FIVE MODERN ENGLISH OPERAS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 37, Issue 946, 27 September 1957, Page 8

FIVE MODERN ENGLISH OPERAS

JURING the month of October YC listeners will have the opportunity to hear five operas by contemporary English composers, three of whichAlan Bush’s Wat Tyler, Lennox Berkeley’s. Ruth, and Vaughan Williams’s Sir John in Love-have not been broadcast in New Zealand before. The remaining two are Benjamin Britten’s The Little Sweep, from Let’s Make an Opera, and Walton’s Troilus and Cressida. "The history of English opera has been’ for the most part the record of three centuries of failure," wrote Edward Dent in 1928. "From the first attempt to introduce opera to English audiences down to the present day there has never been any period at which serious musical drama in the language of the country has been as firmly established among ourselves as it has been in Italy and France since the middle of the 17th century, or in Germany during the last 100 years." The year after these words were written, 1929, saw the first performance at the Royal College of Music of Vaughan Williams’s Sir John in Love, the text of which is based almost entirely on The Merry Wives of Windsor. In the preface to his score the composer touched on the consideration of nationalism, on whether an English theme could be approached with more success by an Englishman, when he wrote: "I hope that it may be possible to consider that even Verdi’s masterpiece does not exhaust all the possibilities of Shakespeare’s genius." Possibly because of the Verdi precedent Sir John was fot as successful as the composer’s earlier opera Hugh the Drover (which was: taken on tour under Malcolm Sargent not long after the first publication in 1924). For Sir John, though it had a number of. amateur performances, had to wait unti! 1946 for its first professional performance. The wait might have been even longer but for the fact that in June of the preceding year the Sadler’s Wells Theatre reopened after five years of war with the first performance of Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes, and the English operatic renascence was under way. No other first opera by any other 20th century composer, it has been said, enjoyed such. a triumph as Peter Grimes, for in the next few years it became (and has remained) a major box-office attraction in the repertory of theatres throughout the world. This success, wrote Eric Walter White, went far "to break down the inferiority com-

plex under which English opera had laboured for so many years." And in 1946, when the English Opera Group was formed, the prospectus read: "We believe the time has come when England, which has never had a tradition _of native opera, but has always depended on a repertory of foreign works, can create its own operas. . ." Four of the five operas to be heard this. month have been composed since 1948; one, Lennox: Berkeley’s Ruth, within the last two years. Wat Tyler, which is the first of the five to be broadcast, was one of the prize-winning operas in the 1951 Festival of Britain competition sponsored by. the Arts Council. Alan Bush’s opera, the first English opera to use an English historical theme, was the most fortunate of the four 1951 prize-winners. It was broadcast in 1953 on the Berlin Radio, and, as a result, was taken into the repertory of the Leipzig Opera, where it was played for two seasons with great success. Moreover, the \Leipzig production won Bush three further commissions for operas-from Berlin, Rostock and Weimar. In England, though excerpts were broadcast, no complete performance of Wat Tyler was undertaken until the BBC production of last December, the transcription of which will be heard next week. With a libretto written by the composer’s wife, the opera deals, as might be expected, with the Peasants’ Revolt

against feudal authority in ‘the year 1381. It begins with a Prologue, in which an escaping serf is told of "great things stirring in Kent" that may soon bring serfdom to an end. In the three scenes of the first act Wat leads a demonstration at Maidstone, rouses the people of Kent, then leads the march

— to London to petition the King for freedom after John Ball, the people’s priest, is released from Maidstone gaol. In the second act (also three scenes) Richard II and his courtiers decide on a‘meeting at which they will agree to the peasants’ demands, though they do not intend to keep their promises. The meeting takes place at Smithfield, and on leaving the King, Wat Tyler is stabbed to death by Walworth, Lord Mayor of London. The final scene set outside Westminster Abbey shows the King disavowing his promises: "Serfs you have been and serfs you shal] remain." The people think differently and in the final chorus affirm their faith in eventual victory. The Prologue and each of the acts of Wat Tyler is composed as a continuous piece of music, and each approximates to the general outline of a symphony, with the scenes as symphonic movements. "The orchestra is not, however, the battleground." Alan Bush has written, "The persons on the stage bear both the dramatic and the musical burden, the orchestra being designed as a support or, if you like, an accompaniment to their singing and acting." Wat Tyler will be broadcast from all YCs at 8.0 p.m., Thursday, October 3. In this BBC production the groups taking part, under the direction of Stanford Robinson, are the BBC Chorus and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. Immediately before the opera is broadcast there will be a talk on modern British opera by Donald Munro.