Opera
The End of the Beginning ?
By DAVID CAIRNS
10 raise 'their hesitant British voices in Auld lang syne.'
There is not, of course, the smallest danger that auld acquaintance will be forgot. The mood of this season, of which the demonstration on New Year's Eve was only the most ardent expression, has all along been one of conquering ease, happy comradeship, of going forward together in un- troubled confidence into a new and more golden monopoly with this great and character- istically 'British company of whom we are so justly proud. There has been no sense of the beleaguered defiance of a tradition declining into old 'age. It is not even a closing of ranks, backs to the vial' stuff, against the modern age. They believe they can afford to be tolerant of their new competitors. When the 'general manager, Mr. Frederick Lloyd, says that `as far as the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company is concerned, 1961 is not the , beginning of the end but the end of the beginning,' he means 'exactly what be says.
What is there to be feared? For the audiences, young as well as old, who throng the Savoy, the modern age does not significantly exist; 1961 can be ignored because it is really still 1901. For them, as we have said before, to attend a D'Oyly Carte performance is to 'partake of a time-honoured ritual, to have one's dearest reflexes most tenderly stimulated and to return, for an evening, to an age in which the Empire is big and red on the map, income tax is .1 s. in the £ and America has not yet been invented. In The Mikado, at the words 'apologetic statesmen of a compromising kind, Such as What d'ye call him, Thing'em-boh and likewise Never-mind,' while I was hesitating between various members or the present Cabinet an aged female voice nearby exclaimed 'Churchill!' The description hardly fits any of the last three bearers of that name; but I swear she meant Lord Randolph.
But my impression is that it is the young as much as the old who keep the torch burning. The sacrament of G and S, preserved and administered by its chosen priests, nourishes and draws strength from the national neurosis of not wanting to know. It keeps our nostalgia green, always fresh. So long as this mentality does not change, so long will the tradition flourish. Indeed, of the few concessions to modernity that the company has permitted itself to make in the text, most strike. a jarringly inconsistent . note. 'That singular anomaly, the televisionist,' in Ko-Ko's list of people ripe for execution, may be good for approving laughs but it is, like the policeman's lot, not a happy one. As for the replacement of 'blacked like a nigger' by the feeble 'painted with vigour,' it carries no conviction and only a reminder of things better forgotten, an alien, un- comfortable world pressing beyond the walls of the theatre. Within those walls all is still for the best in the best of possible worlds.
This is the strength of the traditional versions. It is not so much the particular lines themselves that tell—the puns, the paradoxes, the tags, the topical allusions (Captain Shaw, parliamentary trains, and the rest)—as the soothing, splendid atmosphere they recreate of a past when Britain really ruled the waves and Britain set the world ablaze. That is why the jealous preservation of every move and gesture hallowed by Gilbert's prompt-book, every semaphored sigh and smile and tantantara, is axiomatic. Equally, I suspect, the finer points of Sullivan's music and his paro- dies of opera are lost on most of the audience, who never exercise their brains (that is assum- ing that thex've got any) with questions of musi- cal standards and accuracy, and who take a skit on sentimentality at its sentimental face value.
G and S (D'Oyly Carte style), in fact, is a quasi-religious institution: change must come imperceptibly, if at all. And like most religious institutions, it embodies a denial of its founders' intentions. By a final Gilbertian paradox its popu- larity is based on an exact* inversion of the origi- nal spirit. That terrible weapon of the English, the ability to laugh at themselves just so far as is necessary to take the sting out of satire, has once again been unfairly at work. The operas are cherished for the very sacred cows they' once mocked.
For this reason, if for no other, the challenge of competition is overdue. But there are, of course, other reasons. The chief is the state of the music. It may be argued that Gilbert's plots and period wit could not survive except in the stylised productions that have been handed down. It can also be argued that if the audience do not catch the echo of 'Why do the Nations' in the opening chorus of The Mikado or the snatch of Bach's great G minor fugue at the reference to 'classical Monday Pops,' or even if it treats a bit of cod pathos like Katisha's 'Alone and yet alive' as a serious and very affecting piece of work, no matter. But it cannot be argued, least of all by professed admirers of Sullivan, that the D'Oyly Carte tradition has, in living memory, done more than very rough justice to the music. In some respects, particularly the orchestra, stan- dards have improved. I remember performances of The Mikado in the not-so-distant past in which the bassoon fluffed his solo in 'Three Little Maids' with damnable precision. At the Savoy, though the string tone is weak and uningratiating, there is some fine wind playing.
And, on certain nights, there is Sir Malcolm Sargent to restore a sense of musical values. I am tempted to regard this as his finest hour. It has not always been so. Sir Malcolm reorchestrat- ing L'Enfance do Christ for Anglicans, Sir Malcolm publicly asserting that Beethoven's Eighth Symphony sounds like an early work— these were, with respect, ridiculous figures. But Sir Malcolm taking the bandmaster's rigidity out of the rhythms, lightening the musical articula- tion, observing the spirit and letter of Sullivan's admirable scoring, shaping the phrases with the affection of one who truly loves the music be- cause he truly understands it—this is Saul among the prophets, and it does one good to hear it. The crime of the D'Oyly Carte has been that it has tended to reduce the English Offenbach to the level of a pier-end tunesmith. As it is, even when Sir Malcolm is at the helm, the poor quality of the voices—bottled voices, breathy voices, pinched voices, wobbly voices, bleeting voices, hairy voices and yokes as bald as an old tennis ball—is not to be disguised. There is hardly a singer at the Savoy Who achieves a decent all- round standard of tone, rhythm and phrasing, and many who fall miserably below it. Yet how many Savoyards are not perfectly satisfied with the singing they get, and ould not endorse Sir Arthur Bryant's words in the souvenir programme book about dedicated artists training to sing the operas as their author intended them to be sung? Whatever the debt we owe to the D'Oyly Carte for keeping the works in constant circulation (and I acknowledge it, along with millions), such complacency can- not go unpunished, nor the Guthrie and Sadler's Wells invasions arrive too soon. Even in the matter of stage personality—the strong suit of D'Oyly Carte in the days of Darrell Fancourt and Sydney Granville—only John Reed (especially good as the Lord Chancellor) and Donald Adams (a splendidly overblown, disgusted Mikado) carry on the old tradition with the old authentic skill and panache.
Besides, it is the least compliment that ought to be paid to the vitality of G and S to put it to the test, of new methods. It may be found that Gilbert has no future outside the D'Oyly Carte straitjacket. Personally, I believe his wit should have no difficulty in proving its topicality in an age when a peer is Foreign Secretary, not to mention the hot competition on both sides of the House for Ko-Ko's allusion to 'apologetic statesmen of a compromising kind.' I agree with the implication of Grouch() Marx's dictum, de- livered after the great man had appeared as the Lord High Executioner in New York: `If this doesn't kill Gilbert and Sullivan, nothing will.' At the very least we may hope that the end of copyright will lead to productions which are imaginative, flexible and prettily designed, with- in traditional lines, and conducted as Sir Malcolm has shown how, and above all well sung.
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