British and American Operas

Dr. Johnson’s definition of opera, in his dictionary of 1755. as “an exotic and irrational entertainment has always seemed not only agreeably pithy but thoroughly British. Operatic composition has never taken root in the British Isles; if one excepts Henry Purcell, who lived in the seventeenth century, and John Gay, whose Beggar’s Opera consisted of popular tunes arranged by one Dr. Pepusch. England’s contribution to the international operatic repertory has been nil. Even the immensely skilled Sir Arthur Sullivan was unable to write a genuine opera; his major effort, Ivanhoe, is a museum piece.

If this situation has altered drastically today, it is largely the result of the work of Benjamin Britten, who at fifty-one may well be the supreme operatic genius of our day. Britten’s activities are by no means limited to opera; he writes prolifically — perhaps too prolifically in all forms. But his most imposingachievements seem to be reserved either for choral works, such as his War Requiem and his Cantata Misencordium, or operas, such as Peter Grimes and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, both of which have entered the repertory of British and American companies.

The newest Britten opera to be recorded is Albert Herring. a comedy which deserves to be better known in this country than it is (London OSA-1378. stereo; A-4378, monaural; three records). It was written in 1947‚ has had a performance or two at Tanglewood and elsewhere, and has otherwise gone unperformed. Yet it is a work of comic genius. with a score that is pungent and lyrical at the same time. It abounds in good tunes, which Britten weaves skillfully into dramatically apt vocal ensembles, and is enlivened by musically satiric thrusts aimed at the pretentiousness and pomposity of some of its characters, and also at operatic conventions in general.

As in other of his works - and this is the part that might have surprised Dr. Johnson most of all - Britten finds his subject and his personages in English village life. Eric Crozier’s libretto for Albert Herring is based on a short story of Maupassant’s called “Le Roster de Madame Hasson‚” but its scene has been shifted to a mythical village called Loxford in East Suffolk. There, on a spring day in 1900, the town leaders are gathered to select a young girl as the May Queen. Lady Billows, the dowager who rules such matters, declares that no girl is virtuous enough for the honor, so it is decided to name a May King, in the person of Albert Herring, a simpleminded lad who lives with his widowed mother liehind her greengrocer’s shop. Albert, having no wish to be dressed in a white suit and crowned with a wreath of orange blossoms, takes off instead for a pub crawl, the first of his young life, and returns at the end clothed in new dignity and manhood.

Using only a small orchestra, Britten constructs an enchanting picture of both the young people and the old in an English village. A few bars of woodwind music evoke a pastoral mood, a snatch of a ball-bouncing melody establishes the presence of three village children, and a few lyrical passages depict the amorous evening strolls of two of Albert’s friends, Nancy, the baker’s daughter, and Sid‚ the butcher’s boy. With pompous chords and skyrocketing runs, Britten delightfully satirizes old Lady Billows and her bumbling colleagues: Mayor Upfold. Police Superintendent Budd, and Miss Wordsworth, head teacher at the church school. His chorus hailing the new May King — indeed, his entire patriotic tableau on the village green — is a wicked takeoff on British ceremonial music. When Albert nervously sips his lemonade, which has been surreptitiously spiked with rum by his friend Sid. the orchestra slyly plays the love-potion motif from Wagner’s Tristan. And when Albert’s mother, believing him dead after his sudden disappearance, holds up a photograph of him and tearfully explains, “It was took on the Pier at Felixstowe, when his Dad was alive, in a studio,” the music is colored with just the right touch of seaside nostalgia and vulgarity.

In writing so diverting and delightful a score, Britten carries out one of his basic artistic precepts, which is that music can serve a high purpose merely by entertaining its hearers. In 1964, when he was selected for the first award of the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies, a $30,000 cash prize, he said, “I certainly write music for human beings, directly and deliberately. I do not write for posterity. ... I want my music to be of use to people.” And he once told an interviewer, “A certain rot, if that isn’t too strong a word, set in with Beethoven. Before Beethoven, music served things greater than itself. For example: the glory of God, the greatest of all. Or the glory of the state. Or the composer’s social environment. It had a definite social function. After Beethoven, the composer became the center of his own universe. Hence the Romantic school. The Romantics became so intensely personal that it looked as if a point might be reached where the composer would be the only man who could really understand his own music. Well, that tendency isn’t for me.”

The performance of Albert Herring is by a first-rate cast of singers who understandably seem to be enjoying their work. Peter Pears, the tenor who has long been associated with Britten and his music, is a robust Albert, and the others include Sylvia Fisher, Johanna Peters, John Noble, Owen Brannigan, Edgar Evans, April Cantelo, Joseph Ward, Catherine Wilson, and Sheila Rex. Britten himself conducts the English Chamber Orchestra, whose twelve members produce some remarkably varied and wide-ranging sonorities. The recording was made in a hall in the Suffolk village of Aldeburgh on the North Sea, where Britten lives and works and runs a summer music festival of increasing renown. Aldeburgh is in the same general area as “Loxford,” which makes one wonder whether the locale and personages of Albert Herring are really so fictitious after all.

Michael Tippett, who is ten years older than Britten, is a British composer of much less prolific gifts, but his music conveys a sense of deep thought and honest workmanship. His oratorio A Child of Our Tune is a curious work with a curious history. It is based on a famous prewar incident in 1938, the shooting of a German diplomatic official in Parts by a half-crazed Jewish refugee boy named Herschel Grynszpan, which was followed by savage Nazi reprisals against the Jews in Germany. Tippett must have begun working on, or at least thinking about, his score almost immediately after the event, but A Child of Our Time was not completed until 1942 and performed until 1944. In 1958 it was recorded, but not until last year — possibly as a result of the success of Britten’s War Requiem was it released here (London OSA1256, stereo; A-4256, monaural: two records).

Rather than being a direct setting of the dramatic shooting and its aftermath, A Child of Our Time is a series of ruminations, vocal and orchestral, upon the entire tragic epoch. Its music is sober, deeply felt, expressive. Most striking of all is the incorporation into the score of several Negro spirituals, including “Steal Away,” “Nobody Knows the Trouble I See,” “Go Down, Moses,” and “Deep River.” Tippett incorporates these into his musical fabric with great skill, but they nevertheless stand out as the dramatic high points of his score. At times A Child of Our Time seems somewhat static, and it is patently respectful of Bach and Handel. But it is music that holds the ear, and it receives a sonorous performance from John Pritchard and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra and Choir, with Elsie Morison, soprano, Pamela Bowden, contralto, Richard Lewis, tenor, and Richard Standen, bass.

Gian Carlo Menotti’s The Death of the Bishop of Brindisi also is a work for solo singers and chorus that attempts to convey the scope and drama of a great tragedy. In this case it is the thirteenth-century Children’s Crusade, which ended in shipwreck and Moorish slavery. Menotti envisages the aged bishop who had blessed the departing children haunted by their voices as he lies dying, attended by a solitary nun.

Menotti wrote this thirty-fiveminute work on commission from the Cincinnati May festival. It has been recorded by Erich Leinsdorf and the Boston Symphony Orchestra, with George London as the bishop and Lib Chookasian as the nun. and the New England Conservatory Chorus and members of the Catholic Memorial and St. Joseph’s high schools’ glee clubs (RCA Victor LCS-2785, stereo; LM-2785, monaural).

For all the splendor of its execution in this recording, The Death of the Bishop of Brindisi seems a largely contrived and empty work, made up of music that is effective without being affecting. Menotti is a master of orchestral and vocal writing, but in this piece he seems to be turning his various musical effects on and off as needed — religious, dramatic, consolatory, storm-at-sea, and so on. Moreover, the libretto, which he wrote himself, contains lines that emerge awkwardly in music: “Holding a glass of sweet Salernian wine I saw the setting sun place a golden sword upon the sluggish sea.” Only an occasional children’s chorus with the naïve charm of a nursery tune offers a touch of freshness and originality. The record also contains “The Song of the Wood-Dove” from Schoenberg’s Gurre-Lieder, sung with warmth by Miss Chookasian and played with radiance by Mr. Leinsdorf’s musicians.

Two modern American operas, Douglas Moore’s The Devil and Daniel Webster and Jack Beeson’s Hello Out There had a brief career in the record catalogues some years back before being dropped. Now both recordings have been reissued on the Desto label, and very welcome they arc. The Devil and Daniel Webster (Desto DST-6450, stereo; D-450, monaural) is a short work that is often staged. Its fanciful story by Stephen Vincent Benet depicts Webster called in to save one Jabez Stone from the devilish clutches of a mysterious Mr. Scratch, to whom he has sold his soul. Webster argues his case so eloquently before a jury (handpicked by Mr. Scratch himself) of famous American traitors and a hanging judge from Salem that Jabez gets off, and the devil is driven out of New Hampshire for good. Moore’s music has a fine New England tang, with plenty of fiddle and square-dance tunes, and it gets a rousing performance from a cast headed by Lawrence Winters, baritone, and Joe Blankenship, bass.

Hello Out There, Jack Beeson’s setting of a story by William Saroyan, is much less familiar. Beeson is a member of the Columbia University Music Department; his new full-length opera. Lizzie Borden, was given its world premiere this spring by the New York City Opera Company.

Hello Out There, which Beeson calls a chamber opera, is a much shorter work. There are only two principal characters, a gambler locked up in a rural Texas jail on a charge of rape, oi which he is innocent, and a rather plain town girl who attempts to help him escape before a mob comes to lynch him. Mostly, the music is a setting of the dialogue between the two, but Beeson happens to set conversation to music remarkably well, and his score underlines not only the flow of the words but their meaning. It is only at the end of Hello Out There that one realizes with what absorption one has been following the sometimes touching, sometimes ironic exchanges between the gambler and the girl. This moving little work is sung beautifully by John Reardon, baritone, and Leyna Gabriele, soprano, with Frederick Wald man conducting the Columbia Chamber Orchestra (Desto DST6451, stereo; D-451. monaural). On the strength of Hello Out There, not to mention Lizzie Borden. Mr. Beeson may have something to say about the immediate future of American opera.

Record Reviews

Brahms-Joachim: Hungarian Dances

Robert Gerle, violinist, and Norman Shetler. pianist: Westminster WST17093 (stereo) and XWN-19093

Brahms originally wrote his Hungarian Dances for two pianos, and they are probably most familiar in orchestral arrangements. But they never sounded better than they do here, in the violin arrangement of Joseph Joachim, Brahms’s friend and violin mentor (the Violin Concerto in D was written for him). Joachim’s performances of these vividly colorful, dashingly rhythmic works are legendary; Robert Ceric, himself a Hungarian, also infuses them with a fine feeling of open-air vigor and resplendently violinistic sound. This is the ultimate in gypsy fiddling, with a good variety of mood and flavor packed into the twenty-one dances.

Janáček: Missa Glagolitica

Rafael Kubelik conducting Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, with Evelyn Lear, soprano: Hilde RösslMajdan. alto; Ernst Häfliger, tenor; and Franz Crass, bass; Deutsche Grammophon 138954 (stereo) and 18954

This almost barbarically powerful mass by the Moravian composer Leoš Janáček is written in an obsolete Slavonic liturgical language called Glagolitic. Instead of the familiar “Kyrie eleison. Christe eleison‚Kyrie eleison‚” Janacek’s mass begins “Gospodi pomiluj‚ Chrste pomiluj. podi pomiluj‚'' and one is immediately transported to a craggy and rugged musical landscape almost Mussorgskian in its intensity. Janáček scored his mass for soloists, chorus, organ, and orchestra, and it was as much a patriotic and ceremonial work a religious work. With its vivid musical colors and strong folkloristic spirit, its popularity in its native land since its first performance 1927 is understandable. Here it ceives a brilliant recording in stereo, from performers equal not only its musical difficulties but to challenge of singing it in a strange original tongue.

Chants Patriotiqnes et Cocardiers

Michel Dens, baritone, with Orchestre de la Société des Concerts de Conservatoire conducted by René Challan: Pathé ASTX-130553 (stereo) and DTX-30533

If General de Gaulle collected records. surely he would prize this collection of French patriotic songs, sung with richness and grandeur by one of the Paris Opera’s best baritones. The range of emotion is considerable. from the Napoleonic nostalgia of “Le Rive Basse” to the dirgelike measures of “Le Cham la Liberation” of World War II. Also included are the “Marseillaise,” “La Régiment de Sambre et Meuse.” “La Maddon‚” and others less well known on this side of the Atlantic. The record is made available here through Capitol Imports, which thereby earns the gratitude of all displaced Frenchmen.

Marian Grundeff and Raymond Jessel: Baker Street

Fritz Weaver as Sherlock Holmes‚ Inga Swenson as Irene Adler‚ Peter Sallis as Dr. Watson. Martin Gabel as Professor Moriarty, and others: MGM SE-7000OC (stereo) and E-7000-OC

“My friend was an enthusiastic musician‚ being himself not only a very capable performer, but a composer of no ordinary merit.” Thus Dr. Watson describes Sherlock Holmes’s musical propensities in The RedHeaded League. One wonders how Holmes would have responded to Baker Street, a Broadway musical legend built around his exploits. He might have nodded approvingly, or at least tolerantly, at a song called “It’s So Simple,” in which the science of deduction is expounded with some musical wit by Fritz Weaver. He could have accepted the ragamuffinish tunes assigned to the Baker Street Irregulars by the song-writing team of Marian Grudeff and Raymond Jessel. But surely he would have winced at the banality of the melodies given to Irene Adler (who, at Least in Conan Doyle s version, was an opera singer) and sung with no great allure by Inga Swenson. The one supreme moment in this Baker Street original-cast album comes in a song entitled “A Married Man, a tender little tribute to connubial bliss. It is sung by Peter Sallis as Dr. Watson, at a moment when he expects to be blown to bits by a time bomb, and there is something triumphantly Watsonian about its straightforward, honest, and completely untimely sentimentality.

James Joyce: Ulysses — “Hades”

A dramatic reading prduced by Zack R. Bowen, with J. Tyler Dunn, Lawrence Hanratty, Richard Alan Hughes, and others; Folkways FL-9814 (monaural)

The Hades scene in Ulysses is the funeral of Paddy Dignam — pages 86 to 114 in the Modern Library edition. This recording of it is part of a series made under a grant of the State University of New York and designed “to provide a means of making Ulysses readily accessible to those uninitiated students who are experiencing the frustrations of trying to fathom the intricacies of Joyce’s compressed style.” Pedagogical though the purpose be, the effect of the presentation is to put the listener squarely in the carriage on the ride through Dublin to the cemetery‚ listening intently to the conversation of Messrs. Bloom, Power, Cunningham, and Dedalus. A narrator provides the purely descriptive passages, and a rather fragmentary effort is made to illustrate the many musical allusions with snatches of background song. Mr. Dunn, the narrator, speaks in a flat and American-accented voice that seems misplaced in Joyce’s Dublin, but the other participants convey extremely well the speech and die feel of the Joycean milieu. The result is that this chapter of Ulysses is made lively and human; the stream of consciousness never seemed to flow so clearly. A good many aids, guides, and keys to Ulysses have been published over the years, but surely none is more revealing or direct than the sounds of the words themselves. A printed text is included.