BENJAMIN BRITTEN’S OPERAS

Press, 16 February 1980, Page 17

BENJAMIN BRITTEN’S OPERAS

The Operas of Benjamin Britten. Edited by David Herbert. Hamish Hamilton, 1979. 384 pp. $93.95. (Reviewed by John Ritchie) This absorbing and expensive volume supplements our knowledge of one of England’s greatest composers in a peculiarly important way. Although, as Peter Pears establishes in'a preface, Benjamin Britten was more at home with notes than he was with words, it’ was words around which he deployed musical sounds; and he did so with continuing success throughout half a century. The vocal and choral music is better known'in New Zealand because of our relative strengths. Our indigenous deficiencies deny us the dramatic music. Operas are the crowning glory of Britten’s outsut and ithis book is devoted to them. Britten wrote 16 operas if we include the church parables. Fully printed to include subsequent revision by the composer the librettos take up over 300 pages of the text, a fact which demonstrates his extraordinary fecundity. Their value to the layman who enjoys listening to radio or recorded performances is obvious. In addition the musicologist, the literator, and the composer cannot fail to appreciate a rich source of material basic to a true understanding of the musical works as well as a stimulating corpus for comparative examination. The transmogrification of Shakespeare, Henry James, Thomas Mann, Guy de Mapassant into something suited to the composer is a .craft which has not always been handled sensitively. Britten was well served by several writers and one’s admiration grows for them when it is realised what constraints they worked under, the composer’s ideas not least

of all. Fortunately he was blessed with reliable instinct for the stage and for language as is demonstrated elsewhere in the book. Each opera libretto has its own merit and its own character. The foreboding of Peter Grimes, the innocence Of Noye’s Fludde, the brilliant fun of Albert Herring, emerge as a literary consequence to the credit of the authors; but our knowledge, in retrospect, reminds us of the miraculous enchantment which Britten’s music has wrought. Particularly fascinating is the text of “Death in Venice” which Myfanwy Piper produced after Thomas Mann’s short story. Mann’s own motivic repetition and variation, his imagery and . the preoccupation with the East of Dionysus and cholera, would seem an unlikely source of encouragement. But it is the very nature of this episodic imagining which has ignited the spark and produced the unusual structure which is one of Britten’s most personal and individual _ operas. Whereas Mann considered his novella "a secret failure,” the opera shows just how successful it was. As Andrew Porter explains, in a characteristically penetrating essay, “opera is the medium in which music can answer questions and resolve paradoxes when words alone must fail.” Wagner established that. The illustrations are works of art in themselves. The original costume designs and stage settings for each opera, a dozen or so in each case, are provided, and while clearly they have added to the cost of the publication their indispensability is beyond question. Of the several painters and draughtsmen who contributed to the initiation of opera after opera John

Piper stands, out. His “The Lido Beach” is only one of many striking pictures by him. Although each opera is provided with a note briefly describing its genesis and with the vital statistics of cast, orginal performers, date, place, and so on, the entire collection is preceded by several essays from close associates of the great man. Janet Baker writes lovingly on working with Britten, John Piper on designing for Britten and his wife, Myfanwy', °n writing for Britten. Eric Crozier, Basil Coleman and Colin Graham offer detailed and important backgrounds to the staging of first productions, one of which gives a delightful picture of E. M. Forster’s views on what kind of an opera he would consent to collaborate in Chamber? — no. Grand opera, the grander the better for him. The result — Billy Budd. Strangely none of the writers has seen fit to concentrate on Britten’s dual excellences, composing and performing. He was one of the unquestinably great accompanist. If ever there was a modern similarity to Mozart it rested in this young man. But, in a long, rambling and wordy introduction which runs many hares to no appreciable purpose, including a verbose comparison of the two as operamongers, Hans Keller shows no sign of it ever having occurred to him that both boyhood prodigies established their prodigious potential in like manner. Inordinately Jong, Keller’s essay placed at the start of the book could well put off some readers. He is no Bernard Shaw and the best advice must be to skip this. Most everything of possible importance he endeavours to say is put better by the other contributors.