Opera
Professional Amateurs
By DAVID CAIRNS PROMISING noises floated into the crush bar at Covent Garden last week during the press con- ference on the Annual Report. The Magic Flute was having its final rehearsal.
0 1 should, of course, have re- membered that music always sounds better at a distance; the most incorrigible band of amateurs, scratching about in the ruins of some masterwork, can appear sublime for a brief moment as one leaves the street and enters the building where they are at work. It so hap- pened, also, that the fragment 1 heard, part of the Queen of the Night's second aria, was one of two or three numbers in which the Swiss conductor Peter Maag, profiting presumably from the law of averages, found the natural pulse of the music and kept to it. Even a critic can succumb afresh to illusions : I went to the performance the following night in a mood of innocent anticipa- tion, prepared for something which, if not wonderful, would at least allow me without too much interference to follow Mozart, in Berlioz's phrase, to 'the threshold of the infinite.' Three hours later 1 left the theatre a broken man.
But to get back to the conference. The ghost of insolvency which has haunted Covent Garden for so long may at last be laid. The Earl of Drogheda, chairman of the Board of Directors, announced that `the Treasury have proposed a new arrangement (to extend over the next three years) under which the Arts Council grant to Covent Garden, instead of being a flat sum, will be calculated as a fixed percentage of our approved expenditure.' The flat sum has never been enough even to support a hand-to-mouth existence, and though it is not apparently settled yet how big the percentage is to be, the directors `hope'—and neither Mr. Webster nor Lord Drogheda has the air of a man given to naive expectations—ghat in practice it will mean an increase in our grant.' Lord Drogheda had said, just before this, that an annual grant of about £500,000 was required `as a matter of some urgency.'
What might Covent Garden not do with such a sum? The Board gave some answers. First, spend more on maintaining the structure of an ancient building which 'is liable to many physical infirmities' (in a well-run State this would be the direct responsibility of the Ministry of Works). Secondly, improvements. The Earl brought a Whiff of gracious living into the proceedings with his plea-for a third row of candelabras. Mr. Webster, democratic and down to earth, wanted to make the gallery more comfortable and the stage safer to dance on (Ulanova, who slipped one night; was 'far from happy about it'). Thirdly and fourthly, enlarge the repertory and do more to train young artists: I would add to that list a resident producer who has been steeped from his youth in music and the atmosphere of an opera house, and not merely paddled in it with his trousers rolled, and who is prepared and able to do something about the continuing scandal of the miserable, half- hearted charade which passes for acting on the part of the chorus; and also an opera sub- committee on which there is even just one man who is not, as far as the theatre is concerned, an amateur. Even splendid amateurs of the type of Sir Isaiah Berlin need their ideas to be guided by a canny professional hand. The absence of a musical director is, one may believe them, no fault of the directors, but it means in practice that there is no expert to guard against the more elementary blunders. This is where The Magic Flute comes in. Who decided to invite Mr. Maag over from Bonn and why? If thig travesty of Mozart's noblest score had been served up by one of the staff conductors, one would still have wept, but one might have made allowances.
Christopher West's production, with John Piper's gholl settings (all skin and bone), was vague and tentative. It is one thing to keep the action moving—nothing is worse than a Magic Flute sacrifice to the scene-shifters. But if you are going to use suggestion, you have got to suggest something; the technique is not simply a device, for that absolves the producer of any trouble by leaving it all to the spectator's imagination. In this opera a sense of place is paramount.
Yet I would only cast Mr. West as accessory; the villain of the evening was the conductor. Tempo, I admit, is a very personal matter, par- ticularly in Mozart. But disagreement can only be within defined limits. There comes a point when andante is indisputably no longer andante but allegretto, and allegretto breaks into allegro. This point was passed with damnable frequency. Not that the performance as a whole gave an impression of speed. Some of the slower move- me n ts—Werr, ich bin zwar Verbrecherin,' Sarastro's second aria, the Priests' Chorus— dragged out their length interminably, each quaver or semiquaver falling with the dull per- sistence of a stalactite. Worst of all, the tempi were largely unrelated to each other; they lacked even the dubious comfort of being wrong together.
On Tuesday night Madam Butterfly, wisely cast and admirably. conducted, made amends. About this highly enjoyable performance 1 hope to write more fully next week.
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