Opera
A Sad Revival
By DAVID CAIRNS
Yet the show remained absurd. This is not to deny that to any but a provincial German audi- ence Der Freischiitz must seem ridiculous. But there is all the difference in the world between being splendily ridiculous and abjectly ridicu- lous. Der Freischatz is not •a whit less rational than Lucia, besides containing fresher and more interesting music.
But at Covent Garden it never gets a chance, and I do not like to think how many people have come away dismissing it as a superannuated pantomime unredeemed by some vapidly pretty music. The singing of the main roles, except for Jeannette Sinclair's accomplished Aennchen, is very feeble. Arturo Sergi, on Tuesday, made little of Max's music—the heroic passages lacked fire, the lyrical communicated no delight in the charm and elegance of the phrases. Yet Mr. Sergi was musicality itself beside his. pachydermatous bride. Miss Edith Lang, bending her eye on vacancy, gave hints of a fine voice, at least in the lower register, but she used it like one of those un- economically designed Victorian fireplaces which lose 70 per cent. of the power up the chim- ney. She moved her lips so imperceptibly and opened her mouth so little that she suggested nothing so much as a ventriloquist, and it would have been no more than logical had she delivered her great scena with a doll on her knee, like Tuppy Glossop's girl friend at Beefy Bingham's entertainment in Jeeves and the Song of Songs. The house, unlike the robuster audience on that occasion, politely refrained from giving her the bird. But Miss Lang, if she is careless of her own reputation, might at least give a thought to Weber's.
But even a first-rate cast would not really have saved the situation. The fault is partly in Dent's perky translation, the tone of which is set by the tendency for one character to enter another character's room with the exclamation, `Oh. there you are !'; what should be a pleasant chuckle be- comes a horse-laugh. But it is also in the produc- tion's failure to be even moderately spectacular. The Wolf's Glen, with not an owl or a black boar or a flaming cart-wheel to be seen, and with Vic- tor Godfrey intoning Samiel's lines like an Ang- lican vicar of the old school, is an absolute non- starter. Yet if Freischiitz is worth doing at all— and 1 am convinced it is—it must be played to the top of its bent. Even Kempe's sensitive conduct- ing, by far the best thing in the evening, seemed to me to lack essential exuberance and panache.
Mr. Solti has promised to restore the German repertoire to parity but, as this revival demon- strates, Italian values still lord it at Covent Gar- den. About Persephone, and the popularity of Stravinsky, I will write next week.
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