Opera
The Silver Tassie (English National Opera)
Cup fever
Michael Tanner
rvi ark-Anthony Turnage's new opera The Silver Tassie has been launched with all the publicity appropriate to a major cultur- al event. And pretty well everyone who has written about its premiere has expressed the feeling that the opera more than lives up to the hype. Exalted comparisons have been made, often wedded to mention of the very obvious influences on the work, such as Britten and Tippett, but also Berg. Turnage himself has said that he doesn't feel comfortable in opera houses, prefer- ring the straight theatre or the cinema, and perhaps The Silver Tassie distances itself from any tradition of opera, heterogeneous as that form has been and become over the centuries.
It is in four acts, each given a heading: Home, War, Hospital, Dance, and Turnage at least flirts with making parallels with a symphony, with War as the slow movement and Hospital as the scherzo; but that idea seems to me not to be too helpful. The first act — the work is called a Tragi-comic Opera, though the comic elements are recessive or, when present, more intended than achieved — takes place in a Dublin tenement, and is almost startlingly natural- istic, as it might be the set for A Miner's Friday Night. This is the world that those who are fighting (it is 1915) have to leave behind, and their initial willingness to do so isn't hard to understand. The opera gets under way with an overextended scene of domestic bickering, escalates into violence, and then at last Harry Heegan, the tragic hero, the footballer who wins the Silver Tassie, appears and gets ready with his best friend Barney to return to the Front. The 'I've brought these back, they're too accurate.' music of this act is, I find, more telling lis- tened to at home (the first night was broad- cast), since the action, quite well produced by Bill Bryden, is hardly enough to hold the interest, while the orchestral textures undoubtedly are.
The link to Act II moves us from realism to a kind of dreamy cantata, and War as evoked in this act is a matter of low spirits and apprehension rather than violence and killing. The only quasi- or pseudo-realistic intrusion is of a peppery officer of the kind we love to hate, barking idiotic orders. The characters of the main drama are absent altogether, and the burden of solo singing is taken by The Croucher (Gwynne Howell at his most sonorous), singing in biblical terms, but reversing the sense of familiar sayings, conjuring up the extinction of life and a valley of dead bones. The most affecting music is here, but it is indicative of a waste land, of the trenches and fields after the fighting, and of the spirit in exhaustion rather than in violence or viola- tion. The men join in, in Vaughan William- sish idiom, and stretcher bearers, sung by boys, arrive, to a vaguely War Requiem effect. There is a brief game of football, and then an enemy breakthrough is report- ed, as the men go off to action. The chief horror and terror of war, as opposed to its fearful effects, is oddly hardly touched on by the music, so that this whole section is an elegy with almost irrelevant interrup- tions. Musical depiction of fighting is extremely hard to bring off, but it would have been intensely interesting to see if Turnage could be more impressive than his predecessors.
The rest of the opera shows Harry a crip- ple, paralysed from the waist down, and his neighbour Terry blind. The hospital scene is obviously painful, as the portrayal of dreadfully injured people is bound to be, and all the more so when they are as unrec- onciled to their incapacitation as Harry, who is agonisingly articulate and bitter about his condition and the way in which people are treating him, medically and per- sonally. Here the words are more promi- nent than the music, the outrage of what war has done expressed in terms close to those of Siegfried Sassoon, one of whose poems is quoted in the programme. My response to that poem, and to this stretch of Tassie, is complete agreement, but a sense that I'm not learning anything, and would be shocked to come across anyone to whom any of this was news. Sassoon was a necessary voice in his time, and O'Casey may still have been; but there is something self-indulgent now, or an element of ritual, in getting indignant at the pity of that dreadful war.
In the last act Harry, drunk with wine from his tassie, watches while his erstwhile best friend, who saved his life, seduces his girlfriend. They even have a fight, a macabre incident from which Harry is taken away on the shoulders of his blind friend; the rest of the cast is left singing about how life must go on, 'for they are a life on the ebb, and we are a life on the flow'. A sentiment that is both hideous and undeniable. The drama in this act is strong, and yet none of it reveals anything about war, or suffering, or betrayal, or any of the other big topics with which this piece is concerned. The blend, in this act, of dance music in a variety of idioms and the out- bursts of Harry, creates moments of con- siderable pathos, but isn't it bound to? I don't want to deny the effectiveness of the work, but I do want to know what it adds, tackling an area where we need either to say nothing or to be vouchsafed an epiphany.
The musical performance is superlative, with Gerald Finley as Harry showing him- self both a superb member of a most distin- guished team of singers, and a most powerful distinctive personality. No other character has anything like so strong a part as his, but the cast list is a roster of many of ENO's most notable artists. The opening performance was astonishingly assured, under the confident leadership of Paul Daniel. Is isn't easy to imagine a work being presented in a more favourable light, and it will be a matter of the greatest inter- est to see whether it survives, as is being widely predicted, as permanent repertory fare.
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