The Faber Pocket Guide to Opera (69 page)

The requisite spookiness is created by the ironic use of cheerful nursery songs (such as ‘Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son’ and ‘Lavender’s Blue’), lullabies, twittering bird-song, prayer-book chants and primer piano pieces, set against the exotic and eerie sounds of celesta, gong, harp and glockenspiel. Nothing in the opera is more haunting or haunted than the way that, in the fifth scene of Act I, Miles suddenly modulates into a Latin classroom mnemonic, ‘Malo, malo’ – a serene yet sinister melody that heralds the melismatic cry of ‘Miles, Miles’ that Quint alluringly keens at the end of Act I.

In performance

The question in James’s short story as to whether the ghosts are figments of the Governess’s cabin-fevered imagination does not arise in the opera: Britten’s ghosts undoubtedly
exist, and the question becomes whether it is they or the Governess who are the more destructive of Miles’s and Flora’s innocence.

Among many superb productions that this eminently theatrical opera has received, that of Deborah Warner for the Royal Opera stands out for the creation of an uneasy moral atmosphere, suggesting the possibility that the children may find the influence of the ghosts more benign and liberating than that of the Governess’s hysterical paranoia.
A great practical difficulty is finding a young soprano who can impersonate Flora convincingly – few children are capable of singing the role, and adults tend to be either too tall or too bosomy to give the right impression!
The use of mirrors by the designer as a means of creating ghostly effect has become a cliché.

Recording

CD: Robert Tear (Quint); Colin Davis (cond.).
Philips 446 325 2

A
Midsummer
Night’s
Dream

Three acts. First performed Aldeburgh, 1960.

Libretto by William Shakespeare, edited by the composer and Peter Pears

Written in haste, with only one non-Shakespearean line – ‘Compelling thee to marry with Demetrius’ – added to the text.
Although not as innovative as other Britten operas, its delightful musical creation of the fairy world, as well as its wit and good humour, serve as a rebuff to all those who persist in thinking that a twentieth-century opera must be grim and unenjoyable.

Plot

Broadly the same as Shakespeare’s play, omitting the opening Athenian scenes.

What to listen for

From the opening bars, with their glassy string glissandi evocative of deep-breathed sleep and night-time forest murmurs, this is an opera full of magic of an unexpected kind.
It contains three distinct sound worlds: fairy, mortal and rude mechanical.
The fairy king Oberon, sung by a counter-tenor, is both sensual (as in the gorgeous aria ‘I know a bank’) and commanding, in contrast to his high-pitched (in both senses) wife Titania, with her extravagant soprano coloratura skittering, the treble choir of attendants, and the perky spoken rhymes of Puck, whose acrobatics are accompanied by a pealing trumpet and drum which bring the opera to an end.
In comparison, the mortal lovers sound distinctly earthbound, though their lovely canonic quartet when they awake from the spell shows that they have been touched by the wonder of their comically nightmarish experience.
The ‘rude mechanicals’, led by Quince and Bottom, are perhaps too bluntly mocked by their music (underlined by the use of a blundering solo trombone), though their version of
Pyramus
and
Thisbe
contains a hilarious parody of several of the sillier conventions of Italian opera.
The final scene is perhaps the most magical of all, as Oberon and Titania arrive to bless Theseus’s palace, with the ‘Scotch snap’ of ‘Now, until the break of day’.

In performance

Robert Carsen’s chic production, first seen at the Aix Festival, covered the stage with a giant bed, symbolic of the underlying innocent eroticism to the proceedings, and presented Puck as a dirty old man in a flasher’s raincoat.
But the most enchanting production is surely Peter Hall’s at Glyndebourne, designed by John Bury.
Costumes suggested a lavish Jacobean masque, and the trees of the forest seemed truly alive, their branches moved by actors who sat inside their trunks.
Elsewhere, it has become common to see the lovers presented as silly toffs from a Noel Coward drawing-room comedy and to take a sophisticated, even satirical view of the pantomime magic.

Recording

CD: Brian Asawa (Oberon); Colin Davis (cond.).
Philips 454 122 2

Death
in
Venice

Two acts. First performed Snape, 1973.

Libretto by Myfanwy Piper

Britten’s last major work, completed shortly before he underwent an operation for the heart condition which eventually killed him.
Death
in
Venice,
based on the novella by Thomas Mann, is a sombre and intense work, on a theme painfully close to aspects of Britten’s own emotional life.
Aschenbach is the last operatic role he wrote for his partner, the tenor Peter Pears, who also created the roles of Peter Grimes, Albert Herring, Vere in
Billy
Budd
and Quint in
The
Turn
of
the
Screw.

Plot

Failing in health and inspiration, the celebrated novelist Gustav von Aschenbach arrives for a recuperative holiday in Venice.
At his hotel, he is struck from a distance by the beauty of a young teenage boy who belongs to a Polish family.
Without ever speaking to him, Aschenbach begins to watch the boy – whose name is Tadzio – with what he believes to be disinterested platonic pleasure.
Slowly, however, as the rottenness and corruption of the city closes in on him, he realizes to his wonder and horror that he is deeply and carnally in love with Tadzio.
Although the emotion in some respects revitalizes him, Aschenbach’s situation becomes increasingly abject.
Venice empties as rumours of an outbreak of cholera spread, and Aschenbach realizes that the Polish family are about to leave.
He sits on the beach, gazing adoringly at Tadzio for one last time.
Finally, he calls Tadzio’s name out loud for the first time and then dies.

What to listen for