Alan BUSH, Arthur BENJAMIN,
Berthold GOLDSCHMIDT, Karl RANKL, Lennox
BERKELEY & THE ARTS COUNCIL’s 1951
OPERA COMPETITION by Lewis Foreman
The story of the Arts
Council’s ill-conceived opera competition
for the Festival of Britain in 1951
is of a classic British funding cock-up.
It was a starry-eyed scheme which did
not command the resources to implement
its outcome, compounded by competing
artistic factions and longstanding resulting
ill-will as a consequence of the publicity
attendant on the scheme. The four ‘winners’,
Berthold Goldschmidt’s Beatrice Cenci,
Arthur Benjamin’s A Tale of Two
Cities, Karl Rankl’s Deirdre
of the Sorrows and Alan Bush’s Wat
Tyler were perceived to be an embarrassment
to the organisers on account of their
nationality or political affiliations.
Yet the project had been carefully organised,
with a succession of assessments of
the emerging works that were being submitted.
The composers were anonymous, only identified
by a pseudonym, and thus even the organisers
had no inkling with whom they were dealing
until the competition had ended. Arthur
Benjamin chose the pseudonym "Stagestruck",
Alan Bush "Dudley Underwood",
Berthold Goldschmidt "Squirrel",
and Karl Rankl "Charles Francis",
while Lennox Berkeley who fell at the
last hurdle, was "Timotheus"
.
After the euphoria
in musical circles at the success of
Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes
in 1945, it was clearly thought to be
a positive move to encourage composition
of music for the lyric stage to build
on a positive climate. Three operas
were commissioned for the Festival of
Britain, though none of them was a total
success at the time. They were Vaughan
Williams’s morality A Pilgrim’s Progress,
first seen at Covent Garden on 26 April,
and certainly a succès d’estime
at the time, though not the full-blooded
opera that many might have been hoped
for, and its full stature only really
recognised after it had been recorded
long after. Secondly, George Lloyd’s
John Socman, a traditional opera
on the theme of a fourteenth century
soldier returning from the wars. This
was toured by Carl Rosa. An audience
success, as owners of the CD of excerpts
will know (Albany TROY 131-2), it was
a stageworthy traditional opera which
failed owing to backstage intrigues.
Finally, Britten’s Billy Budd,
not staged until the end of the year,
and being for an all male cast was not
seen as mainstream. (The first production
from 1951 is on CD on VAI Audio VAIA
1034-2.) Unfortunately there was no
opera from the competition that might
have crowned this activity, though Peter
Tranchell’s competing opera The Mayor
of Casterbridge, rejected by the
competition at an earlier stage, was
produced at Cambridge in 1951, and might
well have been capable of fulfilling
the expectations of the organisers.
Unfortunately it was side-lined by the
simultaneous production of Billy
Budd at Covent Garden.
The competition was
announced in February 1949 and a promotional
pamphlet was issued. It is not quite
clear who the Arts Council’s intended
audience for this competition was, but
there was an unprecedented response.
Indeed, one wonders if the Council knew
themselves, for clearly they were hoping
for entries of international stature.
It is quite clear that entrants, several
of them with experience of the German
opera scene before the Nazi era, and
the fact that they were living under
the post-war Labour administration,
the composers who were largely of a
politically left sympathy, expected
a socialist state to behave like a socialist
state and provide funding. Thus the
last thing that any of the entrants
expected was that the winner would not
be produced; they all approached it
with the utmost seriousness. The state
was commissioning an opera, this was
an important milestone. They would all
be disappointed.
There were several
stages in the competition. The first
deadline was to submit a form stating
the intending composer’s qualifications
and experience, over a pseudonym, by
June 1949, and when it closed there
had been an unexpected 117 applications.
This was sifted down to 61 who proceeded
to the next stage and were invited to
submit an outline.
At this stage the competitors
were still anonymous. Over a succession
of meetings during the autumn of 1949
most of the outlines submitted were
rejected by the judges. Rejected composers
we can now see included many of the
leading British musicians of the day,
including Malcolm Arnold, Albert Coates,
Arnold Cooke, Christian Darnton, Norman
Demuth, Maurice Johnstone, Clifton Parker,
Ian Parrott, Cyril Scott, Bernard Stevens
and Egon Wellesz. At this stage three
composers were short-listed and identified,
and only then did the judges discover
that they had chosen three composers
who had not been born in the UK, two
of them German. They were the Australian
Arthur Benjamin, who had proposed setting
Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities,
the musical director of the Royal Opera
House, Karl Rankl with Deirdre of
the Sorrows after J.M. Synge, and
Berthold Goldschmidt’s Beatrice Cenci.
Feeling that they needed a winning composer
with an English name they also hurriedly
considered the next three operas on
the shortlist, which turned out to be
Alan Bush’s Wat Tyler, Wilfred
Mellers’ The Tragicall History of
Christopher Marlowe and Lennox Berkeley’s
Nelson. Alone among the judges
Constant Lambert championed Nelson,
but after he died Lennox Berkeley was
forgotten on the remarkable grounds
of excessive modernism. Eric Walter
White, the Assistant Secretary to the
Arts Council, whose brainchild the competition
was, wrote to the chairman Steuart Wilson
about the first three commissions:
In some ways I think
it may be desirable for us to give publicity
to the commissioned operas as soon as
possible; but I realize that if there
is to be a fourth commissioned opera
and its composer happens to have an
English name, it may be preferable to
hold up press publicity until we can
include him as well as the three composers
mentioned above.
Nathaniel G Lew points
out in his AMS paper that the ‘competition
lagged increasingly behind schedule,
and by the time the commissions were
announced, the Arts Council had postponed
the deadline for the full scores from
September to December 31, 1950. Several
of the composers did not even meet this
new deadline.’ Thus there was no chance
that the operas could be produced in
association with the Festival of Britain
and when the Labour government fell
in October 1951 any further prospect
of official sponsorship of the winning
operas fell with them.
Berthold Goldschmidt
had recently written incidental music
to Shelley’s play Beatrice Cenci
for the BBC Overseas Service, and it
was presumably this which suggested
the play to him as an operatic scenario.
Berthold needed a libretto in a hurry
in order to enter the competition and
he turned to his celebrated BBC European
Service colleague Martin Esslin. His
timing could not have been worse as
Esslin was very busy and about to take
up a new appointment and he refused.
Berthold was focussed on him as collaborator
and he put on the pressure as only Berthold
knew how. To clinch the collaboration,
Berthold offered Esslin a 50% interest
in the work, and Esslin accepted and
produced the libretto in a short time.
Later Berthold discovered that the customary
librettists fee should be very much
less than that and tackled Esslin about
it, who, annoyed, responded by saying
that he had not wanted to do it and
had only done so because Berthold had
offered him such advantageous terms.
Berthold could not see it and they never
spoke again.
Berthold Goldschmidt
clearly viewed his work on the commissioned
work as serious and giving him a new
status. At this time he would visit
Box Hill or the gardens of nearby Polesden
Lacey, where sustained by sandwiches
and thermos flask he sketched his musical
ideas, working out the various strands
of the opera, and then setting them
into full score on returning home in
the evening. In the late 1940s Berthold
used to visit Rickmansworth in the warm
weather for outdoor swimming. At that
time the German community of north London
would visit Rickmansworth (directly
accessible to them on the Metropolitan
tube line from Finchley Road) where
there was a series of lakes, known as
The Aquadrome, where at this time there
was swimming with a little beach, deckchairs
and a small café. Here on a Sunday
was recreated a semblance of similar
outdoor facilities in pre-war Berlin.
Recounting how he approached
the composition of an opera to Sue Lawley
when he appeared on BBC Radio 4’s programme
‘Desert Island Discs’ Goldschmidt recalled
the ‘enormous interest in opera when
so many of our troops had been to Italy
and encountered bel canto. I thought
it would be nice to write a bel canto
opera’. It was clearly an opera written
for an English audience, and he went
on to say that Beatrice Cenci
was ‘an English opera written to be
performed in English’.
Berthold Goldschmidt’s
winning entry, viewed against its competitors
in the competition, may well be seen
as the toughest nut to crack among the
winners, not least because of its gruesome
plot. Of the winning operas Alan Bush’s
Wat Tyler was taken up in communist
East Germany. Bush, who had studied
piano in Berlin, had longstanding sympathies
in Germany, and had been present at
the first performance of Hanns Eisler’s
lehrstück Die Massnahme
in 1931. Bush used his communist contacts
first to mount a London concert performance
with himself accompanying at the piano
and then to obtain a production, the
first of several, on East Berlin Radio
in April 1952. It was staged at Leipzig
in September 1953, and at Rostock in
1955, a BBC Third programme production
followed in December 1956 and it was
finally seen in the UK at Sadler’s Wells
in 1974.
Arthur Benjamin, who
after all was a pupil of Stanford, was
more successful in penetrating the musical
establishment with his opera, A Tale
of Two Cities, and it received a
BBC broadcast performance in 1953 before
being staged by the New Opera Company
at Sadler’s Wells in 1957, and on BBC
Television in 1958. I have dim memories
of the crowd scenes on the black and
white screen, but nothing seems to survive
for us to revisit today. In many ways
it is the most successful of these operas,
with a wide appeal, and it is surely
overdue a full-blown stage production
in the UK.
However, Lennox Berkeley’s
Nelson was actually the opera
which most nearly met the criteria of
the Opera Competition, with its heroic
subject, its opportunities for elaborate
spectacle and its romantic triangle
between Nelson, his wife and Lady Hamilton.
It was the first to be seen on the British
stage when produced at Sadler’s Wells
in September 1954, when the critics
gave it a good reception, Scott Goddard
finding ‘the music . . . entrancing,
and there are things both moving and
startling in the score, generous expanses
of subtle music and keen points of dramatic
emphasis’.
Karl Rankl’s Deirdre
of the Sorrows remained a closed
book in the face of the composer’s insistence
that it should first be seen on the
stage, and unperformed it remained on
the shelves of the Oxford University
Press until their music department moved
their office from London in 1980 when
it was thrown out by them. At that time,
purely by chance, I had arranged to
have lunch with a friend who worked
at OUP. I arrived to find the place
stacked out with boxes and rubbish tied
up in bundles as waste paper. While
waiting for my friend I soon realised
the ‘waste paper’ was music going for
pulp, and persuaded my friend to untie
one or two. I thus found multiple copies
of the dye-line vocal of Rankl’s opera,
and was duly given one. It was this
score that much later enabled me to
programme two extracts to be specially
recorded by BBC forces for a programme
on the subject of Deirdre in opera which
was broadcast on 31 October 1995. It
was an eye-opener and revealed a vividly
imagined and approachable score on a
grand scale.
In the face of this
competition how did Berthold Goldschmidt’s
opera score? It is clear that when a
performance was not forthcoming, to
him conspiracy theory loomed large.
He had been commissioned to write an
opera, having been chosen by a procedure
in which he had not been identified
until late in the process. He had delivered
and it was now up to the commissioners
to complete their part of the bargain.
The motives of the assessment panel
in choosing Beatrice Cenci was
not known to Goldschmidt, and they may
perhaps also been seen as suspect by
us half a century later. Nathaniel G
Lew quotes the chairman of the judges,
Steuart Wilson, in explaining that the
panel had accepted Deirdre of the
Sorrows and Beatrice Cenci
"as much on their intellectual
value as for their music; as [A Tale
of Two Cities] is accepted on its
potential stage value." Deirdre
of the Sorrows and Beatrice Cenci,
by composers armed with full German
training, impressed the judges with
their sophisticated continental styles,
harmonic and contrapuntal mastery, and
engagements with psychologically complex
plots. Although the judges deemed them
stageworthy, they entertained doubts
as to their viability with English audiences.
Although the commission
fee of £300 was paid, the lack of any
news from the Arts Council and the consequential
dashing of Berthold’s hopes must have
been severely depressing. But not for
Berthold the hole-in-the-corner concert
performance at Rudolf Steiner Hall with
which Alan Bush had to satisfy himself.
He soon arranged for his many musical
friends and contacts to arrange a piano
run-through of the opera and the Arts
Council had no option but to host this.
Berthold invited as many influential
musical figures as he could think of,
though there is no record of who actually
attended. On 21 June 1950 he invites
Peter Crossley-Holland of the BBC to
‘a private run-through of my opera "Beatrice
Cenci" ... [at] the Arts Council
of Great Britain ... headquarters at
4 St James Square on Monday July 3rd
at 6 p.m’. Also there was Vaughan Williams.
Unfortunately it has not been possible
to find a written assessment or description
written by anyone present which might
have given us the flavour of that evening.
In fact, it is clear
that the Arts Council and especially
Eric Walter White were very embarrassed
by their failure to secure production
– or even interest - in any of the operas.
In his history of British opera published
many years later Eric Walter White does
not mention the competition. White turned
to the BBC, writing to Leonard Isaacs
on the possibility of broadcasting the
music and was asked to seek the composers’
attitudes. On 27th November
1950 he wrote from 4 St James Square:
I have now received
answers from three of the commissioned
opera composers.
Mr Berthold Goldschmidt
would be delighted to consider a broadcast
of "Beatrice Cenci".
Mr Arthur Benjamin
and Mr Karl Rankl are opposed to the
suggestion. The former says: "I
think it would be great mistake for
a first performance, especially of a
work so very obviously for the stage".
Mr Rankl says: "I think it is very
bad to have a broadcast of an unknown
opera previous to a real production"
adding that he would be delighted for
the BBC to broadcast his opera after
a real performance has taken place.
I believe that, when
you saw Alan Bush last night at the
audition of "Wat Tyler", he
expressed his approval of the plan.
This means that you
will have two operas under consideration;
and I hope both composers will send
you the necessary material as soon as
possible, as requested.
Isaacs passed the scores
on for reading by the panel but noted
his own reaction:
We are awaiting the
2 scores. In the meantime O.M. reported
on the Bush work, and I shall be doing
so as well. It was rather disappointing.
Leonard Isaacs 30.11
The panel who read
Berthold Goldschmidt’s opera were Benjamin
Frankel, William Alwyn and Gordon Jacob,
the first two later to make ambitious
attempts at opera themselves. Benjamin
Frankel’s assessment is clearly written
after expending some effort on the vocal
score and he was in no way superficial
or off-hand in his assessment:
CONFIDENTIAL
My first criticism
from an operatic point of view is that
there is practically no attempt at vocal
characterisation and the voices seem
often to gabble the (inordinately long)
libretto until they come to a significant
moment – which is then made "expressive".
No attempt is made to discriminate that
which must be clear and therefore
given help by a device (declamation,
recitative, speech) and that which,
being self explanatory can give
musical opportunities. The resulting
"setting" of everything indiscriminately
makes an amateurishly and often unwittingly
humorous effect.
There are excellent
moments and Beatrice’s music is often
lyrical & occasionally moving. Her
aria at the opening of Act II is very
good indeed but is approached so ineptly
from a dramatic point of view as to
make nonsense of her horror – and, incidentally,
the implication of the incestuous episode
in the prelude to Act II is too obvious
and painstakingly German a device to
be dramatically effective and remains
merely repellent, not quite the same
thing. Personally I think the work is
a cantata – with occasional splendid
& effective moments, but as an opera
I find it a failure. Shelley’s play
is full of tender portraiture and compassion
and infinite sadness. Goldschmidt has
managed the horror & the tragedy,
but not the characterisation, not the
human weakness & not in any way
the raw painting of the scene. The libretto
is impossibly long and as a broadcast
work it would be pretty nearly incomprehensible.
NO Benjamin Frankel, Feb 23 51
One also has a lot
of sympathy with William Alwyn’s objections,
particularly when assessing it from
the vocal score:
Musically the texture
is so closely interwoven that one longs
for a lull in the counterpoint and relief
from the gloom of the harmony. It has
impressive moments and at times there
is a lyric quality and one can admire
the thought that has gone into this
huge undertaking. I a dubious whether
two hours of unrelieved gloom is suitable
for broadcasting (the expense would
be enormous) – indeed I am rather of
the opinion that the subject is even
too repellent for staging.
W Alwyn Feb
14, 1951
It is difficult to
know what to say about this work as
a proposition for broadcasting. It commands
one’s respect as a very considerable
achievement, and it has power and dramatic
force and tension. It would take a great
deal of rehearsal and is, as Alwyn says,
exceedingly gloomy. This gloominess
would to some extent be made more tolerable
by stage-setting, but it is rather beyond
the power of the panel to recommend
it or not for broadcasting. It obviously
cannot be rejected out of hand, as much
invention and imagination has gone to
its making. Gordon Jacob 14.2.51
It is not clear whether
it was rejected and Goldschmidt notified
or not, but later in 1951 Rudolf Bing
wrote to John Denison at the Arts Council
from the Metropolitan Opera, New York
... The particular
purpose of this letter is to implore
you to rack your brains and see if there
is anything you can do for Berthold
Goldschmidt. I personally think that
his "Beatrice Cenci" is really
a very fine opera and I would love to
do it here, but cannot for the simple
reason that a new production of this
sort would cost $60,000. and I could
not, with the attitude of the New York
public towards contemporary works, hope
for more than three performances ...
Even "Peter Grimes", although
by a composer well-known here, had not
more than four or five performances
with diminishing and shocking box office
results.
... Failing all that,
is it not possible to find some reasonable
job for a worthy good musician like
Goldschmidt? He has, of course, enormous
operatic and musical experience. He
is a first class conductor (you may
remember he conducted Glyndebourne’s
"Macbeth" at the Edinburgh
Festival) and is certainly one of the
best musical operatic coaches that I
have ever met. He is an extremely nice,
honest and highly intelligent man whose
life now hangs in the balance both for
economic and, even more serious, psychological
reasons ...
Sadler’s Wells also
considered the score but in the end
rejected it ‘probably on the grounds
of its gruesome plot’ The initiative
to broadcast extracts now came from
Berthold Goldschmidt who first wrote
about it to Eric Warr at the BBC on
4 April 1952
As far as my opera
"Beatrice Cenci" is concerned,
I wonder whether it would not be practicable
to broadcast two or three excerpts from
it within an orchestral programme. This
is, of course, only a suggestion, but
I could imagine that the BBC audience
would be interested to hear some fragments
from the commissioned operas.
There is nothing unusual
in such a procedure as quite a number
of contemporary operas became known
by the "Bruchstücke"
prior to their stage-performance.
This was smiled on
by the BBC and eventually Leonard Isaacs
was asked to select extracts for concert
performance in consultation with the
composer. Berthold wrote to him on 30
November 1952 proposing the following:
a) intro to 2nd
act (pages 55-57 up to piu mosso)
b) Cenci’s aria &
Lucrezia’s Song "Unfathomable Sea"
(pages 75-82)
c) Orchestral interlude
"Nocturne" followed by Camillo’s
aria and Beatrice’s song (pp 118-124)
and possibly rounded of[f] by the orchestral
interlude that comes immediately after
it, ending on the ¾ bar, Bb minor-chord
on page 127.
The total duration
of this sequence would be 22 minutes.
It could be brought up to 28’ by the
inclusion of the Prelude to the 1st
act followed by the duo and terzetto
(Lucrezia/Beatrice and Lucrezia/Betrice/Bernardo
respectively (pages 1-12)
There always remains
"Beatrice’s Song" (4 ½ minutes)
as a "rocher de bronze".
This was accepted and
two broadcasts were scheduled for 13
and 14 April 1953. The extracts
from Beatrice Cenci were to be
in the first half conducted by Berthold
himself and the second half would consist
of Nielsen’s then little-known first
symphony conducted by Sir Adrian Boult,
a total running time of 64 minutes,
scheduled for an hour and a quarter
with introductions. Shortly before it
was due Frank Wade wrote to Eric Warr:
‘May I just check with you that the
excerpts from "Cenci" are
approved and agreed – our only reports
(attached) gave no clear decision. FW
24/3/53’ Eric Warr replied:
Mr Wade
The report on the
opera as a whole being doubtful
C.T.P. jibbed at the expense of mounting
it. Nor was he keen on undertaking
a cut version that would be less uneconomical.
The April performance is not, of course,
a cut version but a few bits extracted.
They were chosen – I believe in consultation
with L.I. – by the composer who must
know the best bits to extract for
an orchestral concert. We trust that
they are the "lyric parts"
& "impressive moments"
noted by Alwyn and the "excellent",
"lyrical" and "moving"
parts to which Frankel refers. Eric
Warr 25/3/[53]
The performance was
recorded off-air for the composer, and
it was probably Berthold himself who
played the recording to his friend Leonard
Isaacs, who minuted about it at length
when he was back in the office:
I heard a playback
the other evening privately of a tape
recording of the excerpts from the above
opera given in the Third Programme last
April or May under the composer’s direction.
The casting had not been faultless,
in particular Arnold Matters is far
too ‘good’ a man to be able to be convincing
as a revoltingly cruel villain and Jean
Grayston’s voice is far too weak and
spreading for the part of Lucretia,
but I was very considerably impressed
with the sound of the music. It had
dignity and here and there nobility
and the composer’s use of the orchestra
was sometimes really imaginative and
always completely professional. A good
deal of the vocal writing is stylised
– in the composer’s intention it concentrates
more on dignity of vocal line rather
than immediate characterisation – therefore
the question of casting is one of extreme
importance for the characterisation
has to come through vocal quality.
With this in mind I
must admit to having some doubts as
to whether we were right in recommending
to C.T.P. that he should not sponsor
the whole work.. It is that sort of
music which is pretty ineffective on
the piano. I do not know whether any
reports exist on the above broadcasts
(13th and 14th
May 1953) but I remain under the impression
that we ought perhaps to think again
about the whole work.
Leonard Isaacs.
However, soon after
this Isaacs left the BBC and became
the Principal of the Winnipeg Conservatory,
Berthold lost an important friend at
the BBC and the opera was forgotten
until revived in 1988.
So of the operas that won or came near
to winning, Goldschmidt’s Beatrice
Cenci is the only one on CD. Of
the others A Tale of Two Cities,
Wat Tyler and Nelson have
been seen on the stage or in concert
performances, while soon after the competition
five that did not make the short list
were also produced: Brian Easdale’s
The Sleeping Children, Peter
Tranchell’s The Mayor of Casterbridge,
Egon Wellesz’s Incognita, Arwel
Hughes’ Menna and Inglis Gundry’s
The Tinners of Cornwall. Apart
from the two extracts broadcast in 1995
Karl Rankl’s Deirdre of the Sorrows
has never been heard, not has Wilfred
Mellers’ The Tragicall History of
Christopher Marlowe, the other near
runner up, which was subsequently withdrawn
by its composer. Apart from Goldschmidt,
the only one of these to have been heard,
live, albeit a concert performance,
for a long time was Lennox Berkeley’s
Nelson, which was a memorable
occasion with the Chelsea Opera Group
in 1988 at London’s Queen Elizabeth
Hall, but even that was fifteen years
ago. The competition was held over fifty
years ago, it is time we revisited it
in performance.
This article first appeared in BMS
News Issue 100 celebratiing 25 Years
of the British Music Society.
British
Music Society Pages
