MUSIC
The Immortal Hour.
AFTER Saint-Sains's Samson and Delilah and Sutermeister's Romeo and Juliet, Sadler's Wells' lateit novelty is Rutland Boughton's The Immortal Hour, which had its first performance there on May 28th. This sequence of novelties does not promise well for the future, and it is only to be hoped that what seem to the outside observer egregi- ously poor choices are the sort of box-office successes which will eventually enable the management to return to the policy which, a few years ago, gave us Katya Kabanova, Sitnone Boccanegra and Don Carlos. There was, perhaps, some feeling of national piety behind the revival of what has, after all, been the most successful British opera between Balfe and Britten. Certainly neither critics nor public would have been so enthusiastic, or even so tolerant, of this mawkish, misbegotten offspring of Wagner and one of the Name- less Ones of the Celtic twilight had its composer been anything but British.
The great appeal of The Immortal Hour thirty years ago was its " spirituality. The work was written in 1914, a year which hap. pened to mark the end of a great era of confident optimism and materialistic expansion, against which this shadowy, etiolated, bloodless music was a protest. A decade earlier Debussy had voiced something of the same spirit in Pelleas and Scriabin in his bogus mystical poems of ecstasy. It was interesting, too, to fmd occasional echoes of Peter Pan (in Act 1, scene 2, especially) and to see with what a sure instinct producer and designer used the gestures, move- ments and effects of lighting and drapery typical of the art nouveau movement. These consciously " beautiful " and " spiritual " gestures were worthy of Bunthorne and his fellow-aesthetes of the 'eighties, earlier protestants against the vulgar presumptions of reality and its Philistine representatives.
That the story is shadowy nonsense expressed in often comically pretentious language might also be admitted even by the most fervent devotees of The Immortal Hour, just as many of Scriabin's admirers must have found the published text of the Poem of Ecstasy rather hard going. It was the atmosphere of vague, symbolical dreaming, of immaterial and incorporeal longing and unfulfilment that satisfied some appetite starved in the midst of Edwardian abund- ance, some longing for escape from the bright and ruthless crudities of the 1920s.
The music itself varies slightly in character between the two acts. In the first scene the, pulse beats so sluggishly that one seems to be assisting at some Wagnerian parody. It quickens in the second, but the poverty of rhythmic life and invention, the alternate insignificance and dreadful " daintiness " of the melodies and the provincial restriction of the harmonic language make the whole work quite insufferable to any but those who fall under the spell of this par- ticular brand of Celtic whimsy. The real piquancy of the situation, though, is missed by those (and they must be many) who do not realise that this escape of all escapes, this piece of rentier day-dream- ing, this bourgeois make-believe is the work of a Party member ; for I am assured on good authority that the composer had already attempted his' Marxist interpretation of Bach before he composed The Immortal Hour. 0 ever-wavy party-line ! 0 more than Protean Plekhanov !
It was a good performance under James Robertson. Quite out- standing was the Dalua of Stanley Clarkson, a full-throated, and authoritative Celtic Wotan. Patricia Howard was a rather sharp- voiced Etain, the Melisande of the piece, but John Hargreaves's singing almost overcame Eochaidh's handicapping accoutrements. These included what seemed to be two Brunnhildian breastplates, one of which had slipped, giving an unfortunately lop-sided appear- ance to this poor prince, who wears a crown of horns even before his wife is coolly whistled away from under his nose by a fairy—in this case the rather too substantial John Lanigan, whose voice and manner
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