enough 'love operas' in the repertory to relieve Mr Britten of any obligation

to repeat (with different notes, to be sure) his Dream achievement. Courting and kissing are splendid in their way. But there are other themes

and aims, of a kind outside Puccini's or Massenet's capacity—or even Verdi's and Wag- ner's. Mr Britten's special genius is for devising sounds that lead to the root of strange matters; for expounding certain kinds of human pain, fear and dilemma more explicitly than a librettist's words alone ever could. He has done so many staggering things in this line that a page wouldn't suffice for their listing. Here are a few that occur to me on the spur of the moment.

In his 'realisation' (which producers have fatuously neglected) of The Beggar's Opera (1948), highwaymen sing 'Let us take the road' in B flat while a remote solo horn symbolises guard or postilion with a jolly fanfare in D flat: a distufbingly beautiful discord that epito- mises more drama than all the masks and pistol- cockings in the world. In Billy Budd there are muted trtuppets which, at the mention of mutiny, send Jr, trickle of ice-water down any civilised spine;` also a court-martial trio for low voices so noble and gentle that, groping for com- parisons, I think of Fidelio itself. In The Turn of the Screw'(l954) there are church bells that boom benevolently or race in sudden evil or clash at the unseen approach of calamity. As the doomed little boy sits brooding at night, bass flute and clarinet weave a sinister elegy against the harp's ambivalent swayings. In Gloriana no musical symbol is more telling than the pavane which courtiers dance at the opening of the Whitehall Palace scene; a turgid weight of har- monies and scoring bespeaks the Tudor state in all its craft, glvms and power.

The recent 'church parables,' plus The Turn of the Screw and The Beggar's Opera, persuade me that Mr Britten's musico-psychological pene- trations are deepest and surest when he's using the chamber medium. Another thing. The more slender his forces the more startling his sound inventions. When Nebuchadnezzar enters, in The Burning Fiery Furnace, there are pages of simple up-and-down tune for flutter-tongued flute. These are accompanied by horn and harp playing not exactly the same tune but the same notes in a slightly different grouping and at a slightly different pace. The first impression is that some- body's playing wrong. But wrong always in the same way. Which, when you cotton on to the fantastic Oriental flavour of the passage, turns out to be the right and only way. With a similar handful of instruments, Curlew River is perhaps stronger in emotional impact than anything else Mr Britten has written for actor-singers. The lamenting Madwoman wanders in search of her stolen child with a flute obbligato that flutters like a cage bird, then sails up into the sky. The cumulative tension is almost too harrowing, even though we know that a healing miracle is on the way.

Why bother with a band of eight—or, for that matter, with Boy Meets Girl—when so much can be achieved on a shoestring and high-mindedness?