The Truth About Opera

Otago Daily Times, Issue 24254, 23 March 1940, Page 4

The Truth About Opera

" Opera," wrote Sir Hubert Parry in his diary. " is the shallowest fraud man ever achieved in the name of art." Sir Walford Davies more or less concurs in his description of it as "an astonishing and phenomenal enormity. Mr James Agate, not unknown as a critic of the theatre, has confessed to having sought for a logical basis " for the absurdity of grand opera." and his colleague. Mr A. E. Wilson, has dismissed substatial portions of Wagner in particular as comprising " long recitals of innumerable grievances pitted against the turmoil of the < orchestra, much of which sounds like corridge orchestrated." None of that as criticism cf opera is necessarily new or unfamiliar, it is likely to be endorsed, in this community as elsewhere, by people who have some claim to genuine musical appreciation. Grand opera, in a type of mind —the type impatient of muddle or seeming extravagance and abnormality in form—is very prone to encourage nrejudices. It requires explaining. And it is for that reason that a new book, titled A Key to Opera, which is mainly the work of Frank Howes and partly the work of Philip Hope-Wallace, is both welcome and valuable. Those who are unwilling to be converted to opera will at least find this book, and especially its opening chapter on the nature of opera of quite unusual interest. In the first place it follows no established pattern in the treatment of its subject. Mr Howes makes that plain enough in his preface. Books about opera, he says, are usually either a collection of synopses of opera plots or the memoirs of dead singers. "This book." he hastens to add. " is neither, nor is it a history of opera nor a volume of

A Key to Opera. By Frank Howes and Philip Hope-Wallace. (Blackie). 7s 6d.

musical criticism. It attempts to be a discussion of the nature of opera; the answer to the question 'What is opera?' requires, and in its course embodies, a certain amount of criticism a small quantity of plot narrative, and some discussion of singing but none of singers." The reader, then, to a point knows what to expect. But he will have to reread the first chapter to appreciate the excellence of its argument in defence of an art form which is " drama carried on with or in music, a combination of two arts each claiming sovereign status and jealous of its rights." yet with "no fundamental hostility or incompatibility between them." Mr Howes propounds his own questions. Is opera an impossible hybrid? Do its conventions condemn it to absurdity? Is it too artificial? Is it a meretricious form of art? And he answers them at length, and supports his conclusions with sound argument based on a mature knowledge of both music and the theatre. His ultimate finding is that the positive claims of opera to be a proper part of culture—regardless of its employment of conventions which may cause discomfort to some—are founded on its distinctive properties, "the dramatic powers of music itself, and the evervarying synthesis it can make with the other arts of the theatre." The succeeding chapters, which deal with the early history of opera and its divisions into schools and periods of composition, are handled with singular tbility. and give access to the fruits of a wide and thorough research. The collaborators in A Key to Opera have produced a book which is likely to command attention as being authoritative. F. H.