Whatever happened to Gloriana in 1953? More turkey than Coronation Chicken, it would seem. But ahead of Richard Jones's staging at Covent Garden - the first time the ROH has done the work since its unfortunate premiere 60 years ago - I've been talking to its conductor, Paul Daniel, its Earl of Essex, Toby Spence, and the playwright Mark Ravenhill, who has written a new radio play about the relationship of Britten and Imogen Holst, looking at what really went wrong. Piece is in The Independent, here. Slightly longer Director's Cut below the video. Book for the opera here.
Meanwhile, it sounds like everyone had the most brilliant time last night at Grimes on the Beach at Aldeburgh. Having been away/concert-giving for most of the last ten days, and heading to the Cotswolds for Longborough's Die Walkure today, I needed yesterday to stay in and work, so regretfully declined an offered place on the press bus. Sounds like this may not have been the best move in the world... The extraordinary event has, fortunately, been filmed and Tim Albery says it should be in the cinemas this autumn - which I guess will be warmer, if nothing else.
Onwards to the next big Britten event...here's an extract from Richard Jones's production of Gloriana, which has already been seen in Hamburg:
It was not Benjamin Britten’s finest hour. The world
premiere of his Gloriana, written to
celebrate the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, was a flop. Opening night, 8
June 1953, found dignitaries, ambassadors, court officials and the youthful
monarch assembling in the Royal Opera House for the glittering occasion: a new
opera about the young queen’s namesake, Queen Elizabeth I.
Yet such was the
apparent disappointment with it that, despite successful airings at Welsh
National Opera and Opera North in intervening decades, its original venue has
not attempted to stage it again. Now, after 60 years, a new production by the director
Richard Jones is to open there at last.
Jones, in this co-production with the Hamburg Staatsoper,
has updated the setting to 1953, so that the opera’s action – which concerns
the relationship of Elizabeth and Robert Deveraux, the Earl of Essex – takes
place as a play within a play, framed by the exact era of its composition. The
designs by Ultz present children in grey uniforms and a dilapidated wooden
school hall – within which bright colours, vivid dances and stylised
backgrounds evoke what could be the 1950s’ idealised, escapist vision of the 16th
century, including lettering formed from stacked vegetables and a golden coach
made entirely of roses. A star-studded British cast is headed by the soprano
Susan Bullock as Elizabeth and the tenor Toby Spence as Deveraux, and Paul
Daniel conducts.
This is an anniversary year for both the Queen and the
composer; the event is a major contribution to the Britten centenary
celebrations. But it’s time to take stock. Whatever went wrong with Gloriana back in 1953?
The short answer is: pretty much everything.
“This was an opera written with the bunting up,” says Toby
Spence. “Britain had just come out of the Second World War and had only just
got past rationing. We were still a broken country, so any excuse to get out
the banners and flags and give them a wave was gratefully received.”
The opera received financial support from the still-new Arts
Council and Britten worked under extreme pressure to finish the score in about
nine months (most operas take several years). He was aided and abetted in its
administration by Imogen Holst, daughter of the composer Gustav Holst, who
helped to make its completion viable.
An official, courtly stage work nevertheless seemed a
strange direction for a composer not noted for his prime place in the
establishment. During the war Britten had been a conscientious objector; and he
was homosexual, publicly so in his long relationship with the tenor Peter
Pears. The climate of the Cold War and the ripples of McCarthyism were making themselves
felt all too strongly at the time; the display of patriotism and pageantry
around the Coronation was perhaps partly a veneer over an atmosphere of alarm
and repression.
Britten habitually depicted the latter qualities rather
better than he did pomp and circumstance. One of his great strengths in opera
was his ability to evoke empathy for the vulnerable and the alienated. And so
he does for Queen Elizabeth I. Gloriana
– with a libretto by William Plomer based on Lytton Strachey’s book Elizabeth and Essex: A Tragic History –
shows her as a complex, ageing woman facing intense personal anguish, her
public self essentially forced to destroy the man she privately loves. The
premiere’s audience, less than conversant with contemporary music, arrived
hoping for royal celebration. They did not get it.
It was said that the newly crowned queen was not too taken
with the subject matter; Lord Harewood described the event as “one of the great
disasters of operatic history”; and the work was omitted from a supposedly
complete recording of Britten conducting his own works. Its failure had
long-lasting effects on the composer: “Afterwards, he closed in upon himself,”
says the conductor Paul Daniel. “His music became more introverted for the next
ten years.”
According to Mark Ravenhill, who has written a play for BBC
Radio 3 entitled Imo and Ben about
the creative process behind Gloriana,
Britten was somewhat naive. “He didn’t think strategically or politically – he
just thought it was a great story,” Ravenhill suggests. “But just at the moment
when people were trying to invest the young queen with all the regalia of
royalty, to show an old woman being divested of that seems a really bad
choice.”
Spence points out that the work is not without structural problems.
“It is a more difficult opera to stage than Britten’s others, because it’s more
chopped up,” he says. “There are long gaps in the narrative and as an audience
you have to span those gaps in your mind as to what’s happened in between. But
the music is as beautiful as anything else he wrote.”
Daniel indicates Britten’s technical expertise. “The whole
point is that Queen Elizabeth I is very public, on view and on trial as a woman
and as a queen; but on trial in her own mind, she tortures herself with her
private life,” he says. “Britten jumps brilliantly from one side of her
existence to the other. He scales up and down, focuses in and focuses out,
rather like a brilliant film maker.” He suggests that the disastrous opening
night was not solely about the work, but also concerned the performance: “There
is a recording of that premiere and musically it was a sorry experience.”
Ravenhill, though, nails the paradox at the heart of the
matter. “I was intrigued by the idea of an artist being commissioned to write
an official piece, a sort of national work of art – rather like the opening
ceremony for the Olympics - and how much was at stake in that idea,” he says.
“The Arts Council and public subsidy was very new and in many ways this was
seen as a test case.
“I think Britten himself felt ambiguous about that. He
wanted that national recognition, partly because it said something about the
importance of opera, which still was not really valued as an English art-form.
Nevertheless, he knew that his art was not best made as national and official
and that maybe he worked better when he was writing for a group of friends at
home in Aldeburgh. That contradiction within him – about creating great work,
but not being quite able to fit within big official structures – says something
about the climate at the time.”
To Spence, Britten still did exactly the right thing:
writing from the heart and to his own strengths, putting humanity above all
else, no matter the establishment reaction. “I don’t think an artist should
ever pander to a set of invisible rules by which people are made to conform,”
Spence says. “It is artists’ and composers’ jobs to expose those rules as a
load of old rubbish.”
Today Gloriana is
free to prove its worth. Let’s hope the Queen may like it better this time
around.
Gloriana, Royal Opera
House, from 20 June. Live cinema relay 24 June. Box office: 020 7304 4000. Mark
Ravenhill’s Imo and Ben is on BBC Radio 3 on 30 June, 8.30pm
