THE BEECHAM OPERA
THE season of opera in English at Covent Garden, which opened at the beginning of November, offers a programme of unusual interest. Tristan and Prince Igor are its oldest classics; Mozart, so it is rumoured, is being held in reserve for a special season of his own. The list contains hardly a single work that is not either a masterpiece or at least a novelty. Wagner is represented only by Tristan and Parsifal, Verdi by Otello and Falstaff. Except for a few Puccini operas on Saturdays, the commonplace popular operas that are obliged to form the backbone of every continental opera-house's repertory have been struck out altogether. It is certainly to London's credit that for so uncompromising a choice the response of the public has been enthusiastic.
As long as Sir Thomas Beecham was fighting the battle of English opera with dogged persistence and unstinted expenditure of material in the face of apathy and indifference, and possibly the hostility of vested interests as well, there was a very general feeling that his courage and high idealism should not be hampered by a too searching criticism of his performances. The Beecham opera has by now become an established institution, and it is inevitable, now that it has taken possession of Covent Garden, that it should be considered in a more impartial spirit. It need not fear comparison with the imported opera of the summer season. It has made its own high standards; but it follows that its performances must be judged in general by the standards of its highest individual achievements.
The present season has so far been something of a disappointment. Several of the operas to be seen have been given over and over again in the provinces if not in London. In the case of an absolutely new opera insufficiency of rehearsal may be pardoned; but it is not a sign of good management when the performance of stock classics is allowed to become slack and indifferent. Sir Thomas has not been seen very often at the conductor's desk, and this is the more to be regretted, since he has a most remarkable genius for pulling through a performance which in other hands would be always trembling on the verge of disintegration. He has very little sympathy with singers, it seems. He always tends to regard the orchestra as the main thing, and the singers as mere adjuncts to it, so that an opera under his beat might easily become a symphony with voices ad libitum unless, as, for instance, in Trovatore, the composer has understood voices and written for them in such a way that nothing could ever dominate them. Mr. Goossens follows in the steps of his master, but with less genius. The performance of Falstaff was instructive on this problem. Compared with that in the other Verdi operas, the treatment of the orchestra is so complex as to make it almost symphonic in character. None the less, it is an opera in which the voices must lead and the band accompany, for if this is not done the work at once becomes patchy and formless. It requires, in fact, that the singers should have a strong symphonic sense, should feel themselves all parts of a continuous vocal ensemble which must be kept going not by the conductor but by their own co-operative efforts. The orchestra can then accompany, and it must also play its part with a sense of vocal expression and individual personality. This is the real difficulty of Falstaff. As it was, the singers had little or no feeling for ensemble. I use the word in a large sense, meaning not merely the passages where several voices are singing simultaneously, but all those in which the phrase of one voice is answered directly, or even at some bars' distance, by another. Mr. Goossens did his best to hold the singers to a steady beat, but he allowed the orchestra to get very much out of hand. Mr. Percy Pitt has probably suffered too much from the old conventional Covent Garden routine. He lets the singers do more or less what they like, and allows the orchestra to play Wagner and Rimsky-Korsakov as if their music were no more interesting than that of Bellini and Donizetti. The one salvation of the opera season will be Mr. Albert Coates, who, even considered merely as a concert conductor, is in a different category from any of our English conductors. He adds to this a real knowledge and understanding of the stage, and a personality which has the quality of being able to get the best possible work out of every single person under his control. That quality is as rare as it is important.
The stage-management of the season has been, on the whole, good. Falstaff went with plenty of activity and comic business, if with nothing else. Indeed, there seems to be a pretty general tendency to romping, which might well be put under restraint. Romping may pass with some audiences as a substitute for acting, but it can never, even in English opera, quite take the place of singing. Singers, it must be frankly admitted, are the weak point of the Beecham company. Covent Garden, partly by its own acoustic properties, partly by its traditions, which no one who enters the house can quite forget, shows up vocal deficiency only too severely. Sir Thomas Beecham possesses only one really first-class operatic artist—Mr. Frederick Ranalow. He is a real actor, equally at home in comedy or tragedy, and always a real singer. It is because he is a real singer, singing all the time, that one never misses a single word that he says. He is a musician with a large understanding of the deeper things of music. His Falstaff forms a continuous line; as King Mark he makes what with most singers is a tedious recitative into a perfect song of rare beauty. Mr. Frederick Austin is a good second; but whereas Mr. Ranalow is a singer who is also a musician, Mr. Austin is a musician who also sings. Of the other male singers there is not much to be said. Some have voices, some can sing, a few can act and throw their words out. At the best they may in certain cases do remarkably good work in one or two special parts. Among the ladies the most interesting is Miss Sylvia Nelis. At present she is little more than a singer. As a singer she goes on steadily improving, in accomplishment of technique, in diction, and in quality of tone; indeed, there can be little doubt that if she continues at her present rate of progress she will from about 1970 onwards be annually enrapturing the Albert Hall with Home, Sweet Home. As an actress she has a good deal to learn, but with her intelligence and undoubted capacity for hard work there is no reason why she should not develop in this direction. Sir Thomas Beecham has hitherto confined her almost exclusively to coloratura parts; it would be well to give her a chance in some part that required bright and vivacious acting rather than vocal agility. Miss Agnes Nicholls has worked so hard to become an operatic actress that one regrets bitterly the non-existence of the Beecham company in the days when she made her first appearance. As it is, she has obviously sung too often in oratorio. That is the great fault of English singing. It has only two styles (apart from the ballad concert style)—oratorio or Gilbert-and-Sullivan. Neither of these will take a singer through Falstaff. Miss Nicholls did not happen to be in her best vocal form that evening; but her acting was surprisingly good—indeed, she was the only character on the stage, except Mr. Ranalow and sometimes Mr. Percy Heming as Ford, who gave one a real impression of a Shakespearean character. Miss Rosina Buckman has also improved, but is very unequal in different styles. As Isolde she sang with a firmer sense of rhythm than before, and if she did not act very convincingly, at least looked—in a black dress with a long white veil and a small crown—a figure of so queenly a dignity that it was not surprising to see Mr. Mullings as Tristan keeping a respectful distance even in the most passionate moments.
Stravinsky's The Nightingale was the nearest approach to a novelty that has yet appeared. Evidently it had been very inadequately rehearsed. The performance fell far below the level of the Russian production at Drury Lane in 1914. Miss Nelis as the Nightingale seemed to be the only singer who was certain of the notes to be sung, and almost the only singer who was taking the opera seriously. Stravinsky's music is a good deal less bewildering now than it was five years ago. The first act has a good deal of beauty: so has the third. The second seemed merely bizarre—but the performance did not do the composer much justice. A modern opera of such intricate difficulty ought to be staged properly and conscientiously or not at all.
There has not yet been time since the end of the war for foreign artists to visit England in the large numbers which were inevitable five or six years ago. Yet even though the givers of concerts are at the moment almost exclusively natives of this country, or foreigners who have definitely made England their home, the scarcity of concert halls is being very acutely felt. Almost every day there are three concerts at the Æolian and Wigmore Halls, and when operas begin at 7.45 or earlier, music-lovers have often to choose between their first act or their dinner. What is to happen when travelling conditions become easier and the annual foreign invasion reaches its full tide?
A new and very attractive series of Sunday evening concerts has been inaugurated at the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith, under the direction of Mr. Arthur Bliss. The programmes have been generally of a simple and informal character, with a liberal admixture of seventeenth and eighteenth century music, either for chamber combinations or for what may be called a chamber orchestra. Designed originally to supply the artistic needs of the Hammersmith neighbourhood, these concerts have, as a matter of fact, attracted a great many of the habitual frequenters of the more central concert-rooms. Mr. Bliss intends to continue his concerts after Christmas, and has announced for performance several works, both modern and ancient, which are of exceptional interest.
The Patrons Fund, originally founded by Sir Ernest Palmer, has resumed its concert-giving activities, but on new and much improved lines. Instead of giving performances of new English works at public concerts, the programmes of which contained nothing else but the music of unknown or almost unknown composers, it is proposed to hold a series of semi-private rehearsals in the hall of the Royal College of Music, at which the works selected are tried over and properly studied, as far as is possible within the limits of a single morning. The first of these rehearsals took place on November 13th, and it was very generally agreed that the new system was an undoubted improvement on the old. One could not help feeling that the atmosphere was both more friendly and more genuinely critical. There is undoubtedly a very strong feeling among all lovers of music in this country that the young British composer deserves far more encouragement than he gets, although it must be admitted that the young British composer is actually getting a great deal more than he did twenty or thirty years ago. Rehearsals of this kind are also of great educational value to the representatives of the Press, for in the struggle for publicity it is not always the most serious and genuinely original composers who receive the most attention in this period of violent and natural reaction against the overcharged emotionalism of the last generation.
EDWARD J. DENT