THE RESURRECTION OF AN OPERA
IT was Dr. Vaughan Williams who, sometime about 1912 or 1913, suggested Purcell's opera The Fairy Queen for performance at Cambridge. In 1911 Mr. Clive Carey and a few others had organised at Cambridge a performance of The Magic Flute. Mozart's last and greatest work for the stage was in those days not so familiar to English audiences as it is now. It had not been seen in this country, as far as I am aware, since it was given by the students of the Royal College of Music about twenty years ago. That it should be attempted by Cambridge amateurs was regarded as preposterous—even Covent Garden had shied at it. But the promoters of the Cambridge opera were less nervous. If they had confidence, it was a confidence in Mozart and in the opera rather than in themselves. They knew the opera intimately enough to have convinced themselves that the chief difficulty of The Magic Flute lay not in the extreme compass of the two parts of Sarastro and the Queen of Night, but first in the necessity for a clear and logical exposition of the story, secondly in the complication of the ensemble numbers, and thirdly perhaps in the psychology of what is really the most difficult part of all, the Orator (Der Sprecher). If singers could be found who were prepared to sing the parts of Gabriel and Raphael in The Creation, they could make at least a decent show of Sarastro and the Queen. Ensemble singing was merely a matter of musicianship and hard work; the personality of the Orator was of necessity a question largely of luck in finding the right man and coaching him intelligently. The producers of the Cambridge performance were guided by two principles, to aim at clearness and unity of style rather than at magnificence, and to pin their faith to a great dramatic composer rather than to a star cast.
The reception given to The Magic Flute encouraged them to consider the possibility of performing another opera in 1914. Several operas had been passed in review when Dr. Vaughan Williams made his brilliant suggestion, a suggestion which was very quickly adopted. The opera was prepared for performance and put into rehearsal in the summer of 1914, with a view to bringing it out in December of that year. The musical portions of the first three acts were well in hand and most of the dresses designed at the moment when war was declared. As soon as the war was definitely over, and Cambridge had begun to resume something of its normal aspect, the opera was resumed, although a bare half-dozen of the original cast remained, and The Fairy Queen was finally presented for the first time to a modern audience on February 10th of this year.
Purcell and Shakespeare
It may be of interest to those who witnessed the performance to learn something of the peculiar problems which confronted the producers and of the principles on which they tried to solve them. The only material available at that time was the Purcell Society's full score and a copy of the original libretto of 1692. The British Museum possessed also the second edition of the libretto (1693). The first thing to do was to prepare and print an acting version and a vocal score. It must not be supposed that The Fairy Queen is an opera in the modern sense, like Dido and Æneas. It is an abridged and altered version of A Midsummer-Night's Dream, into each act of which is introduced a sort of ballet-divertissement with songs and choruses. These musical episodes have practically nothing to do with the play. In Act I. Titania enters with her fairies and orders music to entertain the Indian Boy. This is interrupted by the appearance of a drunken poet, who is blindfolded and pinched by the fairies. In Act II., instead of "Ye Spotted Snakes," there is a long allegorical scene introducing Night, Secrecy, Mystery, and Sleep. In Act III. a divertissement of a broadly comic character is commanded by Titania for the amusement of Bottom. In Act IV. Oberon summons up a pageant of Phœbus and the Four Seasons in honour of his reconciliation with Titania, and lastly the fairies provide in Act V. the most magnificent and extravagant show of all to celebrate the nuptials of Theseus and Hippolyta. It will be seen that there is a certain amount of dramatic reason and also of artistic unity and contrast about these musical episodes. The first, for the Indian Boy, is fantastic and childlike; the second, for Titania, voluptuous and mysterious; the third, for Bottom, half-comic and half-erotic; the fourth, for Oberon, is a sort of Sun-God's festival; the last, for Theseus and Hippolyta, an epithalamium.
The first difficulty to be faced was that of the Shakespeare dialogue, which is all spoken, not sung. Should the librettist's textual alterations be kept, or the original restored? Had the textual alterations been violent enough to stamp the whole play as belonging definitely and unmistakably to the age of Dryden we should have had no hesitation in sticking to them. We were quite clear from the start that we meant to produce Purcell's opera and not Shakespeare's play. But the alterations to the text of Shakespeare were just enough to be irritating to an audience whom we assumed to be familiar with Shakespeare, and troublesome to actors who were probably in the same case. The chances were that the actors would forget the alterations here and there and return unconsciously to the original, and that the audience would merely suppose that they had not learnt their parts properly. Besides, the opera was so long that drastic cuts were imperative. Here again we at once decided that as far as was practicable it should be Shakespeare and not Purcell that was to be cut. We therefore started by restoring the original text of Shakespeare in all the scenes which had not been cut altogether by the librettist, and then proceeded to prune the Shakespeare down until we had reached either our time-limit or the limit of intelligibility. The latter was reached first, and on that we proceeded to cut down Purcell. An obvious course was to adopt the version of 1692, rejecting the scene of the Drunken Poet, and the two songs, Ye Gentle Spirits and The Plaint, which were added in 1693. But the scene of the Drunken Poet was too good to throw away. The two songs we abandoned with some reluctance on account of their singular beauty; but they could easily be spared from the point of view of the stage. Indeed The Plaint would have been impossible to accept; it is dragged in for no reason by special request of Oberon, and is not only extremely long, but profoundly melancholy and totally inappropriate to the cheerful atmosphere of the Epithalamium.
One of the librettist's alterations was to transfer the whole of Pyramus and Thisbe to the rehearsal scene in the wood. The players act it "in our habits as we shall play it before the Duke," and the interruptions of Theseus and the rest are assigned to Puck. Here again we restored the original, if only to save time. The idea then occurred to us to save the play by having it acted in dumb show during the Entry Dance of Act V. This solved the problem of what to do with this particular dance-tune; it gave us additional time to prepare the Chinese scene behind the tableau-curtain, it saved the time occupied by the play, and spared us the very tedious mirth of all the knockabout business which in A Midsummer-Night's Dream has now become traditional. Further, it brought the clowns in again at the appropriate moment, and, what was more important, it associated Shakespeare more closely with Purcell's music. The little pantomime was worked out at rehearsal entirely by the actors themselves. They first walked through the directions of the Pyramus and Thisbe play; then the music was played and the action tried with it. No further alteration was needed at subsequent rehearsals, for it so happened that every one of the actors was musical, and they stepped and moved to Purcell's notes by natural instinct.
There remained still a few bits of music to be disposed of. In the seventeenth century people had to sit in the theatre for a long time before the play began, and to pass the time a concert was provided, consisting of a First Musick, or Second Musick, and lastly the Overture. Under modern conditions it would have been more in accordance with the spirit of Purcell to send our orchestra out into the street to play the First and Second Musick to the queue that was waiting to enter the pit and gallery, but since we could not imagine that police regulations would permit this, we utilised the four little pieces at different points as incidental music to the play. In so doing we knew that we were untrue to the strict traditions of Purcell's day; but we did not wish to cut these pieces out altogether, and we further thought that they would help to Purcellize the Shakespeare. We were somewhat surprised to find that several of the audience seemed to expect A Midsummer-Night's Dream in its entirety, once the play had started. Our assumption, which apparently was wrong, was that everybody knew Shakespeare's play practically by heart, and that we need do no more than just indicate its outlines, leaving the rest to be filled up by the imagination under the inspiration of Purcell's music.
Purcell and His Orchestra
The opera is scored for the usual Purcell band. In the big instrumental numbers two trumpets, kettle-drums, and two hautboys are added to the string. A few numbers have two flutes, but flutes and hautboys never occur simultaneously, which leads me to think that in Purcell's days the flutes and hautboys were generally played by the same players. The solos are accompanied sometimes by violins and bass in three parts, more often by the harpsichord and bass alone, the other instruments playing no more than the ritornelli. On the question of orchestration we never had a moment's hesitation. We were determined from the very first that we would not add a single note to Purcell's score. This meant, of course, that a very serious responsibility would be thrown on the harpsichord. We had experimented once with a harpsichord in a Bach Concerto at a concert, with the very embarrassing discovery that the harpsichord player could hardly hear a note that he played, while the unfortunate conductor could hear nothing else but the harpsichord. To the audience, as a matter of fact, the result was quite satisfactory. The harpsichord in the theatre was a more perilous problem, especially as we were not able to have any rehearsal of any kind in the theatre until the day before the first performance. Would the harpsichord be audible in the audience? Would it be audible on the stage? Would it stay in tune under the very variable conditions of temperature? Would one harpsichord be enough, or ought we to have two, as Hasse had at the Dresden Opera House? Would the harpsichord be monotonous as well as inadequate? Ought we to have in addition a pianoforte or possibly a harp? We decided to do the very best we could with one harpsichord and chance it. In view of the probability that the harpsichord might become amazingly monotonous, the harpsichord part was considered with the greatest possible care and no pains spared to make it as varied, as effective, and as expressive as possible. Once in the theatre, the instrument was tried in various positions until the right place for it was found. It was clearly audible both on the stage and in all parts of the house without ever becoming too insistent. Here I must say how deeply we were indebted to the sensitive musicianship of the player, an undergraduate in his first year, who, although he had never placed his fingers on a harpsichord until about a fortnight before the performance, was gifted with exactly that fine sense of scholarship in music which is the first essential of the complete maestro al cembalo.
EDWARD J. DENT