MUSIC
The Opera Season
" SOMETHING had better be done about this Royal Italian Opera." That is not a quotation from Sir Thomas Beecham's latest speech, which was concerned with the musical millennium, the lunacy of the B.B.C., and the average Englishman's ignor- ance of Shakespeare. No, my quotation is the first sentence contributed to The World by its newly-appointed music critic, Mr. Bernard Shaw, forty-seven years ago. In spite, however, of his preoccupation with the aforesaid metaphysical specula- tions, it seems to have occurred to Sir Thomas Beecham that something had better be done about this Italian Opera, and, on the principle that if you want a thing well done you should do it yourself, he has handed Wagner over to Herren Reiner and Furtwangler, and taken on Verdi's Otello, with which the Covent Garden season opens on Monday night.
An Italian opera has not taken the first place in the " grand " season since the first year after the War, when Melba returned to sing in La Bohame. Since then it has always been Die Meistersinger or Der Rosenkavalier or Fidelio, with the serious business of Der Ring following hard upon its heels. But in recent seasons Italian Opera has crept up from May into April, like a successful college Fight in the bumping- races, and this year it is head of the river, with Der Ring well down in the second division. No better choice than Otello could have been made to display Italian Opera at its greatest, and Don Pasquale, Donizetti's buffo masterpiece follows close behind under the direction of Signor Salfi (vice Bellezza), who was tried out and not found wanting during the winter season.
It seems to have been felt that something ought also to be done about this French Opera. The performances of French operas in recent seasons have not been exactly creditable. So the combined forces of the Opera and Opera Comique are to come over and show us how these things are done in Paris. Their first appearance will be in Dukas's Ariane et Barbe-bleue on Tuesday. This opera, produced thirty years ago and since then widely travelled in Europe and America, has not been given in London before. Its text is by Maeterlinck and, as may be sur- mised from that fact and its date, its music represents the French reaction to and against the Wagnerian music-drama. " Grove " tells us that " the character of Ariane symbolises the liberating pity which struggles against the enslavement and feebleness of humanity, and which endeavours to educate towards a higher consciousness those souls which are not yet sufficiently developed to understand its significance." I hope the music, of which the same writer speaks highly, will do something to make that significance clear and to lift the work above this woolly symbolism. But it speaks ill for the state of opera that for a " novelty " we have to go back a whole generation. However, a real novelty is to be presented later—Eugene Goossens's Don Juan de la Maiiara with a text by Arnold Bennett.
Apart from the casts announced for the first week, the management of Covent Garden has left its patrons very much in the dark about the singers whom they are invited to subscribe to hear. A short list published about a fortnight ago was more remarkable for its omissions, which included a number of names previously announced, than for its comprehensiveness. We are told that Mine. Leider is to sing Briinnhilde in the first cycle of Der Ring, and I for one am grateful that this great artist is not to be dropped entirely in favour of Mme. Flagstad, whose blameless singing is offset by a temperament too phleg- matic for the complete realisation of Wagner's heroine. There was no mention of a possible Siegmund and Siegfried, nor, for that matter, of a Tristan. Is Herr Melchior at last to give place to another ? The worst of Herr Melchior is that whenever another Tristan or Siegfried appears in his place one always hankers to have him back again. Nor can I discover a Sieglinde among the singers announced. Are we really to be spared a repetition of last year's grotesque appearance of the twin-born pair, whose get-up did credit to nothing but their lack of personal vanity ?
It will be a pity if opera-goers, ber1a771ed by the opening of the grand season, overlook the revival of Vaughan-Williams's delightful ballad-opera, Hugh the Drover, at Sadler's Wells next Wednesday. It has always been a mystery to me why this piece, which combines the Fnglishman's love of boxing with his taste for a good tune, has not been in the repertory these many years.
DYNELEY HUSSEY.
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