Saying it without music
Rupert Christiansen
KOBBE'S COMPLETE OPERA BOOK edited by the Earl of Harewood Bodley Head, f30 The easiest way to convince oneself that opera is a silly business is to read a few random plot summaries. A friend of mine swears that Donizetti wrote a comic opera entitled II Pork Butcher di Preston: I wish this was true, because I would love to hear the synopsis. Miss Gladys Davidson, however, in her monumentally eccentric Standard Stories from the Operas records the even more unlikely existence of Hol- brooke's Dylan, Son of the Wave ('when Dylan, son of Lyd the Sea God and Elan, the beautiful daughter of Don, the God- dess of Nature, was carried off by Gwydion to be his heir to the kingship of Britain, there was moaning and regret. . .') and Gatty's Greysteel, or The Bearsarks come to Surnadale (born and died in Sheffield, 1906), as well as an unfamiliar version of Mozart's divine All Do It and a variant conclusion to Eugene Onegin, in which our hero 'drew forth a pistol. . . and since he cared no longer to live, he drew the trigger, and fell lifeless to the ground'.
Kobbd has always been a couple of cuts above this sort of nonsense. His prose may be cliché-ridden — questions are always plied, troths pledged, knights sturdy, re- venge nigh, and• rumblings distant — but his synopses are accurate, amiable, and peppered with relevent anecdotes and a smattering of accessible musical commen- tary. In this tenth revision of his basic collection, first published in 1922, his contribution has diminished to the point that Lord Harewood should now be credi- ted as author rather than mere editor — a fact which serves as an encouraging index of how radically the repertory of a 'mori- bund' art form has evolved in the last 65 years.
Harewood has a good deal more critical acumen than Kobbe, and a more sophisti- cated musical perspective; Kobbe is, I think, the better story-teller — his un- ravelling of Il Trovatore, for example, is masterly. But this division of style and approach is part of the fun of a book which is never anonymous or predictable (or anything like `complete'), and which still has no real rivals. Neither Stanley Sadie and Arthur Jacobs' penny plain Opera: A Modern Guide nor Gerhart von Wester' mann's Opera Guide run it anywhere close, while Ernest Newman's magisterial Opera Nights is altogether much more demand' ing in terms of scholarship and inter- pretation. Now for the nitpicking, sordid but inevit- able activity of all unfortunates reviewing works of reference. First, one should re' cord that although splendidly illustrated and beautifully produced to the noblesst standards of the Bodley Head, the book 15 marred by some passages of shamefully dozy proof-reading; Wozzek, Virgil Thompson, Sadler's Well, Claudio Muvo and Simone Boccanegra all make promin- ent solecistic appearances. Second, Hare- wood is blatantly biased towards new works presented during his years as manag- ing director of the English National Opera. This is pardonable, inasmuch as he obviously believes that Ginastera's B01710 zo, Penderecki's The Devils of Loudon, and Philip Glass's Akhnaten are valuable pieces, on which he has literally put his money. That I passionately disagree on all three counts is irrelevant; but one cannot help feeling that the informed consensus would be that either of Berio's operas or Stockhausen's unfinished Licht cycle rep- resent, both musically and theatricallY speaking, far more significant extensions of the operatic form. And for that matter what has the Earl of Harewood against Peter Maxwell Davies? Whatever one thinks of his oeuvre, he ought to rate .2 mention, when Menotti, forsooth, is granted fifteen solid pages and six synopses for his unmitigated kitsch. There are other areas of imbalance. Nice as it is to read puffs for Milhaud's Le, Pauvre Matelot, Blitzstein's Regina, and Rimsky's Snegurochka, all of which the editor seems to feel 'will (or should) become better known', the preface also states that the criterion for inclusion is the likelihood of 'the travelling opera-gag meeting 'the opera in question during his peregrinations', on which grounds wont should surely have been found for Bern' stein's Candide, Barber's Vanessa, and Thomas's Hamlet. Insubstantial early Ver- di and Britten get in, but there is nothing of Mozart before Idomeneo, Wagner before Rienzi, or Puccini before Manon Lescaut. No sign of Cavalli or Vivaldi at all — one detects an underlying reluctance to engage with the baroque — but a soft spot for some of the ghastlier aberrations of En- glish opera: The Lily of Killarney, Hugh the Drover, The Immortal Hour, The Ice Break.
I have been tiresomely ungracious in these last paragraphs, so let me conclude with heartfelt reiteration of the adjective with which Kobbe has always been deco- rated, and here continues to merit: indis- pensable. Everyone would do it slightly differently: who but Lord Harewood could do it so well?
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