13 Opera in England: taking the plunge
My dear Imogen,
Thank you for your kind letter about Peter Grimes. I am so glad that the opera came up to your expectations, & it is sweet & generous of you to write so warmly about it. I must confess that I am very pleased with the way that it seems to ‘come over the foot-lights’, and also with the way the audience takes it, & what is perhaps more, returns night after night to take it again! I think the occasion is actually a greater one than either Sadler’s Wells or me, I feel. Perhaps it is an omen for English Opera in the future. Anyhow I hope that many composers will take the plunge, & I hope also that they’ll find as I did the water not quite so icy as expected!
(BENJAMIN BRITTEN , 26 June 1945)
Britten’s comments about the wider significance of his first successful opera in this letter to Imogen Holst written nineteen days after its premiere (Mitchell and Reed 1991 , 1268) were indeed prescient. Opera had in fact figured strongly in the worklists of British composers in the first half of the twentieth century: the genre was central to the work of Charles Stanford, Ethyl Smyth, Gustav Holst and Rutland Boughton, while Frederick Delius’s A Village Romeo and Juliet and Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Riders to the Sea contain some of their composers’ best music. But Britten’s Peter Grimes excited an unprecedented degree of faith in opera’s possibilities, sustained to this day . Since the Second World War, few British composers of any substance have been able to resist the siren call of what is still probably the most risky of all compositional undertakings, beset as it is by the dangers of multiple collaboration and the strong possibility that, because of the scarcity of funds, the fruits of many months’ (if not years’) labour will fall silent after the first production. For some composers (Peter Maxwell Davies, Harrison Birtwistle and Judith Weir are a few examples, along with Britten and Michael Tippett) opera has been crucial in forging or honing a distinctive style; sometimes (as in the case of Tippett’s King Priam ) it has been the catalyst for momentous stylistic shifts. For others – Jonathan Harvey, for instance – opera has been less central, though this is not necessarily to say that their work has been less powerful. Indeed, such is the volume and variety of operatic achievement in twentieth-century England that, rather than attempt a comprehensive survey, I have taken a snapshot approach, focusing for the most part on a few key aspects of the most influential works of just three composers – Britten, Tippett and Birtwistle – whose operatic outputs are especially remarkable in range and quality. Consideration of them is preceded by sketches of earlier works that are too often overlooked, and succeeded by brief samples of recent developments.
Delius, Holst and Vaughan Williams
It is difficult to find many opera composers working at the turn of the twentieth century who do not have something to say about Wagner, in words or compositional approach or both, and English opera is no exception. As Anthony Payne has observed, the music of Delius is ‘based to a large extent on Wagner, whose endless flow and harmonic aura Delius attempted to emulate’. This is tempered by Grieg, ‘whose airy texture and non-developing use of chromaticism showed him how to lighten the Wagnerian load’ (Payne 2001 , 164). There is in Delius little of the long-range harmonic momentum without which the unrelenting power of Wagner could not exist: as Peter Evans has written, Delius’s ‘chords are essentially local phenomena, sensitively coloured and spaced but accountable for their nature only in terms of immediate chromatic adjacencies’ ( 1995 , 180). So it is that the final bars of his best-known opera, A Village Romeo and Juliet (1901), are more a contemplation of the socially isolated lovers’ fate than a Liebestod -like denouement. Evans’s comment would seem to imply severe limitations in Delius’s technique. But in this particular instance Delius’s tendency to celebrate ‘the moment’ almost to excess is ideal for the task in hand, since the lovers choose (as Sali puts it) ‘To be happy one last moment, and then to die’. Nor is intense contemplation out of keeping with the rest of the work: Delius describes it as a ‘lyric drama in six scenes’, and, as Payne observes, ‘each scene is more concerned with presenting a spiritual state’ than furthering a dramatic plot line (Payne 2001 , 164). Given the importance of mood, it is no surprise that the evocative orchestral interludes, including ‘The Walk to the Paradise Garden’, well known as a concert piece, have a signal role to play: it is in these that the key emotional moments of the work are to be found .
Wagnerian principles, if not the Wagnerian harmonic vocabulary as such, continued to inspire composers born in the next decade whose nationalistic impulses drew them away from the perceived hedonism and individualism of Austro-German late romanticism. That
Holst started out as a committed Wagnerian is evident from
Sita
(1900–06), the eighth of his thirteen theatrical works. This derives its subject-matter from the Ramayana
, the Sanskrit epic, and is nothing if not Wagnerian in scale. As this extract from a 1903 letter to Vaughan
Williams shows, Holst was unable to see an alternative position: ‘I do feel sometimes inclined to chuck Sita
in case it is only bad Richard I [i.e. Wagner]. Unless one ought to follow the latter until he leads you to fresh things. What I feel is that there is nothing
else but Wagner excepting Italian one act horrors’ (Vaughan Williams and Holst
1959
, 12). Wagner did indeed lead him
on to new things, for Holst seems to have realized through the experience of Sita
that he was precisely the opposite kind of composer to the German master – one whose voice would best be served by understatement and a fundamentally modal, rather than chromatic, language (though chromaticism still has an important role to play)
. The new approach was essayed in Holst’s next work,
Nine Hymns from the Rig Veda
(1907) for voice and piano, and consolidated in his finest opera,
S
vitri
(1908–09).
Based on another Sanskrit epic, this time the Mah
bh
rata
, translated and adapted again by Holst himself, S
vitri
might seem designed as the very antithesis of Wagnerian music-drama. It is a one-act chamber opera of thirty minutes’ duration with a tiny cast of three plus a small chorus of female voices and twelve instrumentalists. The story is romantic (it is a variation of the topos, especially associated with Wagner, of ‘woman as redeemer’), and there are aspects of the musical style that clearly evoke Wagnerian practice (S
vitri’s impassioned, surging hymn to Life and a limited leitmotivic technique stand out in this regard). But the most significant debt to Wagner, the principle of endless melody
, is for the most part allied to a flexible modal usage, sometimes involving folk-like material, as in S
vitri’s song to Satyav
n as he lies on the ground on the cusp of death. This is essentially a love song, accompanied only by flutes and (later) double bass. Its detached simplicity is representative of the work as a whole. Generally speaking, textures are spare, and nowhere more so than at the opening, when Death, unseen, states his purpose unaccompanied. The tenor of the work is established to no small extent by entrances: that of Death, just mentioned; that of the first instrument to be heard, the melancholic viola (which repeats Death’s opening intonation); and that of the mysterious, unseen wordless chorus (supporting the first mention of the mystical concept of Maya). It is in such tellingly simple moments that the music most fully approaches the hieratic tone of the Sanskrit original
.
The most impressive opera by
Vaughan Williams,
Riders to the Sea
(1925–32), based on the play by J. M.
Synge, is also small in scale – only some seven minutes longer than S
vitri
and with a cast of only two more characters, though it does require a somewhat larger (but still chamber) orchestra. Little comfort might be expected at the end of this grim venture into realism, and little is offered. But Vaughan Williams does create a remarkable sense of release at the exhaustion of the possibility of further tragedy. This results chiefly from the quality of the E major that emerges as the tonic at the end. There is no sense of inexorable progression; rather, E is gradually and gently asserted in a number of steps, fully emerging, occasionally inflected with the Lydian fourth, at Fig. 47. The key does not go unchallenged: there are threatening reminiscences of the stormy
opening up to the final page. But it manages to maintain its tenuous authority, even though the work ends with the E major triad in its least stable, second-inversion position
.
Boughton and the Glastonbury Festival
Born slightly later than Holst and Vaughan Williams, Rutland Boughton achieved astonishing success with one of his operas – or music-dramas, as he described them (Boughton and Buckley 1911 , 15–20) – even though he failed to forge a language distinctive enough to build a sustainable reputation. His utopian socialist vision of the Gesamtkunstwerk led him to set up a Glastonbury Festival in imitation of Bayreuth in 1914. As Michael Hurd has written, Boughton’s ideas ‘had grown out of William Morris soil and were primarily concerned with creating a healthy union between art and ordinary people. Boughton proposed a community of artists, living and working on the land and exploding into “festivals” of artistic celebration at regular intervals’ ( 1984 , 435). The first project was to be a Wagner-inspired five-opera cycle on the exploits of King Arthur, the first one of which, Uther and Igraine , he had already written. The extent of Boughton’s ambition is apparent in his extraordinarily bold introductory essay to this work:
The following pages contain a half-taste of a work which achieves what Wagner failed thoroughly to achieve. I do not intend to depreciate Wagner, to whose work Buckley and I are so greatly indebted; but neither will I depreciate our work by affecting modesty in regard to our continuation of the German master’s drama. Wagner has opened the way to the perfection of modern dramatic art.
(Boughton and Buckley 1911 , 1)
Unsurprisingly, perhaps, Boughton’s initial vision for the Festival had to be scaled down (a number of performances were accompanied by piano rather than orchestra, for example), and it finally folded in 1927 – well before the Arthurian cycle was finally completed in 1945 – after one of the scandals that dogged the composer’s career (Hurd 1984 , 437). But the 350 staged performances, including six works by Boughton himself and early English musical dramas by Matthew Locke, John Blow (Venus and Adonis ) and Henry Purcell (Dido and Aeneas ), represent an impressive testimony to Boughton’s and his supporters’ energy and determination (White 1983 , 392–402).
It was at the first Festival that Boughton’s best-known work, The Immortal Hour (1910–13), was first performed. The work adapts a verse drama by William Sharp (1855–1905), writing as ‘Fiona Macleod’. Most of the music is not especially remarkable, but much of it is atmospheric and attractive, though one frequently finds oneself wishing for more incident and dramatic engagement. The opera had a staggering success in London, running for 216 consecutive performances beginning in 1922, with a revival of 160 performances in 1923. Eric Walter White’s explanation of this as escapism for an audience starved of music during the First World War (398) may seem plausible, but is perhaps unduly dismissive, since one of Boughton’s express purposes was to maximize the work’s accessibility. Much, though by no means all, of the musical material is modal, and a folk-like simplicity is cultivated in a number of set-pieces, such as Etain’s ‘Fair is the moonlight’ (Act I scene 1: quoted in Rye 1995 , 347, where it is incorrectly attributed to Act I scene 2) and the ‘faery’ tune ‘How beautiful they are’ (sung by ‘Unseen Voices’ at the end of Act I scene 2 and repeated by Midir towards the end of Act II). The chromatic passages clearly have their provenance in Wagner, but the symphonic development that is at the heart of Wagner’s musical language is not pursued to any significant extent .
Britten
As Hurd points out, Boughton’s Glastonbury Festival anticipated the festival founded at Aldeburgh by Britten and Peter Pears in a number of ways (Hurd 1978 , 31). Aldeburgh’s greater success, and Britten’s greater operatic achievement, is due in no small measure (over and above the sizeable matter of sheer talent) to the unremitting professionalism that informed all his musical activities. Once he had decided, after the success of Peter Grimes , that opera would become central to his career, he devised a working method – Imogen Holst’s description (in Blyth 1981 , 55) makes it seem like a factory assembly line – that allowed him to produce new works at a speed which, if hardly approaching that of Rossini, was nevertheless remarkable for the twentieth century.
Peter Grimes and Death in Venice (1973), Britten’s first and last ventures in the genre, have in common with Billy Budd (1951), Gloriana (1953) and Owen Wingrave (1970) one of the most rehearsed of the recurring themes in Britten’s operas: the isolation of an individual from the society in which he or she moves. This is especially evident in Grimes , in which the gulf between the eponymous anti-hero and the townsfolk is made palpable by the fact that, as Philip Rupprecht has pointed out, ‘Grimes and the chorus in fact share the stage only twice – during the opening inquest scene, and then in the Act 1 pub scene’; as Rupprecht goes on to say, ‘the remainder of the opera is a pattern of non-encounters’ ( 2001 , 34). In the pub scene the dichotomy is projected musically in two ways. First, Grimes’s ‘Great Bear’ aria opens up vistas of musical expressiveness utterly at odds with the habitual small-talk of the townsfolk – an expressiveness matched in intensity, if not in visionary tone, only by Ellen in Act II scene 1 and the quartet of women in ‘From the gutter’ later in the same scene. Second, Grimes’s off-tonic entry into the round ‘Old Joe has gone fishing’ (started by Ned Keene as a way of achieving community order) disrupts the flow, as Evans notes ( 1989 , 113), by augmenting and diminishing the rhythmic patterns, and creates considerable harmonic tension before the Borough, en masse , wrenches the music back to its original key, overwhelming Grimes’s voice in the process. Foreground and middle-ground harmonic tensions such as these have an immediate effect. Less obvious to the listener, but a vital contribution to the overall atmosphere of incompatibility, is the construction of the work at the background level of structure around the tritonal poles of A and E flat, though these do not often engage each other directly. As Evans argues, no hard-and-fast symbolic function can be attached to either key (this is, after all, likely to be lost on the listener who does not possess perfect pitch): it is the tension inherent in the interval that is symbolically significant (121–3; see also Payne 1963 ).
The viewpoint of Grimes ’s audience is the traditional one of the all-seeing spectator, who has direct access to the thoughts and feelings of all the principal characters. The audience of Death in Venice , however, sees events only through the eyes of its protagonist, Gustav von Aschenbach. Thus, in contrast with Grimes , in which narratory reflection plays such an important role (above all in the famous ‘sea interludes’ and the passacaglia), ‘We hear the environment as Aschenbach experiences it, we hear his gaze, as it were . . . everything the orchestra plays reveals Aschenbach’s sensory perceptions, and there is no independent orchestral voice’ (Rupprecht 2001 , 253). (There is, I would suggest, a pre-echo of this in the so-called ‘mad scene’ of Grimes – Act III scene 2 – which Britten encourages us to experience from inside Grimes’s head. After all, the women’s voices’ soothingly triadic, dolce ‘Grimes’ four bars after Fig. 49 can hardly be regarded as ‘reality’, given the aggressive choral utterance of his name to that point; rather, it may signal his sudden thinking of Ellen .) There are exceptions, however, as Rupprecht goes on to mention, and they are not easily dismissed. One of them is the final orchestral passage of the opera, which begins at the moment Aschenbach dies, and so may be regarded as an external viewpoint. Coming at the end, it inevitably colours our view of the whole.
Whittall describes ‘this extraordinarily atmospheric ending’ as conveying ‘the exaltation of Aschenbach’s release into death’, and points to the differences between the technical resources of the two operas by outlining the means by which this release is achieved: ‘The inescapable disquiet inherent in the total chromatic, however securely rooted, is dissolved into modal ethereality rather than resolved into the solidly hierarchic planes of the tonal system. We most definitely do not “progress” from one to the other, but the music evolves the conditions whereby the transformation can be effected’ ( 1990 , 262). As this implies, there is no tonal scheme as such in Death in Venice ; rather the musical drama is created through developments and transformations of motives and through contrasts and interactions of different types of material. In none of Britten’s other operas is the material more vividly or economically characterized. Particularly remarkable is the music first heard in Act I at Fig. 73 that, one might say, embodies Tadzio: this transcends its gamelan provenance (see Cooke 1998 , 220–44) to provide what Rupprecht describes as ‘a transfixed “sonic gaze”’ ( 2001 , 246).
In its swift movement – in effect, cross-fading – from one short scene to another
, Death in Venice
draws on Britten’s (and his production team’s) experience of creating what is still arguably the most distinguished opera commissioned for
television thus far,
Owen Wingrave
. Indeed, it is difficult to see how the effect of ‘that other, external
reality – the world around Aschenbach – [having] operatic life only as an object of his perceptions’ (245) could have been conceived without a televisual (or, at least, cinematic) model of how to melt away the substance of that external reality – the stage apparatus as well as the music – as Aschenbach’s thoughts and feelings shift. Meanwhile the harmonic and textural organization of both Wingrave
and Death in Venice
owe much to the innovations of
Curlew River
(1964), the first of Britten’s three ‘parables for church performance’. In taking on board aspects of both its
N
-play model and the heterophonic textures of other types of traditional Japanese music (Cooke
1998
, 130–89), this work dispenses with the progressive apparatus and textural alignment of conventional tonality that, even in his most radical vein, Britten had still drawn upon to some degree up to that point
.
Tippett
Eric Crozier, Britten’s librettist for Albert Herring (1947) and the co-librettist (with E. M. Forster) of Billy Budd , made it clear that, as far as he was concerned,
a librettist is a craftsman working for an artist. He may also be an artist himself, but his main job is not to write as the poet must write . . . but to provide his composer with words, ideas, emotion, actions that are all true to character, true in style, and infinitely capable of formal modification and reshaping to musical ends .
(Herbert 1979 , 137; emphasis added)
It appears that, after various problems with Auden (librettist of Paul Bunyan , 1941), Montagu Slater (Peter Grimes ) and Ronald Duncan (The Rape of Lucretia , 1946), Britten had found the ideal working relationship, later to be reduplicated with William Plomer ( Gloriana and the church parables) and Myfanwy Piper (The Turn of the Screw , 1954, Owen Wingrave and Death in Venice ). Many other English composers preferred to write their own libretti. In his essay ‘The words of Wagner’s Music Dramas’, published in The Vocalist of June 1902, Vaughan Williams comes to the conclusion that ‘there is only one man who can write the words of a musical drama, and that man is the composer of the music, for the drama must generate in the music’ (Vaughan Williams and Holst 1959 , 35). He had obviously changed his mind by the time he composed Riders to the Sea , which sets Synge’s play with only a little pruning. But these sentiments were shared by a good number of other English composers.
Chief amongst them was Tippett, who had already written the text for one musico-dramatic work, his oratorio A Child of Our Time (1939–41), before beginning work on The Midsummer Marriage (1946–52). The shortcomings of Tippett’s texts have often been observed, not least by Derrick Puffett: ‘I well remember reading, with mounting dismay, the libretto of The Knot Garden when it first came out, in 1969 (it was published before the score), and wondering what sort of music its author could possibly set to it’ ( 2001 , 139). However, it is clear from Tippett’s own accounts of his working practices that he could not operate in any other way; that his holistic approach (and, more specifically, an approach in which Jungian symbology played such an important role) demanded the possibility of words responding to musical or theatrical ideas (Tippett 1974 , 50–66). But whatever problems there may be with the libretti, Puffett’s other main criticism of the operas – that the later ones peddle a personal mythology rather than a collective one – seems more serious:
In pursuing the need to transmute his traditional, mythological material into images corresponding to ‘an immediate experience of our day’, Tippett has lost sight of the equally powerful need for these images to be based on something collective . . . Peter Brook never gave better advice . . . than when he counselled the composer to ‘choose a public myth and not a private one’ for his new opera [ King Priam (1958–61)]. It is not simply a matter of the audience being able to follow the composer without difficulty, as Brook averred. Perhaps Brook was too tactful to say what he really felt: that without the stabilising force of a mythological subject, Tippett’s work was likely to go off into a fantasy world of eccentricity.
(2001, 147)
It would certainly be over-reacting to dismiss the three operas Tippett composed after King Priam (The Knot Garden , 1966–9; The Ice Break , 1973–6; and New Year , 1986–8) on the grounds that they do, indeed, ‘go off into a fantasy world of eccentricity’, for, as Puffett acknowledges , they contain some impressive stretches of music. But it is equally clear that Tippett’s first two operas achieve much of their considerable power from tapping into ‘collective, mythological material’ – a nexus of common inheritance including (to mention only the most obvious) Mozartian opera and the symbology of the Jungian collective unconscious in The Midsummer Marriage (see Kemp 1984 , 209–77, and Mellers 1999 ), and the Greek myths concerning the Trojan war in King Priam .
Much can be learnt about the essences of The Midsummer Marriage and King Priam from their endings. The Midsummer Marriage centres on the psychic and spiritual journeys that the main characters, Mark and Jenifer, have to undergo in order to achieve ‘wholeness’. As the dominance of sonata form in the history of common-practice tonality demonstrates, music is particularly good at enacting the progression from ‘division’ to ‘wholeness’. However, as is often the case with Tippett, it is not easy to discern the systematic manipulation of tonal centres that one associates with sonata form (and common-practice masterworks in general), and it seems more productive to regard the type of music employed – and, as Kemp suggests, its sonorities – as being of the greatest significance (Kemp 1984 , 237–9). Thus it is the sheer energy of the final pages, born of madrigalian cross-rhythms (the finale is in essence a series of madrigals) and unexpected shifts of harmonic area – by turns transfiguring, as at Fig. 514 when the stage gradually fills with light, or explosive, as at Fig. 519, or both, as at Fig. 520 when ‘The stage is now in bright sunlight’ – that embodies and celebrates the completion of the quest.
The Midsummer Marriage has clear parallels with earlier and contemporaneous English operas. Though Boughton’s direct influence seems doubtful, the chorus comes close to fulfilling his ambitions for its operatic role, while the pastoral, magical and Celtic aspects have precedents in The Immortal Hour . Although Tippett’s plot is a good deal removed from Britten’s customary realism, the orchestral interludes take as central a role as those of Peter Grimes – and, like Britten’s, were also later extracted to form a popular concert work, the Ritual Dances . The more explicitly modernist tone of King Priam is easier to relate to the work of later generations. Its ending is one of the most disquieting ‘conclusions’ (a singularly inappropriate word) in all opera, and is as different from that of The Midsummer Marriage as can be imagined. Indeed, though there are moments of luminosity during the course of Priam – pre-eminently in Hermes’ hymn to Music (during the Interlude between scenes 3 and 4 in Act III), where Hermes (as Tippett’s mouthpiece) states why the tale is being told through music – the ending is untypical of Tippett in that most of his big, public statements offer unambiguously affirmative statements. The aftermath of Priam’s death is portrayed with what Tippett has described as ‘a few curious sounds that might represent our inward tears’ ( 1980 , 230) – desiccated sonorities with the merest hint of lyricism in the cello. As Whittall has shown, connections can be made with pitch structures from other parts of the work ( 1999 , 63–4). However, while these cannot be dismissed, it could be said that they are beside the point, for it is the numbed disassociation with what has gone before that counts. The break with the previous music is the most extreme instance of the most discussed aspect of the opera, its mosaic form. Unrelated blocks of music, very often non-developing and (more significantly) habitually non-concluding, are placed against each other. The ‘cut-off’ points frequently seem arbitrary, giving the overall impression that the music is not, so to speak, in control of its own destiny: the decision to move on to the next block is not intrinsic, but external. This is as powerful a symbol (again, almost an embodiment) of the hand of Fate – arguably the true central ‘character’ of King Priam – as one could imagine .
Birtwistle and after
Tippett’s mosaic approach has its provenance in Stravinsky (whose Symphonies of Wind Instruments of 1920 (revised in 1945) is the locus classicus of the form), and Stravinsky is also the model for the highly ritualistic mosaic usage in the first opera by Birtwistle, Punch and Judy (1967), commissioned by Britten’s English Opera Group for performance at the 1968 Aldeburgh Festival. It may be felt that what Robert Adlington terms a ‘compulsive short-windedness’ ( 2000 , 11) born of the abrupt discontinuities lends itself particularly well to depicting the notorious violence, as well as the comedy, of the traditional puppet show. But, as Adlington has argued, it is the absence of recitative that gives the opera (styled by Birtwistle and his librettist Stephen Pruslin as ‘a tragical comedy or a comical tragedy’) its unique flavour:
In Punch and Judy the lack of recitative only emphasises the extent to which this is indeed a ‘toy opera’. The ‘characters’ – puppets, after all – in being denied recitative are thereby largely denied opportunities for character development or the exercising of volition. Instead they are deployed in a succession of static situations, just as a child deploys toys in play. The motivation for the deployment is not apparent to the toys, but exists only in the child’s imagination. Their violent interactions, similarly, are best seen not as representative of some potentially cathartic, archetypal conflict, but as reflective of the more quotidian brutality of motiveless, childlike play.
(12)
A good deal of the comedy is to be found in the wordplay of the libretto itself, though it is difficult fully to appreciate the wittiest moments in the theatre: ‘Punch, that virtuoso of villainy, plucks pizzicati of panic and glissandi of gore in a toccata of torture’ from ‘Proclamation III’ in ‘Murder Ensemble III’ is readily assimilated by the ear (most of it is recited, by the Doctor and the Lawyer, on an octave E), but ‘Two times too lost four her sake./ Totem stool for hearse ache’ from ‘Passion-Chorale II’ demands to be seen on the page. As Adlington notes, the music itself ‘comes close at times to a succession of comedy turns’, with ‘many of the opera’s numbers [fashioned] into mini exercises parodying historical styles or forms’ (11). Not the least comical moment occurs when the putative narrator, Choregos, is himself tricked by Punch into being hanged. And in such moments of challenge to the ‘normal’ course of operatic events the work triumphantly asserts the capacity for modernism to continue to breathe new life into the genre.
But it is Birtwistle’s second opera (or ‘lyrical tragedy in three acts’) that most fully demonstrates its composer’s remarkable capacity for reinvention. While Punch and Judy was conceived, on one level, as (in the librettist’s own term) a ‘source opera’ – in fact, the source opera, as if it had somehow travelled back in time to create the conventions that, in its own time, it is parodying – The Mask of Orpheus (1983), based on one of the favourite topics of opera composers through the centuries, begins with the birth of music itself. It is a highly complex work, with a threefold representation of the central characters (Orpheus, Eurydice and Aristaeus are each played by singer, mime and puppet), frequently dense counterpoint of orchestral layers, and various electronic components (brilliantly realized by Barry Anderson at IRCAM in Paris). But it is the non-linear plot, resulting from the concatenation of various Orphic myths and from events being revisited and seen from different angles, that most fully characterizes the work. The discontinuities can be over-emphasized, however. Adlington notes that ‘the directness of the music is potentially a surprising revelation for a work whose notoriety since its premiere came to rest largely on the fastidious complexities of its libretto’ ( 1998 , 43). Later he writes of the ‘unapologetically goal-directed musical structure’, and notes elsewhere that the music ‘frequently takes a stake in the raw drama of the narrative, in just the manner that the rigorous formalism of Zinovieff’s text denies. The music’s very continuousness does much to maintain the unbroken theatrical spell – the tinge of realism – that was so consistently disrupted in Punch and Judy ’ (2000, 20). The listener’s (if not the spectator’s) final impression of the work, looking back over the whole, is likely to be a progression towards what Whittall has described as ‘the archetypal Birtwistle conclusion, establishing an equilibrium between focusing and dissolving which, for all its reliance on centricity, creates no “tonal” hang-ups’ ( 1998 , 55). The centre referred to here is the E that recurs, often spread over several octaves, during Act III (it provides the starting-point for the various returns of the Love Duet, for example). Significantly, E is always a point of departure, never a point of contraction (which explains why there are no ‘“tonal” hang-ups’). Always unheralded, its various appearances seem to be in the manner of external intrusions similar to the imposed breaks between the blocks in King Priam . Again, the symbolism suggests the hand of Fate: Birtwistle’s and Zinovieff’s underlying metaphor for Act III is the inexorable movement of the tides. The effect, though, is rather different: as most commentators have observed, the central concerns of The Mask of Orpheus are Time and Memory, and in Jonathan Cross’s words, ‘by the end of the Act, events have become so attenuated that the E of the tides is about all one can fix on. Fragments are layered on top of this . . . but we are left in something like a dream world, an eternal present, the product only of memory’ ( 2000 , 107).
While the quality of the music of The Mask of Orpheus (which in Act III ranks as high as anything the composer has written) may be equalled in his ensuing operas ( Yan Tan Tethera , 1984; Gawain , 1991; The Second Mrs Kong , 1994; and The Last Supper , 1999), Birtwistle’s second opera is likely to remain at the core of discussions of his achievements, and its originality and colossal ambition should ensure that it remains a benchmark of late twentieth-century musical theatre of whatever provenance . The operas of the other members of the so-called Manchester School, Peter Maxwell Davies and Alexander Goehr, are less spectacularly innovative and, while containing much that is impressive on a purely musical level, generally lack Birtwistle’s dramatic sensibility. Thus Davies’s Taverner (1962–8), which follows the composer John Taverner’s betrayal of his art through misguided political idealism, suffers from pressing its central concern – the transformation from one state into its opposite – rather too laboriously. And it makes impractical demands on the audience’s powers of perception, requiring a highly tuned ability not only to detect markedly transformed versions of the plainchants that are Davies’s basic material, but also to recall their texts, if the fundamental symbolism is to be appreciated. (Introducing a BBC studio recording broadcast on 2 April 1997, Davies talked about the ‘slight optimism’ at the end of the work, which depends on the listener spotting an easily missed reworking of a fragment of a plainchant for the Resurrection in the cello at six bars after Fig. 290. )
Given my commentary so far, it might seem that, although parallels can often be observed between different works by different composers, little emerges in the way of an English operatic tradition as such. The work of subsequent generations – composers like Robin Holloway, Jonathan Harvey, Oliver Knussen, Judith Weir and Mark-Anthony Turnage – reinforces this view. All of these figures, who have come to prominence in an era of unprecedented pluralism, display a degree of indebtedness to one or both of Britten and Tippett, but the differences between them are more striking – from the luscious romanticism of Holloway’s Clarissa (1976), to the playful and manifold allusions of Knussen’s Where the Wild Things Are (1979–83), the electronically underpinned psychic journey of Harvey’s Inquest of Love (1991–2), the multiple rôle-playing of Weir’s King Harald’s Saga (1979), and the ingenious mixture of kitchen-sink drama (with its references to popular culture) and Greek myth in Turnage’s Greek (1986–8). King Harald’s Saga might seem out of place in this chapter, since it is written for just one performer; yet it achieves a sense of breadth (and an engagement with the essential features of ‘grand’ opera, actually being entitled ‘grand opera in 3 acts’) that belies the length of its cast-list and its duration. Weir has said of the singer’s task:
I find that making a singer play several characters draws out much more interesting work from them, and they begin to define their characters in much more scientific ways. In the classic operatic production there are stock characters and the singers have rather trivial, anecdotal ways of getting into them. So if a singer is suddenly plunged into King Harald’s Saga where they have to be about nine characters, they have to think hard about making these characters different people .
(Ford 1993 , 109–10)
Multiple rôle-playing is also required in Weir’s A Night at the Chinese Opera (1987), a work that shows pluralism to its best advantage in its mixture of comedy and moral seriousness couched in a language that, whilst drawing chiefly on materials and procedures familiar from the extended-tonal past, rarely takes the easy expressive option. Harvey’s Inquest of Love , with its resonances of The Midsummer Marriage in its ‘strange story of weddings, murders, and the quest for understanding, healing, and forgiveness in the afterlife’ (Harvey 1999 , 54), exemplifies the continuing relevance of the modernist legacy to an institution that Boulez famously decreed should be blown up. That operatic composition in England should survive his injunction might never have been in serious doubt; that English composers continue to take the operatic plunge with such variety and inventiveness despite the infrastructural problems mentioned at the beginning of this chapter is testimony to the continuing potential of the richest of all musical genres as well as the strength of English composition in general.