MODERN COMIC OPERA

New Zealand Listener, Volume 20, Issue 514, 29 April 1949, Page 24

MODERN COMIC OPERA

Britten's "Albert Herring" from .2XN Nelson

ENJAMIN BRITTEN’S comic opera Albert Herring was first produced at Glyndebourne by the English Opera Group in 1947. The BBC later broadcast a production of it by the same group, with the composer conducting, and recorded excerpts made at the time have been issued as a 45minute programme. This will be heard from 2XN Nelson at 7.0 p.m. on Sunday, May 8. Eric Crozier, who introduces the programme, wrote the libretto for Albert Herring, and is also one of the leading spirits in the English Opera Group. The work is said to have come into — being when Crozier suggested to his — associates that a comic opera could be © made out of de Maupassant’s story Le Rosier de Madame Husson, about a village lad who is elected May King and spends: his prize money on a _ spree. Britten liked the idea and he and | Crozier planned a free version of the story as it might have happened in an English town 40 years ago. The hero (played by Peter Pears) is a shy, pleasant country lad of 20 who works for his mother in a greengrocer’s shop and has his misadventures in a small Suffolk town with all its richly varied characters. Nicknamed "the thermometer of modesty," he is a kind of harmless and gentle Peter Grimes. According to the published synopsis of the story, Lady Billows of Loxford combines an autocratic zeal for good works with a horror of immorality in all its forms, especially amongst the young and unmarried. She proposes to revive the May Day Festival, and offers 25 guineas as the premium on virtue, indispensable to the selected May Queen. Unfortunately a committee consisting of the vicar, the mayor, the local schoolteacher and the police superintendent, finds that none of the Loxford girls quite fulfils the qualifications. Why not a May King? someone suggests, and for a perfect candidate there is Albert Herring, who has never taken a girl out in his life, and whose reputation is spotless. Preparations are made forthwith for an old-style High Tea in the rectory garden, where Albert is crowned. The Value of Independence At the ceremony, however, he meets his friend Sid, a youngster who fancies himself as a lady-killer and is also given o practical jokes. As the glasses are lled with lemonade, Sid and his girlfriend, Nancy, dose Albert’s glass with a stiff lacing of rum. Immediately he demands more "lemonade," and back at the greengrocer’s shop that night he decides, in a state of intoxicated exhilaration, to imitate the flirtations of Sid and Nancy under the lamp post outside. The spin of a coin decides him to enjoy at least one night’s freedom, and he slips cut into the night to indulge in an orgy of unspecified debauchery. 7 The following day nobody knows what has happened to the virtuous May King, until someone finds, on the Ipswich Road, the wreath of orange-blossom he had worn at the Coronation. It has been crushed by a cart and everyone concludes Albert has been accidentally run over. A very moving ditge to his memory is sung by the whole cast and this is

interrupted by the arrival, filthy and defiant, of Albert himself. At last he has learnt the value of independence, and is determined to stand up for himself in the future. Such is the story of the opera, which is scored for a twelve-piece orchestra, and which seemed to some critics to have been conceived as a comic pendant to Peter Grimes. Comedy in the music is certainly not lacking, and neither is parody, as in the borrowing of the love potion theme from Tristan to foreshadow the potent effect of the lemonade and rum. How does it compare with Britten’s two previous works? Does it fulfil the promise of Peter Grimes? As in the case of Lucretia, John Klein says in Musical Opinion, the answer is in the affirmative. But it is a somewhat hesitant affirmative, for in spite of Britten’s astounding variety and ingenuity, he is inevitably handicapped by his tiny orchestra. "Nevertheless," Klein says, "Herring reveals fresh aspects of the composer’s superb talent. It is full of fun and gaiety, though at times a rather bitter gaiety. There may be nothing in the work to equal the inspired finale of the first act of Lucretia, yet it is on the whole a more complete and satisfying musical achievement. It is certainly a delightful, nimble-witted ‘work, with perhaps too many moments of sheer tomfoolery, but, on the other hand, what strange and _ arresting glimpses of humanity, of the most penetrating pathos and even of tragedy." Albert Herring in this slightly cut version, produced by Stanford Robinson, Head of Opera for the BBC, conducted by Benjamin Britten, and sung by Peter Pears, will be heard later from other National stations.