MUSIC
Sir John in Love." At Sadler's Wells Theatre.
VAUGHAN WILLIAMS'S opera on the subject of The Merry Wives of Windsor, which was produced for the first time at Sadler's Wells last week, has such obvious faults that it hardly seems necessary to mention them. The chief is its extraordinarily haphazard con- struction and failure to keep to any particular dramatic point. It suffers, in fact, from that amateurishness of approach to the problem of opera that has so long been the bane of English essays in the form. Yet, in the event, these faults turn out to be unimportant, because the composer has breathed musical life into the somewhat disjointed bones of his libretto. Sir John in Love is never—or hardly ever, for I think the added episode of the pickpocketing in Act I is an exception—boring. There is always a good tune, Vaughan Williams's own or a folk-song that happens to suit the occasion, to engage our interest ; and if the composer is amateurish in the larger matters of dramatic construction, his musical carpentry and joinery is expert indeed. He can give musical point to the discovery of Mrs. Page behind the arras as neatly as Mozart does when Susanna unexpectedly emerges from the Countess Almariva's closet.
As to the performance, it is lively and well-sung by most of the large cast. Mr. Roderick Jones's Falstaff is a revelation of what this fine singer can do when he is given really vocal music to sing. I was not correspondingly surprised at the excellence of Miss Terry's Anne Page, having heard her beautiful performance of Gilda ; and Miss Jacopi, too, fully comes up to expectation in the " fat " part of Mrs. Quickly. Mr. Sumner Austin has handled the complicated and, because of the aforesaid amateurishness of construction, difficult task of production with great skill. If some of the singers fall back on the conventional gestures that so often pas,. for acting in opera, that is, I fancy, because they can do no better, and not because that was what the producer wanted. It is a pity that this delightful work is not more agreeably presented to the eye. The architecture is Golders Green Tudor of the worst period, while the prevailing colours of the costumes and decor are mustard yellow and dun. I can hardly believe that so witty a lady as Mrs. Ford can have had such poor taste in interior decoration. DYNELEY HUSSEY.
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