MUSIC
" Lira's a pleasant institution : let us take it as it comes." What a jolly, reassuring apophthegm and what eminently sensible, if difficult advice ! Did it, 1 wonder, seem at all paradoxical or anachronistic to the audience which packed the Golders Green Hippodrome for The Gondoliers? No, rather a confirmation of a deeply sane instinctive belief, I suspect, which we were glad to hear expressed in so many words, words having the odd, strictly magical power of strengthening our unspoken feelings. As for anachronisms, many of our scientific social observers, discoverers of the Common Man and the Managerial Revolution, might have been surprised to see how voraciously this audience devoured each detail of the Duchess's song describing the shifts to which the impoverished Plaza-Toros were reduced in order to live and the Duke's record of petty and gross exploitations of the family title undertaken to supplement the family income. All this, they might say, was indeed an outlet for middle class envy in 1889 but in 1952 such things are hardly more than a memory of the middle-aged and cannot possibly interest the young. And yet the loudest laugher in my vicinity was hardly more than twenty and did not look like the victim of social injustice ; so that it may be that the sheer charm of Sullivan's music and the verbal dexterity of Gilbert still form the chief attraction rather than the promptings of class-hatred or social sadism in any of its obscurer forms.
1 admit that my own enjoyment of the Savoy operas is divided in about equal proportions between Sullivan and the stage on the one hand and Gilbert and the audience on the other. Sullivan's tunes and the production evoke nostalgic memories of my youth—amateur performances of Patience at Winchester and Yeoman of the Guard at Wells, the delighted recognition of cathedral choirmen or local butchers, musical spinsters or even an aunt of one's own in the cast, performing those odd curvettings and rhythmic wavings of the hands that had an archaic charm even then and today seem consecrated, surrounded with an aura of taboo like the Elizabethan language of the Book of Common Prayer. It was all bone-English then and is still bone-English now and I wonder who will really be pleased when productions are brought up to date, clothes lose their tradi- tional archness and musical performance is given the modern pro- fessional style and polish. Only those, I suspect, who would never go to a Savoy opera in any case. As a nation we like our railway stations and our restaurants frowsy and friendly in an offhand way, as we have always known them ; and I daresay we like our national operetta, too, as we have known it and should resent any major changes.
Taking life a la Gilbert, " as it comes," has meant two other operas this week. Dido and Aeneas at Bernard Miles's Mermaid Theatre is a delightful spectacle and Geraint Jones's handling of Purcell's music quite masterly. Kirsten Flagstad makes a regal Dido indeed but, with the modesty of a great artist and a generous- hearted woman, she never shows any inclination to sing the rest of the cast off the stage—as, with one deep breath, she easily could. Thomas Hemsley, Eilidh McNab and Arda Mandikian sang the smaller roles like good musicians and the chorus were admirably neat and lively in phrase and full in tone. As at Glyndebourne, the ballet seemed to present most difficulties. No doubt distance lends enchantment to all dancing and a small theatre with an apron stage on a hot night forces on the spectator aspects and details of the ballet which generally pass unnoticed. Possibly the solution lies in an altogether humbler and simpler treatment of the dances.
Faust, which opened the autumn season at Sadlers Wells, is such a French Second Empire work that, for myself, I despair of a modern production. Faust must surely, at all costs, be a young cocodes, whose membership of the Jockey Club was Mephisto's first service ; and Mephisto himself the smartest of boulevardiers. Any attempt to return more nearly to Goethe seems to me a major mistake and the Aleister Crowley 'ballet is surely a complete miscon- ception. Joan Stuart made a pretty Marguerite and John Probyn, though a wooden and self-conscious actor, has a fine voice. Everyone else in the audience seemed to enjoy Faust enormously and perhaps my lack of enthusiasm is due to a blind spot, an occupational disease of all specialists and too historically minded persons.
MARTIN COOPER.
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