'Reminiscences'
by Bill Harris
Second Part: "Some
thoughts on Opera"
I remember when I was
repetiteur for a new church opera by
Neil Saunders, I arrived rather early
at the church, and there was only one
other person there, a man who looked
like some kind of a workman. He was
down on his hands and knees, drawing
lines on the floor with a piece of chalk.
He turned out to be the lighting man
- a most important person in any production,
probably more important than I was,
for my work was almost over, and his
was really beginning.
This set me thinking
about the many facets which go to make
up an opera production: scenery, costumes,
make-up, props, lighting, sets, the
chorus master, the director of movement
or dance, the advisers on all manner
of things - the list is endless, and
many of them, unlike the singers, conductor,
and orchestra, are not even visible
to the audience! When I sat with a singer
friend in the canteen at the Royal Opera
House a woman passed our table. "She's
the French coach", my friend told me.
Later the German coach passed us: two
experts working tirelessly to get the
right sounds of another language into
the singers' voices.
Opera is the most exceptional,
and the most complicated art-form, but
also the most wonderful, in my view.
But what is happening
to opera? When I found out that one
of my favourite operas was coming up
for performance I became excited at
the chance of seeing it once again,
but later I saw some pictures of the
production in a magazine, and I had
my doubts. Was it going to be just another
of those 'silly' productions? In that
case I preferred to stay away rather
than having my evening ruined, and one
of my pupils, who saw it, confirmed
my fears.
I don't go to opera
just to hear the music (in this case
I knew the score quite well, having
played through most of it on the piano).
I go to an opera to hear the music in
a setting which is the essential background
to it, and which, in a good production,
makes an ideal partnership with the
music. I am not asking for a detailed,
'photographic' set showing every brick
in the prison wall (in "Fidelio") or
(in an "Aida") camels and pyramids,
as in a nineteenth-century production.
These things can be subtly suggested:
the sea, in "Peter Grimes" or the mountains,
in the middle act of "Carmen", but they
must be there, and the music
will do the rest.
When "Les Dialogues
des Carmélites" was brought to
the Proms in 1999 by the opera of the
Rhine there was, of course, no scenery
possible, and the single prop was the
bed in which the Prioress dies in the
fourth part of the opera. It was, however,
for me, the finest and most moving performance
of the opera I have seen (much as I
liked the ENO production in the same
year). What touched me particularly
in the Proms production was the exceptional
level of the acting, with complete conviction.
I did not miss the scenery at all.
What I do not want
to see are things which utterly contradict
both the story and the music, as was
the case with the ENO production of
"Fennimore and Gerda", with the floor
of the set being painted red, (as we
watched), a number of garden urns being
thrown into the trap-door, and a couple
making love underneath a grand piano!
Delius' beautiful score
and Mackerras's fine direction didn't
stand a chance in competition with the
irrelevant circus going on, on stage!
The ENO "Parsifal" in 1999 was also
disgraceful. Writing to a magazine which
deals with opera I described what we
saw when the first curtain went up,
and then quoted Wagner's stage directions.
These are not unnecessary or fussy or
irrelevant. They ask only for the things
relevant to the first scene of the music-drama
to be visible on the stage. When the
curtain rose, what we saw resembled
the vaults of a bank! In every conceivable
way this production parted company with
the composer's obvious intentions, so
that all we had of him was the music,
which prompts the question of whether
it might be preferable not to go to
the theatre at all, but to listen to
a radio broadcast. The music can sometimes
convey so much that an imaginative listener
might get more from doing this! Speaking
of Wagner' s intentions, one thing which
is obvious is his love of nature (as
with Delius). The director, in this
case, seemed to find nature repugnant,
or perhaps he was a hardened city-dweller
with an antipathy to open spaces? No
smiling Good Friday meadows for him!
If the magazine had
only published Wagner's stage-direction
to Act I, I think readers would have
been in no doubt about what the composer
had in his mind, as opposed to things
totally alien to him! They are no secrets,
they are there at the top of page seven
of the vocal score for anyone to read
(even opera directors!) (Needless to
say, my letter was ignored.)
It was in a mood of
foolhardy lunacy that I decided to embark
on writing an opera myself! I had gradually
armed myself by making a study of some
of the great practitioners of the art.
From Puccini I learnt (particularly)
about stage timing; there is seldom
an aria in his operas longer than three
or four minutes, and this keeps the
concentration of the audience on the
story. The libretto is often the first
hurdle for the composer (it clearly
was a problem for Britten to find the
right man for the job.) It did not bother
me. I wrote my own libretti, so I didn't
have to pay anyone a fee, and also I
avoided the chore of having to write
"Dear Mr. DaPonte", or "Dear Hofmannstahl,"
would you mind if I cut out half a page
in act two?
I found that the Italians
always get things over quickly, whether
death scenes or love scenes. The French
take a good deal longer - they wallow
in death! Valentine in "Faust" takes
nine pages of the vocal score to die.
The Germans usually take even longer.
Mussorgsky has always held a particular
interest for me. He is like a talented
artist who immediately perceives the
character of his sitter, and can make
it clear in a few strokes of the pencil
or the brush. He can even establish
whether this person is lying or telling
the truth! "Khovantschina" was a great
find for me, and I got to know it well,
long before I was able to see it staged.
It had a ruptured life: when the composer
died he left no full score, apart from
a few bits, and Rimsky-Korsakov (who
had already orchestrated the 'Persian
Dances' with Mussorgsky's approval)
had the job of making a full score of
the opera, based entirely on the composer's
piano score. Stravinsky and Ravel had
a hand in one version also, and eventually
Shostakovich was commissioned to do
a version for the Soviet film of the
opera, of 1958 (which I saw). Coming
even further forward, I found the ENO
production, (which I saw in 2003) superb,
and well deserving of the Olivier award.
I mention the case
of this opera because it proves that
great works somehow acquire a will to
survive against the odds: one thinks
of Mozart's Requiem, Schubert's eighth
symphony, Berg's "Lulu" and Schumann's
violin concerto (abandoned by Joachim,
and locked away for all those years
with an embargo on its performance,
emerging, when it surfaced again, in
war-torn Germany in the midst of the
Second World War!) Then, of course,
the most wonderful case of all of a
work miraculously saved by a brilliant,
persistent musician: Elgar's Third Symphony!
Coming down now from
the stars to the dust-heap with a bump,
my own operatic adventures brought me
into contact with a member of the Delius
family, Eleanor Inglefield, the daughter
of the composer's youngest sister. When
I met her, she was living in north Cornwall,
and I had read a book of short stories
she had written, one of which I felt
would make an excellent small-scale
opera. (So far I had written an opera
based on a play by W.B. Yeats, with
which I became dissatisfied. Eventually
I destroyed it.)
I only met Miss Inglefield
once, at her home in Cornwall, when
we talked about her story, and she gave
me full permission to adapt it to my
needs and make my own libretto. She
came to one of the performances of the
opera in London and wrote me a charming
letter afterwards.
The opera, entitled
"The Woman on the Hill" was a mixture
of science-fiction and religion. It
was not full-length, but was in two
acts and I used a chamber-group, which
I conducted. No critics came, but Malcolm
Williamson did, writing some very kind
words about it afterwards.
There are two stories
which have fascinated me for most of
my life. One of these is the story of
the submerged city of Ker-ys, off the
Breton coast, the subject of my next
(and largest) opera, "The Sunken City"
(in three acts, Prologue and Epilogue,
completed in 1992.) I spent years of
research before starting to write the
libretto, visiting the French Institute
in Kensington and the British Museum.
I also made three visits to Brittany,
exploring areas with possible connections
with the story. The opera has not been
performed, but recordings of a large
number of excerpts have been made.
The other story which
has always interested me is "Tristan
and Yseult', widely known chiefly through
Wagner's opera. I have written three
works concerned with this subject, and
published a booklet "Tristan and Yseult"
- what Wagner left out! ("The Secret
Kingdom" was a chamber work: and also
a 'Dramatic Cantata', recently recorded
following its first performance.)
Performances of operas
by British composers apart from Britten
are so rare that the public could be
excused for thinking that nobody else
composed operas in this country. Britten
was driven into becoming almost the
inventor of the chamber opera, I suppose
because this was probably the only medium
in which he ever heard his work performed,
in the early stages. Like the genius
that he was, he made a virtue of necessity,
and they remain among his best works.
Rutland Boughton, with
amazing persistence and determination,
wrote and performed seven operas with
the forces he could muster at Glastonbury
(according to the list printed in Michael
Hurd's excellent book) and they included
at least one all-time success, "The
Immortal Hour", which ran for five hundred
performances when it was put on in London!
It is good news that there may soon
be chances to see "The Queen of Cornwall"
... (another 'Tristan' opera). I enjoyed
"The Lily Maid" when I saw it at Chichester
in 1985 under Mr. Hurd's direction.
Despite enormous success
world-wide, Malcolm Williamson's "Our
man in Havana" seems to have been dropped,
and a chance to see "The Violins of
Saint Jacques" is surely overdue. Is
it really all to do with money, I wonder?
With a good production and favourable
publicity, would there really be insufficient
'bums on seats'? Perhaps ENO will live
up to the first part of its name and
surprise us one day!
There seem to be so
many operas by some of our finest composers
which have never had a proper chance:
Arthur Benjamin's "A Tale of Two Cities",
Lennox Berkeley's "Nelson", for instance,
and Bliss's "The Olympians". There are
also brilliant one act operas which
would be enjoyable to hear like Arthur
Benjamin's "The Devil take her", (which
I saw when it was done at the RCM when
I was there), Walton's "The Bear" and
the Holst one-acters: "The Wandering
Scholar" and" At the Boar's Head", a
Falstaff opera, with its dazzling array
of English folk tunes popping up quite
unselfconsciously - the very essence
of Shakespeare and Englishness!
Nobody could say that
opera has been ignored by British composers!
Inglis Gundry wrote fifteen operas,
and his former tutor at the RCM, Vaughan
Williams, wrote to him after a private
hearing of one of them (I have a photocopy
of the letter) - "I was struck both
by the quality of the music and by its
probable stage effectiveness, and I
feel that it ought to have a public
stage performance: but the question
is "how"? In Germany or Italy even quite
small towns have their opera house and
are prepared to give an opera of any
reasonable quality a public performance"
... Following on from Vaughan Williams'
point, as we know, Ethel Smyth studied
at Leipzig Conservatoire and had some
success in Germany, where obviously
chances were greater.
Passing on now to 'the
big boys,' the top of my list of candidates
for attention is Vaughan Williams' Falstaff
opera "Sir John in Love". I know there
have been performances (some of them
concert performances, though), and I
have heard broadcasts, but surely it
is the sort of opera which could even
be a Christmas draw, with all the buffoonery.
After all, it's our own subject. If
only they would try it one Christmas
and give "Die Fledermaus" a rest for
once? I have never actually seen
it staged! It would be lovely to see
"Hugh the Drover" and "The Pilgrim's
Progress" once again, too, and given
a really whole-hearted production for
once, but then, there are so many operas
I could add to the list, and all of
you will have your own priorities. Do
people realise how exceptional Delius'
"A Village Romeo and 'Juliet" is?
Well, I think the Germans
do. I heard that there was a recording
(by, I think, the Kiel opera) of "The
Magic Fountain". When I open my score
of "A Village Romeo and Juliet" my eye
catches, on the title page 'Romeo-und
Julia auf dem Dorfe" and 'Universal
Edition' - Wien-Leipzig'. Opening the
first pages after the curtain rises
I see the first notes of the singer,
in bold type, are accompanied by German
words, with English words below in fainter
type. So Delius was setting a German
text! Eleanor Inglefield told me that
the family always called Delius 'Fritz',
not 'Frederick'. Universal were the
first to print the score, and the German
conductors were the first to play his
music, but an Englishman, Beecham, was
probably the one who understood it best.
Delius was a citizen of the world. He
watched the cricket at Harrogate but
loved the mountains of Scandinavia and
the streets of Paris. He had a Gauguin
on his wall and he read Nietzsche!
I can never forget
coming out of Sadler's Wells Theatre
after seeing (and hearing) that wonderful
opera. It was like falling in love!
© Bill Harris
