MUSIC
" Paurrry voices•but no tradition "—such was the charitable summing- up of the position at Covent Garden by one of the most distinguished recent guest-artists at the opera-house. Not all the voices can strictly be called pretty, but this is a criticism which would apply to many other houses and is, indeed, partly a malady of the age. More import- ant, though more difficult to interpret exactly, is the lack of a tradition. It is, of course, a commonplace, and is often answered with the equally commonplace assurance that a tradition is being sloivly built up at Covent Garden, that to demand too much from soioung a'cenlpany is unreasonable and that we must have patience. What we must surely ask ourselves is whether everything possible is being done to insure firm foundations and whether there is practical evidence of a growing understanding of operatic problems and an annual improvement in their solution:
I asked myself these questions at a performance of La Traviala on October loth. Elizabeth Schwarzkopf sang Violetta, and James Johnston, for the first time, Armand. The first scene shows us the drawing-room of one of the great beauties of the Parisian demi-monde in the middle of the last century. Now it is not impossible, at the distance of a mere hundred years, to discover what in fact was the nature of such a drawing-room—how guests comported themselves, what was the etiquette and the " tone " of the society which met there. The producer led us to suppose that Violetta kept a very expensive brothel in which the girls (some of whom arrived in their partners' arms) swayed their hips in time to the music, indulged in a rather blowsy form of round-dancing and curtseyed deeply to the mistress of the house, as to the Empress Eugenie. This, I feel sure without any historical research, was not the case. The great Parisian demimon- daines of the last century probably achieved a position in society more similar to that of their predecessors in Periclean Athens than any of their profession before or since. In any case, the tradition has for a hundred years been to play the first act with dignity and with a decorum only very slightly less strict than would have obtained in the salons of the grand monde of the day. Have researches proved that this tradition, quite unfounded in fact and that an evening party at Violetta's was actually something much more like a week-end binge at a road-house .? If that is so, then of course there is a great difficulty in making the roles of Violett.9. and Armand, and Verdi's music, convincing, for Verdi obviously started the bad old tradition.
Elizabeth Schwarzkopf plays Violetta—and is apparently made up with this intention—as a hard, robustly healthy young woman, of no noticeable sensibility, whose sudden indisposition seems quite obviously a feint practised in order to obtain a tete-d-tele with Armand who, for his part, is plainly a young man very much up from the country and out to have a quick affair with a bad girl. Now we do know that there was a great deal of sentimentality about " redeemed prostitutes " in nineteenth-century French literature, and it is possible that in fact Marguerite Gautier and Dumas answered to this description of their characters rather than to the traditional conception of Violetta. and Armand. But unfortunately there is Verdi's music, written for the old " sentimental " conception of the • story. The girl who sings " Ah ! fors' a lui " is not hard-boiled. She is ill, tired, sick of gilded promiscuity and desperately anxious to be genuinely loved. Armand is equally sick of that measure of debauchery in which any young Frenchman of his day may be presumed to have indulged, and he has fallen in love. It is considered something of a joke in Violetta's circle, but that merely emphasises the fact. All that is deducible from a cursory glance at Verdi's score and a knowledge, however critical, of the traditions of performing the opera. What the music plainly implies should be the producer's first guide, and no director of music should consent to permit in his opera-house a production that runs counter to the plain sense of the score, leaving tradition aside. Can we, then, be satisfied that the tradition in process of being formed at Covent Garden is a healthy one ? This one act, from one of the most universally known of all operas in the repertory, makes me profoundly- suspicious of the whole balance of power obtaining within the walls of Covent Garden. And if I wish to hear Traviata I go to Sadler's Wells. MARTIN COOPER.
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