Opera in the British Isles, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand
The British Isles
The situation in England in the early part of the twentieth century is interesting because of the contrast between the work of continentally oriented composers and the efforts of others to create a viable opera of distinctly English character.1 To the former group belongs Dame Ethel Smyth (1858–1944).2 Following two early operas brought out in Germany (Fantasio, 1898; Der Wald, 1902), her principal work for the stage was The Wreckers, aptly described as “halfway between Tristan and Grimes.” Although written originally on a French libretto, this opera was first produced in a German translation (as Strandrecht) at Leipzig in 1906 and subsequently staged in English at London in 1909. It has been revived in London with success since 1939. The opera is set in Cornwall among folk whose livelihood depends upon their wrecking ships along the coast, where they are ripe for plundering, and within this setting there develops a tragic love story. Smyth’s next opera was The Boatswain’s Mate (1916), a comedy that had a fair success in England; two additional one-act operas appeared in 1923 and 1925. Other comic operas composed by English composers in the first half of the century include Lord Berner’s (1883–1950) Carosse du Saint-Sacrement (Paris, 1921) and Arthur Benjamin’s (1893–1960) The Devil Take Her (1932)—both witty one-act pieces in a fluent modern style.
A virtual expatriate was Frederick Delius (1862–1934).3 Born in England of German parentage, he lived most of his life abroad—first in Florida, then for a period of study in Leipzig, and from 1888 in France. Three of his six operas came to performance, all first in Germany. The best known of them, A Village Romeo and Juliet (1907), might from the story almost have been entitled “A Village Tristan and Isolde.” It is full of lovely music in a late Romantic style—rich in texture, chromatic, with long expressive lines for the solo voices and some fine choral scenes. A Celtic folksong idiom is apparent in some places, for example in Vreli’s song at the opening of scene iv. The familiar orchestral selection “The Walk to the Paradise Garden” (from the end of scene v) is typical of his style.
The British Isles produced a number of other early twentieth-century composers of serious opera in English, though few of their works have been revived. One of the great promoters of opera in England was Philip Napier Miles (1865–1935), who composed Westward Ho! (1913) and Markheim (1924). Among others whose operas had some success were Lawrence Collingwood (1887–1982), with Macbeth (1934), and Albert Coates (1882–1953), with Pickwick (1936).
About 1908 Rutland Boughton (1878–1960), an ardent disciple of Wagner’s theories and himself a composer of frankly Romantic tendencies, conceived the idea of founding an English equivalent of Bayreuth. One outcome of this project was the establishment of the Glastonbury Festival in 1914 and the production there in 1916 of Boughton’s The Round Table, designed to be the first music-drama in an Arthurian tetralogy.4 Boughton completed the tetralogy, but only the second part (The Lily Maid) was performed, in 1934. Meanwhile, the composer had achieved an unexpected success with a less ambitious but appealing opera The Immortal Hour (1914),5 based upon a story with references to a Celtic legend.
Joseph Holbrooke (1878–1958) shared Boughton’s interest in developing a repertoire of national opera and also turned to Celtic literature as a wellspring of ideas for theatrical works. Most notable among operas on Celtic legends was his mythological Welsh trilogy The Cauldron of Annwn drawn from The Magbinogion.6 It was broadly conceived along Wagnerian lines and written in a neo-Romantic musical style strongly influenced by Wagner. All three operas of this trilogy—The Children of Don (1912), Dylan (1914), and Bronwen (1929)—had successful premieres in London, with the first opera also achieving success in other operatic centers of Europe. This trilogy shows Holbrooke’s masterful writing for the chorus, as exemplified in the choral number (sung by young boys) that concludes Bronwen.
THE TWO LEADING COMPOSERS of the first half of the twentieth century, Gustav Holst (1874–1934) and Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872–1958), made significant contributions to opera.7 Holst’s Sāvitri (composed 1908; performed 1916), based on the Mahabharata, is a chamber opera of exquisite tenderness and simple emotion. It is in a musical style that suggests the Eastern setting of the story, without attempting literal imitation of Hindu melodies, and contains some beautiful writing for women’s chorus. In addition to the chorus, the work calls for three characters and a dozen instrumentalists, and is to be staged (without a curtain) “in the open-air or a small building.”When the score was published in 1924, it was designated a chamber opera, and from that time to the present that term has been applied to a specific category of operatic entertainment that continues to be very well represented to the present day.8 Holst’s principal opera, the one-act comedy The Perfect Fool, had successful performances at Covent Garden in 1923; the music shows the composer fully emancipated from the neo-Wagnerian tendencies of his earlier dramatic works. At the Boar’s Head (1925) is a Shakespearean intermezzo with words from Henry IV, a jolly work made up largely of traditional English tunes, somewhat in the manner of a ballad opera. The influence of these works is not to be reckoned so much by their outward success as by the fact that they represent the serious, original, and uncompromising efforts of a first-rank English composer in the restricted and rather thankless field of native opera.
Much the same may be said of six dramatic works by Vaughan Williams, who was wholly committed to the idea that “the art of music above all other arts is the expression of the soul of a nation.” After the writing of The Shepherds of the Delectable Mountains, a pastoral episode after Bunyan that has been frequently revived in England since its first performance in 1922, Vaughan Williams worked to complete an opera that had occupied his attention for almost a decade: Hugh the Drover; or, Love in the Stocks (1924). This is a balladtype opera, but with continuous music, set in a nineteenth-century market town in England. It contains allusions to a number of traditional tunes, usually without direct quotation, and is as thoroughly English in spirit as anything by Gilbert and Sullivan. Sir John in Love (1929), based on Shakespeare’s Merry Wives of Windsor, is the composer’s lengthiest work for the stage (four acts). The music is similar to that of Hugh the Drover, but more highly developed, both formally and harmonically—a truly English Falstaff, not unworthy of comparison with Verdi’s Italian one. Several recognizable folk tunes are quoted, such as the sixteenth-century “Greensleeves,” here sung by the character Mrs. Ford, who accompanies herself on the lute.
Following the writing of The Poisoned Kiss (1936), a tuneful comic operetta (with spoken dialogue) in which the tradition of Gilbert and Sullivan continues, Vaughan Williams produced Riders to the Sea (1937), a restrained but moving word-for-word setting (in one act) of John Millington Synge’s play of the same title. Here the vocal parts are in flexibly declaimed melodies and the harmonies are in neomodal style with much parallel chord progression, the whole having a subdued intensity of feeling that accords well with the peculiar atmosphere of the drama. Motifs heard first in the prelude and opening scene become the wellspring from which much of the musical material for the opera is drawn. The sea is the principal protagonist, an unbridled force of nature that has claimed six of Maurya’s sons. In her poignant lament “They are all gone now,” Maurya accepts that which she has no power to change: “No man can be living forever, and we must be satisfied.” A wordless chorus of women’s voices adds a mysterious dimension to the opera.
In 1951 Vaughan Williams brought to the London stage his last and possibly his greatest opera, Pilgrim’s Progress, a work that evolved over a period of forty years. It therefore is not surprising that some of the musical material in the opera is similar to, or even an exact quotation of, material found in several of his previously performed works. For example, music in the opening scene of Act I is quoted in the slow movement of his Fifth Symphony (1938–43). The opera score also includes several hymn tunes: “York” appears in the prelude and epilogue;“Monk’s Gate” is a hymn tune Vaughan Williams derived from an English tune. Pilgrim’s Progress is a “morality drama” in four acts, bounded by a prologue and an epilogue in which Bunyan appears. In the prologue, Bunyan reads aloud from his Bedford Gaol; in the epilogue, he offers this book to the audience. The opera builds to a glorious choral finale, with choruses both on and offstage singing “Alleluia,” as Pilgrim arrives at the Celestial City, the goal of his life’s journey. This opera holds in common certain traits of an oratorio and therefore can be classified as an opera-oratorio, a category of dramatic works that became increasingly popular after World War I.9
BRITTEN
Of unquestioned importance for the history of twentieth-century opera is one of England’s most versatile composers Benjamin Britten (1913–76), whose introduction to the operatic world came by way of his previous work for film and theater.10 In June 1945 his Peter Grimes was staged at the Sadler’s Wells Theatre in London, with Peter Pears singing the title role. That occasion, viewed in retrospect, heralded a new era in English opera, one that continues to be favored with artistic achievements at home and abroad. Britten selected the story of Peter Grimes as told in George Crabbe’s multi-sectional poem The Borough (1810), and he had Montagu Slater fashion a libretto about this fisherman from the seacoast town of Aldeburgh, whose boy apprentices had been found dead under questionable circumstances. The villagers point an accusing finger at Grimes, believing him to have molested and murdered the apprentices. Their ever-increasing persecution of him causes Grimes to take his own life.
Britten’s opera presents an admirably constructed drama, with music in separate numbers linked by orchestral interludes and a few recurring themes. It embraces an idiom permeated with the spirit of English folksong, while unobtrusively incorporating Britten’s own traits of color, rhythm, and harmony. An outstanding feature is the sensitive declamation of the text; the expertly handled choral sonorities play an important part in creating the stark dramatic atmosphere of the work. Most effective is Britten’s simultaneous use of foreground and background sounds to achieve a telescoping of dramatic events, as in Act II, scene i, when Ellen and Peter are arguing on the beach against the singing of the liturgy in the church (example 28.1). He also used cross-fading techniques to simulate an uninterrupted flow of musical material. A good example of this is the implied continuation of the raging storm in the second scene of Act I. Each time the door to the inn is opened by townsfolk seeking shelter, a fragment of the music associated with the storm (which had been heard in its entirety in the second interlude) is played. Throughout the vocal passages of the score, the orchestra is kept in a subordinate, accompanying role or is silenced altogether as in Grimes’s soliloquy (Act III, scene ii); it rises to prominence, however, in the six interludes, communicating a cyclic design of village life, the moods and events of the sea, and a return (through repetition of the orchestral music of Act I) to village life.
Britten’s next large-scale opera was Billy Budd, the libretto an adaptation by E. M. Forster and Eric Crozier of Herman Melville’s posthumous novel Billy Budd, Foretopman. The 1960 version of the opera, restructured from the original 1951 version of four acts, consists of a prologue, two acts, and an epilogue. Captain Vere and the crew of the Indomitable comprise the all-male cast: seventeen characters, a main-deck chorus of thirty-six voices, a quarterdeck chorus, and a quartet of midshipmen. The prologue and epilogue allow the audience to see the Billy Budd story through the eyes of Captain Vere, who, in his old age, comes to an understanding of the universal power that one human being can exercise over another. He has had to live out his days haunted by the memory of that fateful day when he chose not to exercise his authority to save an innocent person from death. That person was Billy Budd, a handsome youth falsely accused of plotting mutiny aboard ship. In defense of his innocence, Billy Budd struck his superior officer, the fatal blow witnessed by Captain Vere. Punishment for Billy’s action is decided by the drumhead court, its verdict told to Billy, offstage, by the Captain. During this meeting in Billy’s cabin, the stage remains empty. The orchestra fills the void, with a slowly moving progression of whole-note chords, each played at a specific dynamic level by different groupings of instruments (brass, woodwinds, strings, tutti) to portray the drama of that confrontation. Before Billy is put to death, he forgives the captain for following the dictates of naval law rather than those of the heart. The inner struggle of the drama—the opposition of “innocence and infamy”—is manifested in the bitonal clashes and in the juxtaposition of recurring themes.
EXAMPLE 28.1 The Peter Grimes, Act II, scene i
Peter Grimes—Britten. © 1945 by Boosey & Hawkes, Ltd. © renewed. Reprinted by permission.
Gloriana (1953), a historical drama set in the time of Queen Elizabeth I’s reign, was composed for the celebration of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. To capture the spirit of the sixteenth century, Britten included in his score lute-accompanied songs and dances from the Elizabethan period. Gloriana represents a pivotal work in that it builds upon ideas expressed in Billy Budd, while at the same time foreshadowing those explored in The Turn of the Screw11 Another opera he composed on a distinctly British theme is A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1960), based on Shakespeare’s play. Britten and Pears retained the original text (though abbreviating it considerably) to create a delightful fairy-tale atmosphere, complete with an opera within the opera (Act III). Each group of characters is associated with different kinds of textures and orchestral colors. In addition, the division between natural and supernatural characters is clarified by having the latter assigned high voice roles. Some beautiful numbers in the score include the duets in Act I, the comic rehearsal of the rustics in the first scene of Act II, and the ensemble for six boys at the end of the same act. But some of the mannerisms, such as glissandi in the double basses and ostinato techniques generally, are overworked, and a certain monotony of effect results from the prevailing color of high voices; in particular, the countertenor role of Oberon is dramatically unconvincing.
Britten’s operas for smaller performing groups include several chamber operas, an art form that the composer was interested in developing.12 Into this category fall The Rape of Lucretia (1946), Albert Herring (1947), and The Turn of the Screw (1954). Lucretia is a tragedy that calls for four female and four male singers (with two solo voices constituting a commentative “chorus”) and a small orchestra of thirteen musicians (piano, harp, percussion, five strings, and five woodwinds). Notable is the funeral march constructed upon a passacaglia form and the night music that accompanies Lucretia’s sleep, which is scored for bass clarinet and bass flute to illicit a mysterious presence. Albert Herring, a comedy drawn from Guy de Maupassant’s Le Rosier de Mme. Husson, is noteworthy for its fugal choruses. The same instrumental scoring as in Lucretia is found here.13 Perhaps the most unusual of these three operas is The Turn of the Screw (1954), a work that is a dramatization of Henry James’s tale, with music in the form of fifteen variations on a tone row, the first full statement of which is heard in the prologue. This row, however, is treated as a theme rather than by the usual twelve-note techniques of construction. Moreover, it is so conceived and harmonized as to produce an effect not far removed from conventional tonality. The music successfully captures the supernatural mood of the story (conveyed here by the black-note keys) in contrast to the natural world (with its seven white-note keys), but the dramatic material is almost too subtle to be effectively projected in the theater. Another work by Henry James, his short story Owen Wingrave, provided the basis for Britten’s opera of the same title, a work commissioned by the British Broadcasting Corporation that premiered as a television opera in 1971. Owen Wingrave is a story about the futility of war as seen through the lives of a professional military family, an attitude with which Britten, an avowed pacifist, could readily sympathize.
For more than thirty years, Britten shared the spotlight of his illustrious career with Peter Pears, his lifelong friend. Pears had not only sung the tenor roles in most of Britten’s operas but also performed as part of their celebrated piano-vocal duo. As a tribute to this artistic partnership, Britten created for Pears the role of Gustav von Aschenbach in Death in Venice (1973), his last opera.14 The libretto, written by Myfanwy Piper after Thomas Mann’s novella of the same name, is in two acts of seventeen scenes. The central figure of the opera is Aschenbach, a “famous master-writer” who seeks a life of fulfillment after having lived for years under the constraints of his own creative activity. His quest for a new life brings him to Venice, where various incarnations of Fate, each portrayed by the same bass-baritone, guide him to his inevitable dissolution and death. In the course of this journey, Aschenbach is ravaged by two forces, fear and friendship. The former is associated with the plague, the latter with his interest in a young boy, Tadzio, whose Apollonian realm is expressed in dance and mime and articulated by the exotic gamelanlike sounds of vibraphone and percussion. In Britten’s setting of the text, he relied heavily upon various styles of recitative, including one in which the pitches are notated but the rhythmic interpretation is entrusted to the singer. He also made effective use of orchestral writing to communicate the nonverbal aspects of the story, as in the overture, which bridges the time interval between the second and third scenes of Act I, and in the instrumental postlude, which sustains the final moments of the opera while Aschenbach silently slips from life into death.
Britten wrote two operas for children, The Little Sweep (1949) and Noye’s Fludde (1958). The latter provided a model for a set of three one-act operas with all-male casts, designed for church performance: Curlew River (1964), modeled upon Sumidagawa, a fifteenth-century Japanese nō drama; The Burning Fiery Furnace (1966), derived from the Hebrew Scriptures; and The Prodigal Son (1968), from the New Testament. Curlew River reveals Britten’s long-held interest in Asian drama and music, and like many of his stage works, it centers on the death of an innocent person. In this particular opera, the river is the focal point; it divides East from West, death from life, sanity from insanity. The tale is of a widow gone insane because her young son has disappeared. In her search for him, she boards a ferry, along with a crowd of people who are intent on gathering at a monument marking the place where it is said that the spirit of a dead child can work miracles. As the widow hears of how this child was kidnaped and killed, she realizes this must be her son. She prays at the grave and hears his voice; he appears to her in spirit and her sanity is restored. In keeping with the nō tradition, the cast is male; in the original production the madwoman’s role was sung by Peter Pears. No conductor is used for performances of Curlew River. Rather, the instrumentalists and singers proceed at their own tempos, pausing only at the “curlew marks” (a special type of fermata Britten designed for the score), waiting until all have reached that point in the music before they proceed to the next section. In this work Britten has created a unique “timeless” dramatic experience, in which Eastern musical influences are melded with Western traditions. All in all, there can be no question as to Britten’s signal importance in contemporary English opera or his significance as an original, skillful, and idealistic composer adapting himself without sacrifice of integrity to the practical conditions of his place and time.
OPERA IN ENGLAND had indeed taken on new life immediately after World War II, a period marked by many new and important works. In addition to those already discussed, they include a heroic opera, Nelson (1951); a humorous chamber opera, The Dinner Engagement (1954); a biblical pastoral, Ruth (1956); and Castaway (1967)—all by Lennox Berkeley (1903–89).15 They also include A Tale of Two Cities (1953), Mañana (the first opera commissioned by the BBC for television, 1956), and Taruffe (the orchestration of which was completed by Alan Boustead for a production in 1964), all by the Australian-born Arthur Benjamin; Infidelio (1954), a chamber opera, showing Schoenbergian influence, by Elizabeth Lutyens (1906–83); and Troilus and Cressida (1954) by William Walton (1902–83), a large-scale opera in an ultraconservative style that underwent several revisions but still failed to excite any interest in revivals.16
In the next decade, Lutyens created several more works for the stage, including The Numbered (composed 1965–67, but not performed), in which the characters know at what age they will die but are sworn to keep their age a secret from each other, and Time Off?—Not a Ghost of a Chance! (1968).17 In this same decade, Walton produced a second opera, The Bear (1967), an extravaganza that has become an international success. The libretto was fashioned by Paul Dehn from a one-act vaudeville by Chekhov and is a humorous caricature of three distinct types of Russian people, represented by the widow Popova (mezzo-soprano), her servant Luka (bass), and the gentleman visitor Smirnov (baritone). Walton mirrors the comic actions of the protagonists with musical parody and clichés. His scoring for chamber ensemble (strings, woodwinds, piano, harp, horn, trumpet, trombone, and percussion) enhances the fast-paced delivery of the text, which is often expressed in accompanied recitative.
A composer highly regarded by his fellow musicians is Alun Dudley Bush (1900–1995), whose four major operas are Wat Tyler (1953), which won a prize in Britain’s Arts Council Festival competition, Men of Blackmoor (1955), The Sugar Reapers (1960), and Joe Hill: The Man Who Never Died (1970).18 His impact on English opera, however, was considerably less than it might have been had his major works received professionally staged performances on his native soil. The reason they did not was more political than musical. Bush had become a member of the Communist Party in 1935, and he used his operas as a forum for expounding political views. Potential audiences at home did not share these views, forcing Bush to look elsewhere—namely, to Leipzig and other East German cities—for productions that proved successful and brought him public acclaim. All four operas were designed to communicate political messages; they were centered on the plight of workers who daily endure the oppression of a government official or an employer. Of the four operas, only Wat Tyler is known to have had a professional production in England (1973).
Throughout the post–World War II era there had been a growing predilection among British composers for writing operas in a more simplified mode of musical expression to complement the dramatic portrayal of commonplace events. Britten’s operas underscore this generalization; those of Michael Tippett (1905–98) controvert it. Tippett, author of all his opera librettos, was clearly influenced by contemporary theatrical works.19 By means of symbolism and allegory, he placed before his audience a world of myths, dreams, and fantasies. His characters divorce themselves from the commonplace and become absorbed into the primordial depths of ritualism. The premiere of The Midsummer Marriage in 1955 generated few laudatory remarks; a similar fate greeted King Priam (1962), The Knot Garden (1970), and The Ice Break (1977). Subsequent performances have altered those initial reactions and, with the passage of time, Tippett’s operas have achieved a prominent place in the present-day repertoire.20 All explore two realms: the real world and the dream world; there is also the role of a messenger (Sosostris in Midsummer; Hermes in King Priam), which some critics see as another manifestation of the role of the artist.
The Midsummer Marriage, the longest of the four operas, has the usual complement of arias, duets, and ensembles, but what is distinctive is Tippett’s emphasis on ballet. In the course of the opera, subjective hindrances to eventual marriage are explored and overcome through ritual dance. The path traversed by the lovers from ignorance about themselves to enlightenment is musically conveyed by brilliant orchestration and a directness of vocal declamation. Neo-classical forms are clothed in neo-Romantic lyricism. The theme of King Priam, a tragedy that draws its characters from the epic realm of Homer, is unavoidable destiny. Numerous monologues allow each character to set forth a particular situation that involves a conflict of choice, especially a conflict between desire and duty. In the orchestration, Tippett uses strings sparingly, even eliminating them (except for the guitar) in Act II.
The Knot Garden has no real plot. Seven characters move through the ritual maze of the garden, seeking transformation from a state of noncommunication to one of reconciliation, which will ultimately permit communication. The transformation, however, is not realized in the opera, and thus The Knot Garden, with its preponderance of duos and trios depicting collective rather than individual communication, might best be viewed as a prelude to the next phase of life, one that begins immediately after the last note of the score has sounded. Tippett’s preoccupation with “ritual rebirth” continues in The Ice Break. This fast-paced score uses music of the blues, in jolting contrast to the violence of amplified sounds and extensive percussion passages. The chorus, always masked, reinforces the violent mood with its terrifying shouts. Unexpected combinations of instruments and offstage choral and orchestral sounds further contribute to what has been termed Tippett’s “surrealist approach” to opera.
REPRESENTATION OF A YOUNGER GENERATION of composers in the British Isles are Iain Hamilton (1922–2000), Thea Musgrave (b. 1928), Alun Hoddinott (b. 1929), William Mathias (1932–92), Malcolm Williamson (b. 1931), Peter Maxwell Davies (b. 1934), David Blake (b. 1936), Harrison Birtwistle (b. 1934), and Judith Weir (b. 1954). Hamilton’s The Royal Hunt of the Sun (1977), based on a play of the same name by Peter Schaffer, tells a tale of atrocities committed against the Incas during the Spanish conquest of Peru. His score is composed in a basically tonal style. It calls for two mute roles played by women, one spoken role, and the remaining roles to be sung by male voices, the whole supported by a large orchestra and chorus.
Williamson is a native of Australia whose career has been centered in London. Although he has composed a number of operas, his best works in this genre appeared between 1963 and 1966. They include one chamber opera in two acts, The English Eccentrics (1964); two full-length operas, Our Man in Havana (1968) and The Violins of Saint-Jacques (1966); and two children’s operas, The Happy Prince (1965) and Julius Caesar Jones (1966).
Thea Musgrave, a native of Scotland, began composing operas in Britain as early as 1955. Her first was The Abbot of Drimock, followed by The Decision (1967) and The Voice of Ariadne (1974), the latter commissioned for the English Opera Group. The Voice of Ariadne, dedicated to Benjamin Britten, is an amusing three-act chamber opera inspired by Henry James’s The Last of the Valerii, a short story about a count who becomes enamored with the spirit of a recently excavated statue to the extent that he ignores his own wife. Not until the statue is buried once again does his interest in the countess resume. Amalia Elguera’s libretto adapts James’s retelling of the legend with an important variation: there is no statue to attract the count, only the voice of Ariadne (on pre-recorded tape offstage). No one but the count can hear this voice, a situation that creates some very humorous episodes. In the mid-1970s, Musgrave moved to the United States, and the operas she composed in that country are discussed in the next chapter.21
From the Welsh composer Hoddinott have come six operas for stage and television that have enjoyed considerable success: The Beach of Falesá (1974), The Magician (1976), What the Old Man Does Is Always Right (1977), The Rajah’s Diamond (1979), The Trumpet Major (1981), and Tower (1999). His librettist for three of them was Myfanwy Piper, skilled in writing original librettos as well as in fashioning them from other literary sources (in this case, the short stories of Robert Louis Stevenson and a novel by Thomas Hardy). Tower takes its title from the Tower Colliery in south Wales. This, the last working mine in the region, was about to close, but the miners who worked at the site joined together to purchase the mine, as the only means they had to save their livelihood. Out of this scenario Hoddinott created a documentary type of opera that speaks to the heart and soul of the Welsh population.
Also from Wales is Mathias, who wrote The Servants (1980) on a story derived from Iris Murdoch’s play The Servants and the Snow. The action is set in Central Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century and focuses on the ambivalent roles of servant and master on a wealthy landowner’s estate. Composed in the tradition of a “number” opera, in the sense that whole sections can be performed as separate units, the score places considerable importance on the chorus, which functions as an active protagonist.
Within the last quarter of the twentieth century, Peter Maxwell Davies produced a number of operas, including The Martyrdom of St. Magnus (1977), Le Jongleur de Notre Dame (1978), The Lighthouse (1980), The Doctor of Myddfar (1997), described as “a futuristic tale of a primitive society,” and Mr. Emmett Takes a Walk (2000), a “dramatic sonata” for three singers.22 The opera that best exemplifies his personality as a composer, however, is Taverner (1972). Davies began formulating ideas for this opera as early as 1956, when he first contemplated writing a libretto on the life of the noted English church composer John Taverner (1495–1545). The score was completed in 1968, but not before Davies had experimented with the integration of Taverner’s music with his own in the First Fantasia on In Nomine of John Taverner for Orchestra (1962).23 The opera explores the conflict between religious faith and artistic freedom as experienced by Taverner when he, in an act of self-fulfillment, agreed to create music for the Roman Catholic church, thereby tacitly affirming Christian dogma, which he would later find intolerable.
A characteristic of Davies’s style of composition is his penchant for expanding an already unique vocabulary with pre-Baroque sources. In Taverner this characteristic manifests itself in the use of Renaissance instruments to evoke the courtly atmosphere of sixteenth-century England and of musical quotations from liturgical plainchant and Taverner’s festal mass Gloria tibi Trinitas. Seldom can these quotations be readily discerned by an audience, for Davies intentionally distorts his borrowings to suggest, symbolically, spiritual and emotional transformations in his principal protagonist.24
Another composer whose works for the theater were produced after the mid-1970s is David Blake. He first came to the attention of the music world with his Ezra Pound cantata Lumina, written specifically for the 1970 Leeds Festival. On the merits of that composition, he was invited to write a work for the English National Opera company. The commission was fulfilled with Toussaint (1977), an epic-styled opera that expresses Blake’s beliefs about political, economic, and racial issues. In a program note to the 1977 production, Blake mentions that he wishes not only “to be entertained in an opera house” but also “to be intellectually stimulated, and, finally, to be made to take up a position.”25 Toussaint is a historically oriented drama concerning the transformation of Saint-Domingue into Haiti, the first black independent republic of the New World. The vision of Toussaint (who oversaw the initial establishment of the republic) to have a multiracial society in which tolerance and compromise would be the guiding principles was darkened by his successor, Dessalines, under whose reign “the whites” (meaning in this case the French) were driven out. Haitian drumming and voodoo chanting are incorporated into the scoring to evoke the island’s culture. Blake also wrote The Plumber’s Gift (1989), in which he invents an opera by Mahler.
The first opera Harrison Birtwistle composed, Punch and Judy (1968), has been aptly described as a “brutal ritualistic piece.”The opera is akin to a puppet play; the six main characters (each distinguished by a different vocal style) are complemented by some instrumental soloists, whose individualized parts are conceived theatrically. To further accentuate the interaction between singers and instrumentalists, Birtwistle calls for the wind quintet to perform on stage. The music is arranged in a series of succinct numbers that are molded into a cyclical repetitive format.
Almost twenty years after Punch and Judy came to the stage, the English National Opera gave the premiere of another Birtwistle opera The Mask of Orpheus (1986), which had been composed as early as 1977. Multiple casting is used for the principal characters:26 each is portrayed by a singer, a mime, and a puppet (with the last named having his or her words projected by an offstage singer). The singers also wear masks. Six “electronic” interludes, during which all action ceases on stage, articulate the overall structure. The orchestra consists of a large grouping of woodwinds and brass, three “electric instruments,” a harp (but no bowed strings), and a pre-recorded tape. Instead of presenting one version of the Orpheus myth, Birtwistle chooses to offer various versions of the myth simultaneously, with one version running parallel to another without regard for any contradictory events that might be contained therein. For example, in scene ii of Act I, two different versions of Eurydice’s death are presented at the same time. More recent operatic works by Birtwistle are Yan Tan Tethera (1986), an opera designed for television that is based on a northern English legend about rival shepherds; Gawain (1991), after Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; The Second Mrs. Kong (1994), an opera in two acts; and The Last Supper (2000). Throughout all his operatic works, Birtwistle explores varying facets of the same elements: myth, ritual, and time.27
One of Birtwistle’s early works for the theater was Down by the Greenwood Side (1969). It is a Christmas mummers’ play that was arranged for a musical setting by Michael Nyman (b. 1944), who is a composer in his own right and is considered to be one of the first, if not the first, to apply the word minimalism as a descriptive compositional term to certain types of musical design. In addition to his many other composing credits, including well-known film scores, Nyman wrote five operatic works, of which the chamber opera The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (1986), has achieved some measure of success. It represents Nyman’s attempt to bridge the gap between popular and “serious” compositional styles.
Judith Weir, native of Scotland, began her career as a composer of operatic material with a ten-minute scena, King Harald’s Saga (1979) for solo soprano. This was followed by a Chinese chamber opera, The Consolation of Scholarship (1985). Two years later, she again chose to represent a Chinese theme in A Night at the Chinese Opera (1987), in which Act II is devoted to a retelling of a Chinese Yuan dynasty play The Chao Family Orphan that is performed in a musical reconstruction that reflects the style of a traditional Chinese opera. This meant cutting the orchestral forces used in Acts I and III to a minimum in Act II to achieve an “oriental” sound.28 In Vanishing Bridegroom (1991), a three-act opera, she turns to her native roots and bases the libretto on three folktales taken from Popular Tales of the West Highlands. Weir writes in an accessible style that at times shows influences from Britten, Stravinsky, and even Messiaen. This is especially true in Blond Eckbert (1994), wherein the orchestra’s role as commentator is very important. In her later works she also makes use of minimalist techniques to achieve an economy of means.
Canada
The Canadian counterpart to the twentieth-century generation of British composers is represented by Harry Somers (1925–99), John Beckwith (b. 1927), Raymond Pannell (b. 1935), Charles Wilson (b. 1931), and R. Murray Schafer (b. 1933).29 Although opera has long been a part of Canada’s cultural tradition, with performances of the earliest Canadian score dating from 1790,30 the repertoire has been limited primarily to nineteenth-century European works. Not until the 1960s, a decade that saw the construction of many new theaters and the establishment of resident opera companies, did this situation show signs of change. The Canadian Opera Company’s performance in 1966 of the revised Deirdre by Healey Willan (1880–1968) paved the way for production of other Canadian operas, with some of the more successful ones designed specifically for radio and television audiences.
One of the most important operas to emerge from this period was Somers’s Louis Riel, commissioned and performed in 1967 by the Canadian Opera Company in celebration of Canada’s centennial.31 The opera is set during the time of the uprisings among the Indian-and French-speaking Métis that took place in 1869–70 and again in 1884–85. One of the leaders of these unsuccessful uprisings was Louis Riel, who, in the course of events, killed Orangeman Sir Thomas Scott on the premise that it was better to rid the nation of one man than to have that man block the will of a nation’s people. Ironically, some fifteen years later the same fate based on this very same premise befell Riel, whose execution was ordered by Sir John A. Macdonald, the prime minister. The text of the opera reflects the various ethnic divisions that were involved in this piece of Canadian history. English, French, Cree, and even Latin are woven into a score that is equally diverse in its musical styles, which vary from an actual folksong of the chief of the Nass River tribe to a contemporary Canadian popular song, diatonic-based writing, electronically generated sounds, and atonal writing for some of the orchestral music.32 The scenario of this opera—namely, the struggle between the French and English-speaking citizens of Canada and the ethnic conflict between the native people of Manitoba and the newcomers—is as real today as it was in the 1960s when Somers’s opera was first produced, for the Canadian government has yet to find adequate solutions for many of the same problems that confronted Riel and the Métis more than a hundred years ago.
Between the years 1979 and 1992 a number of operas appeared that were based on Thomas Mann’s Mario und der Zauberer (1929), a work described as “a parable on the rise of fascism.”33 One was by Somers, whose three-act opera Mario and the Magician (1992) incorporates almost all the episodes of the original story. The prologue to the opera has Mann (now named Stefan) delivering a lecture at Munich in 1929 (the place and date where his story was published), warning those in the audience of the impending threat of a totalitarian regime; he reappears in the epilogue, confirming that his prediction has come to pass with Hitler’s rise to power. The dramatic intensity of the opera is undergirded by a small orchestra, made up of a woodwind quartet, brass quartet, piano, harp, percussion, strings, saxophone, and accordion.
Whereas John Beckwith based all four of his operas—the earliest is Night Blooming Cereus (radio broadcast, 1959; staged, 1960) and the most recent Taptoo (1999)—on Canadian stories originating in southern Ontario, Raymond Pannell looked outside of Canada for material for his video opera Aberfan (1976). This highly acclaimed work recounts the tragedy of a mine disaster in Wales, when heaps of slag moved down upon a school and buried the children alive. A twelfth-century love story was the inspiration for Charles Wilson’s three-act drama Heloise and Abelard (1973), but the score gives no hint of the medieval setting, with its prepared tape, declamatory vocal style, and bitonal glissandos in the orchestral writing.
Of the composers listed above, R. Murray Schafer may be the best known internationally, not only for his musical compositions but also for his writings about music.34 His vocal works reveal an intense interest in the special properties of language. In his nonstage works can be found a selection of Tibetan, Egyptian, and Persian texts; in his operas, the librettos are often written in two languages, one of which is the vernacular of the country where the performance is staged. By introducing the vernacular, Schafer can heighten the dramatic immediacy of the events portrayed. This is certainly the case in Toi (1965) and in Patria, which is made up of a series of operas that are interconnected with musical and narrative themes. For example, one of those themes focuses on problems of loneliness and isolation caused by language barriers, ranging from those of the immigrant who discovers his “vernacular” cannot be understood by the other protagonists to those of a mental patient who is daily confronted with the medical jargon of a hospital staff. Patria, begun in 1966, is still a work in progress and, when completed, is expected to comprise twelve full-length operas, a prologue (“The Princess of the Stars”), and an epilogue (“And the Wolf Shall Inherit the Moon”).35
Australia and New Zealand
Alfred Hill (1870–1960) was born in Australia, but most of his musical education was acquired in Germany at the Leipzig Conservatory. While there, he also became well acquainted with the repertoire of the Leipzig Opera House. Hill composed his earliest operas for New Zealand, where he had taken up residence in 1892. His fascination with the music and dance of the Maori people of that country is evident in his first opera, Tapu, or The Tale of a Maori Pah. In this opera, which was staged at Wellington in 1903, Hill attempts to weave together aspects of his own culture with that of the indigenous culture of New Zealand. His second opera was a comedy, A Moorish Maid (1905), that premiered at Auckland. By the second decade of the century, Hill was back home in Australia, writing operas for productions in Sydney. Two were comedies: Giovanni, the Sculptor (1914) and The Rajah of Shivapore (1917). His final offering was a grand opera in one act, Teora: The Enchanted Flute (1929).36
Over the course of the past century, a number of Australian-born composers established a permanent residence abroad, and therefore their operas do not rightly belong in a discussion of “Australian opera.” Included among them are Arthur Benjamin and Malcolm Williamson, whose works (cited above) were written principally for London, and Peggy Glanville-Hicks (1912–90), a composer of four operas who lived as an expatriate in both the United States and Greece. Her opera The Transposed Heads, inspired by the writings of Thomas Mann, had its premiere at Louisville, Kentucky, in 1954 and a second production at New York in 1958.
There also have been foreign-born composers who have made Australia their permanent home. Felix Werder, for example, was born in Berlin in 1922, but in the wake of anti-Jewish persecution, his family was forced to seek a safe haven, first in England and then in Australia. After the war, Werder decided to remain in his newfound homeland. His contribution to the opera repertoire has not been substantial, with his offerings limited primarily to works that are in one act, as is Agamemnon of Aeschylus, a “mime-chant” opera broadcast in 1967 and then reworked as Agamemnon for a staged production in Melbourne ten years later.
Several other composers lay claim to being considered a part of the cultural heritage of both Australia and New Zealand. Gillian Whitehead (b. 1941) falls into this category. She is a native of New Zealand, and her first opera, the chamber opera Tristan and Iseult (1978), had its premiere in Auckland and was accorded a prestigious prize in 1979. Her music shows a strong influence from her studies with Peter Maxwell Davies in England. For the past decade or more, Whitehead has resided in Australia, where her three-act Bride of Fortune (1991) had its premiere. Her most recent opera, Rush, was commissioned to mark the two-hundredth anniversary of European settlements in Otago, New Zealand; it contains a considerable amount of singing in the Maori language.
One native-born Australian who has made a significant contribution to the repertoire of Australian opera is Richard Meale (b. 1932). His highly successful opera Voss (1986) centers on historic events that took place in the mid-nineteenth century. In 1845 the German explorer Voss dreamed of being the first person to journey across the Australian continent. To undertake this adventure, he received financial backing from a rich merchant. Although the overland expedition ended in disaster, Voss did manage to win the hand of the merchant’s daughter, Laura. The first of the opera’s two acts is set in Sydney in 1845; the second act is set in the Australian outback; and the epilogue relocates to Sydney in 1865. The score adheres to a post-Romantic tradition of opera, with the use of leitmotifs and bitonality, two of its salient features.37 A considerable period of time separates Meale’s first opera from his second, Mer de glace, which was staged in 1991. It consists of a prologue and seven scenes and is based upon events connected with Mary Shelley’s writing of Frankenstein.
New Zealand’s opera tradition has produced very few works by native composers, with those of David Farquhar (b. 1928), Ross Harris (b. 1945), Jack Body (b. 1944), and Christopher Blake (b. 1949) being the most important.38 Farquhar has to date contributed A Unicorn for Christmas (1962); the one-act Shadow, based on a story by Hans Christian Andersen, that was composed in the late 1960s but not performed until 1988; and Enchanted Island (1997), after Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Harris has had two of his operas produced: The Clockmaker (1979), a chamber opera, and Waituhi (The Life of the Village, 1984), with the latter incorporating traditional Maori songs into an otherwise standard type of opera score that consists of arias, duets, and choruses. Body and Blake have each produced one opera. Body’s Alley (1998) tells the story of Kiwi Rewi Alley, who lived for most of his life in China and rose to fame as one of the heros of the Cultural Revolution. Portions of the text are in Chinese and the score incorporates elements of classical Chinese music. Blake’s Bitter Calm (1994) is set in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century and relates the true story of a murder of a Pakeha family by a young Maori. The text is in both Maori and English.
1. For an overview of music by English composers of the twentieth century (and earlier), see Caldwell, The Oxford History of English Music: Volume 2, c. 1715 to the Present Day.
2. Biography by St.John. See also Smyth’s memoirs, Impressions That Remained, and Capell, “Dame Ethel Smyth’s Operas.”
3. See Hutchings, “Delius’s Operas”; Redwood, ed., A Delius Companion; and a biography by Jefferson.
4. The prologue, entitled “The Birth of Arthur,” had been heard earlier, with a piano substituting for the orchestra.
5. See Hurd, Immortal Hour; Antcliffe, “A British School of Music-Drama”
6. Scott-Ellis, The Cauldron of Annwn. (Note, the spelling of the place-name can vary from Annwvyn or Annwyn to Annwn.)
7. On Holst, see a study of his music by his daughter, Imogen Holst, and by Short, Gustav Holst: The Man and His Music. On Vaughan Williams, see studies by Ursula Vaughan Williams, Howes, Kennedy, D. Gordon, and Day.
8. Prior to the appearance of the term chamber opera with Holst’s score, there was an isolated instance of the term, in English, being used circa 1868; it appeared in the title of a published score: Beauty and the Beast: A Chamber Opera, by Stephen Glover (1813–70). Since the midpoint of the twentieth century, the frequency with which chamber operas have been composed and performed has increased substantially.
9. For a list of other works that fall under this same category, see the introduction to chapter twenty-five.
10. See the essays in Mitchell and Keller, eds., Benjamin Britten; Palmer, ed., The Britten Companion; Herbert, ed., The Operas of Benjamin Britten (with texts of all the librettos and illustrations of stage designs and costumes from premiere productions); and M. Cooke, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Benjamin Britten, Part II: The Operas. See also studies of Britten and his music by Holst; Evans; Headington; Mitchell; Howard; Carpenter; and E. White.
11. See Banks, ed., Britten’s Gloriana: Essays and Sources.
12. Britten expressed this intention in a letter to Ralph Hawkes (June 30, 1946), quoted in Carpenter, Benjamin Britten, 225.
13. Britten, in collaboration with Tyrone Guthrie, explored the delights of comedy with their adaptation of The Beggar’s Opera by Gay and Pepusch. In their version, which was performed at Cambridge in 1948, they retained almost all the original airs found in the 1728 score.
14. In this same year, Britten returned to his earliest work for the stage, Paul Bunyan (composed in 1941), and prepared it for performance at the 1976 Aldeburgh Festival.
15. P.Dickinson, The Music of Lennox Berkeley.
16. Howes, The Music of William Walton.
17. In the following decade, Lutyens brought forth several more operas, including Isis and Osiris (1976) and Like a Window (1977), the latter after the letters of Vincent Van Gogh. See Walsh, “Time Off and The Scene Machine”; Harries and Harries, A Pilgrim Soul: The Life and Work of Elisabeth Lutyens.
18. For an interesting discussion of these operas from the point of view of the composer, see Bush, “Problems of Opera.” Bush also composed two operas for children.
19. See studies by Bowen, Kemp, E. White, Whittall, and Jones, and articles by Warrack and A. E. F. Dickinson.
20. Two ballad operas and an opera for children were written by Tippett before World War II.
21. For bibliographic sources related to Musgrave’s operas, see suggested readings in connection with her American productions.
22. He also composed several masques and theater works for children. For more on Davies, see Griffiths, Peter Maxwell Davies; Pruslin, ed., Peter Maxwell Davies: Studies from Two Decades (containing many important articles that originally were printed in Tempo).
23. His Second Fantasia on In Nomine of John Taverner for Orchestra (1964) grew out of the completed first act of Taverner. See Griffiths, Peter Maxwell Davies, 141.
24. See, for example, the solo viola passage in Act II, scene iii, which represents a quotation in inversion from the “In nomine” section of Taverner’s mass.
25. Excerpts from Blake’s program notes for Toussaint, quoted in Porter, Music of Three More Seasons, 1977–1980.
26. Cf. with Stockhausen’s Donnerstag aus LICHT, which also uses multiple casting.
27. See M. Hall, Harrison Birtwistle; Adlington, The Music of Harrison Birtwistle; and Cross, Harrison Birtwistle: Man, Mind, Music.
28. Weir’s interest in combining Western and Asian cultures can also be found in new operas by Chinese-American composers. See chapter twenty-nine.
29. For the most comprehensive view of Canadian music in general and Canadian opera in particular, see the Encyclopedia of Music in Canada. See also Proctor, Canadian Music of the Twentieth Century; Cherney, Harry Somers; MacMillan and Beckwith, eds., Contemporary Canadian Composers; Opera Canada, a journal published quarterly; and The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, s.v. “Canada.”
30. Colas et Colinette by Joseph Quesnel (1746–1809), which bears a strong resemblance to Le Devin du village by Rousseau, is considered the earliest surviving Canadian opera.
31. Prior to the writing of Louis Riel, Somers’s one-act chamber opera The Fool (1956) and an opera designed for a television production Homeless Ones (1955) had been performed.
32. See The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, s.v. “Somers,” 4: 449.
33. See Porter, “Musical Events: Mann and his Music,” 72
34. In The Tuning of the World (1977), Schafer writes about his study of the sonic environment, which he terms a “soundscape.” He is also the editor of Ezra Pound and Music and of Ezra Pound’s (1885–1972) opera, Le Testament de François Villon (1926). For a comprehensive survey of Schafer’s life and works as well as an extensive examination of his writings, see Adams, R. Murray Schafer; and Waterman, “R. Murray Schafer’s Environmental Music Theater.”
35. For a list of the completed portions of this magnum opus, s.v. “Schafer, R. Murray” in The New Grove Dictionary of Music (2001).
36. On the early years of opera in Australia (1861–80), see Love, The Golden Age of Australian Opera. See also Common, “The Operas of Alfred Hill”;J. Thomson, A Distant Music: The Life and Times of Alfred Hill, 1870–1960; Gyger, Opera for the Antipodes: Opera in Australia, 1881–1939; Callaway and Tunley, eds., Australian Composition in the 20th Century.
37. See E. Wood, “Richard Meale.”
38. See Simpson, Opera’s Farthest Frontier: A History of Professional Opera in New Zealand; Simpson, Opera in New Zealand: Aspects of History and Performance.