"Hugh the Drover"; "A Wedding Bouquet." At Sadler's Wells
STAGE AND SCREEN
OPERA AND BALLET
AN extra fillip has been given to the closing weeks of the Sadler's Wells season by the production of two works by English composers, Dr. Vaughan Williams's opera, Hugh dm Drover, and a new ballet by Lord Berners. The subject of both these works is a village wedding, but there the resemblance ends. Indeed, it would be difficult to find two compositions more utterly dissimilar. They do, in fact, belong to different periods, divided by the chasm of the Great War. For Hugh the Drover was planned and a large part of it composed before r914. Its interruption by that calamity is but one of the many incidental misfortunes of those years. After such an experience a sensitive artist could hardly take up and complete a work with the same freshness of mind and assurance of purpose that went to its beginning.
The first act is a masterpiece of dramatic and musical con- struction. We are carried forward by a sustained and cumu- lative wave of music and action to the curtain's fall. For all the seeming artlessness of the material—scraps of folk-tune and tunes that are indistinguishable from folk-song—a great deal of art has gone to the putting of it together. One hazards a guess that Dr. Vaughan Williams here learnt something from the first act of Otello, wherein Verdi carries the action through from beginning to end with a broad sweep that has never been surpassed. Dr. Vaughan Williams creates with a like mastery a dozen characters, large and small, in their setting of a Cotswold village a hundred years ago. His aim is certainly less high than Verdi's, who was concerned with tragic figures, but it is hardly less sure.
But neither he nor his librettist, Mr. Harold Child, was content to remain on the plane of rustic comedy. Hugh is something of a philosopher with a mystical belief in man's freedom and right to live his life in his own way, and his Mary, the belle of the village, catches the infection of his ecstasy. There is a tang of bitterness in it, that gives flavour to what might otherwise have been a mere piece of bucolic revelry and romance. So the opera takes on the Hardy touch and attains an epic quality that raises it to a higher plane. That the composer was not satisfied with the second act himself is evident in the additions and subtractions that he has subsequently made to it, though I am of the opinion that his first thoughts, as shown in the original performance at the Royal College of Music in 1924 were best. That long, slow ending may have been by conventional criteria undramatic, but it was very characteristic and very beautiful. But even so the second Act never had the sustained power of the first. None the less this opera is a fine work and makes in the admirable production at Sadler's Wells an enchanting entertainment, which ought to be popular once the timid public makes up its mind to try something new for a change.
Lord Berners, with Miss Gertrude Stein as his librettist, also creates an atmosphere, though it is not entirely consistent. For, although the scene is France and the social environment petit bourgeois, the domestic, who leads the dance, seemed to be the typical baronial parlour-maid rather than the bonne a tout faire. But all else is of a piece, a result ensured by the coincident employment of Lord Berners' talent as a painter with his talent as a composer. Costumes and music alike burlesque the fashions of a generation ago, and there is nothing in the world easier to make fun of than the fashions and popular tunes of our immediate predecessors. Put a flamboyant ribbon round a boater ; set vividly coloured birds at extravagant angles in a woman's hat ; write a waltz with an exaggeration of its rhythmic sweep, and the thing is done.
Mr. Frederick Ashton has entered into the spirit of the thing and there is no choreographer with a finer sense of burlesque, as is evident in Façade. A Wedding Bouquet is much looser in construction and lacks a real climax. The result is, though at times funny, rather thin and the choreography relies too much Upon ridiculous costume and mime, too little on real dancing. And if I am asked what I mean by " real dancing," I would cite as my example Les Patineurs, which followed the new ballet and, for all that the company showed signs of being tired by the excitements and ovations of a premiere, made the fun of A Wedding Bouquet seem by contrast a little crude and
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