Opera
The Great Cynic
By DAVID CAIRNS
It is not a work of genius, but it is the work of a genius. The music is full of inventive and beauti- ful things which are quite gratuitous from the point of view of conventional operatic success. In the very last bars of the opera, when an ordinary orchestral flourish would do perfectly well (not that anyone would be listening anyway), the noise and bustle are interrupted by a delight- ful chromatic sideslip—a piece of sheer creative exuberance which probably not one person in five hundred was aware of. It seems now barely credible that Rossini could at any time have been accused (as he was, for instance, by Stendhal later in his career) of concentrating attention on the orchestra at the expense of the voices; and that people could think so is indicative of the abject fatuity of opera bufia. Nevertheless La Pietra del Paragone shows a genuine and, in Italian terms, extravagant feeling for instrument timbres and sonorities. From the charming pas- sage for strings which opens the overture the score is always freshly and pleasantly written and sometimes more.
Again and again Rossini gives proof of a capacity to rise above the degrading conditions of his time. And again and again he frustrates expectation by failing to stick by his better nature. Weber's indictment is only the exaggeration of a truth : 'Satan can do anything, even good; but he does not want to.' Rossini is not the devil, only one of his imps. As an artist he is, as Shaw remarked, amazingly deficient in moral fibre. `When he found the natural superiority of his genius in conflict with the ignorance and frivolity of the public . . . he surrendered without a struggle . . . he never persevered in any innova- tion that was not well received; and it is hardly possible to doubt that the superiority of William Tell to his other operas is due solely to the fact that it was written for the Grand Opera in Paris, where the public had been educated by Gluck to expect at least a show of seriousness in an opera seria. He rose to the occasion then as a matter of business, just as he would have sunk to it had the commission come from Venice; and it was characteristic of him that he did not rise an inch above it.
That was in 1829. In 1812, at the outset of his fabulous success, the composer of The Touch- stone (the meaning of `Pietra del Paragone' and its title in Arthur Jacobs's translation made for the St. Pancras production) suggested infinite pos- sibilities; there still seems time for the golden, doomed youth to reform. But the danger signs are unmistakable. It is not merely that the work suffers by comparison with the opera which it often recalls, by general atmosphere and particu- lar turns of phrase—Cosi fan tulle; few works would not so suffer. When listening to Rossini we can never forget what Mozart was able to do with °Peru bufja. But where The Touchstone is really disappointing is in relation to itself. The good is individual and admirable, the bad empty and cliche-ridden; and the good and the bad are not separated but combined in a single number. Con- sider the final aria of the lovelorn Count Asdrubale, just before the end of the opera. It is right that Rossini should keep it short; it is wrong, and utterly maddening, that just when one thinks he is at last going to create something wholly beautiful, he should yet again throw it away and let the exquisite opening phrases degenerate into callously meaningless cadences. He cannot prevent his marvellous inventive gift from throwing up a fine idea; but he simply can't be bothered with the effort of developing it and keeping up its high level of invention. An excel- lent quartet based on a quick palpitating molly, simple but ideal for musical development and for the particular dramatic purpose (the comic agita- tion of the Count's sponging followers on hearing that he has aparently been bankrupted), is a rare example of a movement built on Mozartian prin- ciples and sustained in its interest. Much more Often Rossini, growing bored, resorts to a routine parade of roulade, crescendo on alternate tonic and dominant, and the Rossini cadence: the same cadence which in Mozart always sounds perfectly integrated into the musical flow but in Rossini sticks out like a gesture of bored con- tempt for the gullibility of his audience. Indeed it is as if, deeper than idleness or crafty calcula- tion of what, would do to secure a triumph, there was a compulsion to spoil whatever was well made in his work.
I do not mean to suggest that The Touchstone is not enjoyable stuff; but it is the last half-bitter jest of the great cynic that he puts us into the unpopular position of moralists stuffily shaking. Our heads over the most recklessly gay and effervescent music ever written. The St. Pancras performances, by Group Eight, were quite well done. The English Chamber Orchestra, under Myer Fredman, gave the impression of almost sight-reading their parts—inevitably, one pre- sumes, given the economic circumstances; but it was mostly very clever sight-reading, Mr. Jacobs's translations contains a few clumsinessec and awkward repetitions, but many more felici- ties; but an embargo should be put on the word `Yes' as a syllable-filler in English versions of Italian opera, The banging of characters into each other on the stage, together with the stamping on feet, should also be in all cases proscribed unless explicitly demanded by the stage directions. This excess apart, Rowland Holt-Wilson's production was lively and sensible. Good performances, among others, from Noel Mangin as Macrobio. a seedy, overweening critic, bald and scrofulous. Popping of eye and obscenely trousered; Eliza- beth Bainbridge—a young mezzo-soprano of dis- tinct promise, with a voice not unlike that of Patricia Kern (the excellent Isolier in the Sadler's Wells Comte Ory) as the only one of three
widows weekending with the Count who truly loves him; and Derek Hammond-Stroud as a bad poet, a frenzied but touching figure in rumpled skirt and small steel-rimmed spectacles, gro- tesquely topped with laureate's crown, and clutch- ing a Homeric lyre like a child's most jealously guarded toy.
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