And Independence
OPERA N old dream is on its legs again: a shiny new opera house in the heart of Man- chester, with the latest in the way of knobs, dials, stage lifts, bridges, turntables and throat sprays for tenors who can't and sopranos who won't. The thing began as a Manchester City Council baby. Part of a new city arts centre scheme, the opera house was to seat 1,650 and, said somebody who seemed to be in the know, would cost 'between £2 and £3 million.' Since projects of this kind have a way of swelling to double the price people bargained for, why not say £3 million and have done with it?
The baby is for the moment transferred to a more august knee. An interim report from the committee set up by the Arts Council to inquire into the country's opera and ballet needs has given the project 'priority' over other babies and dreams of the same sort, including a much-talked-of new home for Sadler's Wells Opera on the South Bank.
Manchester has, of course, been on this happy spot before. Nearly half a century ago Sir Thomas Beecham grandly promised to build the city an opera house 'that shall be of size and importance not less than those of any other opera house in London or any continental town with the exception of Paris and Petrograd.' A year later his assets were with the liquidator and himself up to the neck in receiving orders; and that was that.
This time the money end looks more plausible. The idea is that the millions, if within reason, shall be found jointly by the Manchester cor- poration, other northern municipalities and the Treasury. Fine. But what of the box office end? Is there any point in putting up an opera house (with dovetailing ballet seasons, perhaps?) if you can't be sure it will average at least an 80 per cent capacity audience most of the year round? There shouldn't be much difficulty in finding and training the right sort of singer and musical staff, even without an interim leg-up, as had been mooted, by one or other of the Sadler's Wells touring teams. The way our per- manent companies have blossomed at Covent Garden and the Wells suggests that far more operatic talent is latent in this country and accessible overseas (in Australia and Canada, for example) than even the optimists suspected when the two companies so haltingly began twenty years ago. To confront newly-trained talent with rows of empty seats night after night would, however, add cruelty to waste.
To what extent can the North be expected to pack itself in and cause the 'House Full' notices to go up? Like the rest of us, Northerners are great ones for recorded opera, with its ad- vantages of star performers on selective form and bilingual 'books' which enable you to follow and understand every word. (Few can claim to do this in the theatre.) Another factor, I sup- pose, is television opera. Some of this has been technically prodigious, for all its cold, blue-grey monochrome (nothing could be more anti- operatic to the eye) and its forced reliance at many points on half-length or head-and- shoulders shots where the composer had the proscenium frame in mind. We are told that the BBC's very striking Salome some years ago was seen (if not, in effect, heard) by more people on one night than, in the aggregate, had pre- viously heard it anywhere. To what extent are recorded opera and television opera likely to be accepted as satisfying alternatives (though they're nothing of the kind) to the real thing? To what extent, on the other hand, will they turn out to be `tasters' or educators for it?
Opera, let us admit, does not run in the English blood as it does in that of, say, the Germans, who have been dutifully or passion- ately crowding their court- or town-subsidised opera houses for three centuries. About this we needn't be fatalistic. Taste for opera, as for sym- phonic music, may fluctuate in any society. Perhaps it has fluctuated in ours more than in most. From what foreign observers tell us and from what we see and hear at Covent Garden and Sadler's Wells, it would seem that operatic- ally this country is on the up-run and that if we don't watch out we shall end up as enlightened musically as we were under the Tudors.
It is true that certain bluff old fallacies die hard. Not long ago the ex-editor of a national daily said on television that he had always thought of opera as `fat men and women making love.' This is the kind of feckless philistinism which, unless refuted and laughed down the drain, could make Manchester's dream fade like that of C,assio in Verdi's opera. In Beecham's touring days there were great nights at the old Manchester Opera House when Herbert Langley, ending Jago's poisonous narration (in Hueffer's translation), would sing into the ear of Frank Mullings, as noble, cataclysmic and fat an (hello as ever stepped: 'And after that the dreaq forsook him, and calmly . . . he slept.' Observe the 'calmly.' If Manchester's dream goes, the same way as Cassio's, two kinds of calm will ensue, jubilant or long-faced, accord- ing to whether you are a philistine or a realist.
PS.—Myra Hess by her Friends (Hamish Hamilton, 25s.), a collection of memories by fifteen of them, is heart-warming for Sir Ken- neth Clark's sketch and Howard Ferguson's documented account of the astonishing National Gallery concerts which she thought up, got going when the war was a week old and nurtured as piagist and guiding spirit for five years. Here is a prima facie case for a full Life. Meantime, another memorial is in the making. Nearly two months ago, at a crowded cello-piano recital in the Royal Festival Hall, Jacqueline Du Pre and Stephen Bishop launched the Myra Hess Trust Fund to help professional musicians (young ones especially, though there is no restriction on either age or nationality) in pursuit of their pro- fessional careers. The aim is to raise £60,000 here and an equivalent sum in the US, where Dame Myra had a big following. Response here so far: £14,000.
CHARLES REID
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