A tale of two parties

No, not those parties. These are Baron Zeta's embassy ball, and Hanna Glawari's glamour-trip do. We're in Paris and we're at a different party in each act of The Merry Widow, where the filthy-rich Hanna, having inherited millions from her deceased spouse, is the target of Baron Zeta's determination to marry her off to a fellow countryman to bolster the national economy of their homeland, Pontevedro.

A moment of magic: Sarah Tynan as Hanna sings 'Vilja' from the moon.
All photos from ENO (c) Clive Barda

The great thing about operetta is that it is "light". But the trouble with operetta is that it has to be "light", otherwise it becomes heavy and goes clunk. Treat its subject matter with too much earnestness and it can be a total disaster. But what is "light"?

It's in the music, it's in the drama, it's in the touch. It's in the teasing out of meaning, rather than the hammer-head of fate. It's in the quality of projection, the creation of imagery, the flexibility and, most elusively, that strange old-fashioned thing called charm. It makes you laugh, but not without occasionally raising a tear to the eye. There's farce or fantasy, madcap humour and melodies to go mad about. There are home truths, but happy endings. Mostly nobody dies. And, as remarked my companion for the evening - a friend and colleague who knows his central Europe inside out - it's like goulash: there's no one recipe. Anyone who's ever tried will tell you that comedy is far and away the most difficult genre to pull off - whether you're writing, or filming, or staging opera/operetta.

Maybe, then, it's no wonder that a trip to The Merry Widow at English National Opera is a rare experience. We all know the waltz tune, but Franz Lehár's best-known work doesn't often make it to the stage in the UK, let alone in English. This version, with English new book by April de Angelis (Flight) and lyrics by Richard Thomas (Jerry Springer: The Opera), looked enticing and promised much.

How does it match up? Musically, pretty well - though the Overture seemed a strange mash-up of The Best of the Merry Widow, rather than Lehár's original. Still, Kristiina Poska's conducting maintained a pleasing spring in the step, bowling-along momentum and some nice Viennese-style rubato. The cast's voices suited the roles and the music. Sarah Tynan's girlish high soprano was well chosen, precise and biting, with a beautifully plaintive 'Vilja' song delivered from the crescent moon. Nathan Gunn was clear-spoken and world-weary as Danilo and the supporting acts of Rhian Lois, Robert Murray and Andrew Shore as respectively Valencienne, Camille and Baron Zeta pulled off their multiple shenanigans with terrific aplomb.

Go with the flow...

Max Webster's staging had its ups and downs. The splendour and romance of Hanna's party, with that dangling moon, was hard to resist, but act I, taking place inside a stage-within-a-stage that was occupied mostly by a sweeping staircase, felt a bit cramped. The major weakness, though, was one-dimensional characters; Hanna herself, "common as muck", as she's described in this version, is also hard as nails and veers all the way from vampily taunting the predatory men about their obsession with her money to... vampily taunting the predatory men about their obsession with her money. Tynan certainly looks the part in a svelte silver gown, but the character proved oddly hard to care about; when she suddenly deduces that "he loves only me" it comes as a bit of a surprise that she's even interested. Gunn's Danilo was, well, a good match. Their relationship seemed as shallow as both of them, beyond a vague old-flame frisson. These two deserved each other.

And the translation? Sassy and modern, yes: the women get the upper hand, the men are baffled and buffeted. Sideswipes at the present political situation hit home, notably when it's pointed out that the trouble with being Pontevedran is that you're from a country with no natural resources, no manufacturing industry and with whom nobody would want to do business, and that risks being annexed by Lichtenstein. But the highlight was the men's song at their row of urinals, wondering how on earth the women took control ("Go with the flow!"). Last time I heard an English version of this, it was all about "Girls, girls, girls, girls, giiiirls", so a radical rethink was somewhat refreshing. Besides, the words were not only quick, catchy and clever, but they actually worked with the music.

That wasn't always the case elsewhere. Not that this was likely to be a smooth run. I've done some pieces myself that involved fitting new words to existing music, and it's a challenge. You have to make sure you do go with the flow - the shape of the phrases, the open vowels, the way the stresses fall naturally - but when the sound of the original language can be so much a part of the music itself (and it is - others will say it isn't, but in most cases it really, really is), you're almost doomed before you start. Still. One example. You know that waltz tune? The three falling notes at the end of the phrases? Here they sang: "I'll miss you." It comes out with the music as "I'LL miss YOU," though the natural flow of these words, though is "I'll MISS you." Try saying it aloud: it's the shape and impact of the syllables themselves...

There's a lot to be said for sassy, modern and up to date. But it means - perhaps inevitably - replacing charm with cynicism. And without charm, the whole thing risks missing the mark. You can take Lehár out of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but you can't take the...oh.

I kid you not.

A quick word, to close, about the beavers, national symbol of Montevedro... You first encounter them in the foyer - gold ones - and then on stage. And you think perhaps the metaphor/pun is going to become something more risqué, but actually it doesn't, so the gag falls a little bit flat... Except that then two beavers appear at Hanna's party and, um, they tap-dance, accompanied by a gaudy array of moustachioed acrobatic strongmen and party-frocked prancers (see above). At which point, my companion remarked: "Actually, this is very like Romanian late-night TV." To which I can't really add anything at all.

Here's a little treat: the original Merry Widow, Mizzi Günther, singing 'Vilma', recorded in 1906.

En marche

We do.

Plenty of us were there, too.

Cheers to everyone who marched yesterday, using our democratic right to peaceful protest. And with a turnout of an estimated 1.8m, don't forget that each of us were also representing those who couldn't make it due to work, rehearsals, family and other commitments, but were there in spirit and asked us to remember them there. I had at least 10 requests to "march for me".

Who knows if it will make any difference - but that is no reason not to try.

Similarly, if you haven't yet signed the Revoke Article 50 petition - which at time of writing is just short of 5m - please do so here.

"A gaping hole in the heart of British choral music"

I don't think I'm the only person who's currently so cheesed off with the behaviour of our dear country on the international stage that I've been feeling disinclined to listen to any British music. This is not good. Brexit isn't the fault of our composers - anything but. Therefore I'm making an effort to get back to them and I've asked William Vann to write us a guest post about Hubert Parry's oratorio Judith, which he is conducting at the London English Song Festival at the Royal Festival Hall on 3 April, no matter what happens on 29 March. He tells me this will be the work's first airing in London since the 19th century and that its neglect seems to him to be "a gaping hole in the heart of British choral music". Nevertheless, you might find some of it sounds familiar...

Please read on, have a listen and (unless you're in Great Malvern that night for the Schumann Violin Concerto) do give the concert a whirl. If you can't make it, watch out for the recording in due course. JD

‘It is the offspring not only of a finished musician but of a cultivated thinker. For such a possession art is the better and England the richer.’ Charles Villiers Stanford writing on Judith, 1888.

Hubert Parry,
younger than we usually think of him

2018, the year of the centenary of his death, saw a widespread reawakening of interest in the music of Hubert Parry, including the release of three discs of his complete English Lyrics on SOMM Recordings. Yet, particularly in the world of choral music, many of his large-scale works were overlooked in favour of well-known classics, such as the Songs of Farewell, Blest Pair of Sirens, or I Was Glad.

The London English Song Festival’s performance of Charles Hubert Hastings Parry’s oratorio Judith on 3 April promises to be one of the most important revivals of English music for many years. A work of considerable stature and irresistible quality, Judith has not been performed in the UK since the 1950s; in London its last performance was at St James’s Hall in 1889 - 130 years ago! It has never been recorded. Parry was the master of large choral and orchestral forces, and Judith features spine-tingling choruses and a dramatic story. It was an overwhelming success in Victorian England, performed by some of that era’s greatest musicians all over the UK, and it contains the melody that later, under the name Repton, became the famous hymn Dear Lord and Father of Mankind.

George Grove appointed Parry as the Royal College of Music’s professor of composition and musical history in 1883, and he was finally able to put his unhappy career in insurance (he had been underwriter at Lloyd's of London from 1870 to 1877) behind him. The 1880s was a decade when he emerged as a composer of stature, with a reputation as a symphonist and as writer of choral music. His dramatic cantata, Scenes from Prometheus Unbound, had been performed at the Gloucester Three Choirs Festival of 1880 and he was again commissioned to write a short choral work for the Gloucester festival in 1883. Blest Pair of Sirens of 1886, setting Milton’s ‘At a solemn musick’ was commissioned by Stanford and the London Bach Choir to mark Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee and was received with adulation by the public and critics alike.

Shortly afterwards, Parry was commissioned by the great triennial festival at Birmingham to write  a large-scale oratorio. Extensive choral participation was part of the brief: the Birmingham committee insisted on, as Parry put it, ‘regular oratorio’, and after much thought he settled on the dramatic story of Judith during the reign of the repentant Jewish king, Manasseh. After some wrangling with the Birmingham committee, Judith was performed on 29 August under the direction of the festival conductor, Hans Richter.

Parry's new oratorio was well received and was soon taken up by choral societies around Britain, notably in Edinburgh, London, Cambridge, Gloucester, Bristol and Oxford. The work contains many impressive choral movements, particularly in such numbers as ‘Our king is come again’ and the final fugue (‘Put off, O Jerusalem’) and the solo work is thrilling. The hymn tune Repton originated in the ballad of Meshullemeth, the queen-mother (‘Long since in Egypt’s plenteous land’), who sings of the early Israelite history to her children.

It seems that Judith fell out of favour and fashion, along with much of Parry’s music, after his death. The next generation of composers took British classical music in a new direction: no bad thing, but with hindsight it was a pity that much of the finest of late 19th century music was discarded. The more I studied the score, playing through sections of choruses and arias with groups of singers, the more I grew to regard the neglect of this work as a gaping hole in the heart of British choral music.

And so, on Wednesday 3 April 2019, at Royal Festival Hall (an organ is crucial to a full performance!), Judith will receive its first London performance since the 19th century and its first UK performance within living memory. The soloists will be Sarah Fox as Judith (she features on discs 2 & 3 of the SOMM English Lyrics, as it happens), Kathryn Rudge as Meshullemeth, Toby Spence as Manasseh and Henry Waddington as High Priest of Moloch & Messenger of Holofernes. We will go on to record it for Chandos Records later in the month. I am thrilled to be conducting the four of them alongside the London Mozart Players, Crouch End Festival Chorus and a superb chorus of children, specially selected for the occasion. Join us!

William Vann

[Heard this tune somewhere before?]

www.londonenglishsongfestival.org/judith

www.southbankcentre.co.uk/whats-on

Korngold dream sequence...

Guys, guys...wait...what.....

So, here we go. Jonas Kaufmann is singing the role of Paul in Korngold's Die tote Stadt at the Bavarian State Opera, starting on 18 November. And Kirill Petrenko is conducting, and Marlis Petersen is Marietta and if the announcement on Twitter hadn't been accompanied by a slightly worrying cartoon, I'd have fallen off the proverbial chair. One has of course been hoping for years that Kaufmann might do this. (One might even have mentioned such a hope when interviewing him five years ago, just in case - if he was already thinking about it by then, the cards were not revealed.) But gosh, I hope I'm not dreaming.

This video introducing the production suggests that director Simon Stone could well do it proud. (And indeed - update - a Die tote Stadt fan on Twitter tells me he has attended Stone's production in Basel and that it was "the best I've ever seen".) "We must go through the dark times so that we can see the light again," Stone says. "That's what's so great about the piece." Kaufmann meanwhile points out that the work contains just about everything that happened in opera between 1850 and 1950, which makes it "pretty difficult".

This opera, with its extended dream sequence, has in the past been an occasional magnet for 'dirctoritis': I've never quite recovered from witnessing Olaf Bär having to sing the Pierrot Tanzlied dressed in a black basque, angel wings and high heels. It's a work with a lot of heart and a lot of heartbreak; it carries a strong message about love and loss that was all too pertinent in the wake of World War I when the opera was premiered. That was, I'm convinced, one reason for its extreme popularity in the inter-war years - though its generous, atmospheric score and powerhouse roles for the lead singers might just explain something too. 

Speaking of dreams, yesterday I logged on to the Deutsche Oper Berlin site to see if they were doing their hugely successful production of Korngold's Das Wunder der Heliane again, and it suggested to me that they were, in late April and early May, and I even checked T's calendar to see if he'd be free to go and see any of the performances together, and he wasn't. Then I checked back later - only to find it had completely disappeared. Dream sequence again (or just last year's website)? At least that production is due out on DVD in May. Pre-ordering is available, even if tickets are not. 

Meanwhile in the US, the whole of the Bard Festival is built around Korngold this summer. Not least among the treats on offer will be the US staged premiere of Das Wunder der Heliane, conducted by the marvellous Leon Botstein. The festival also contains a concert performance of Die tote Stadt, a rare performance of the Piano Concerto for Left Hand, the Piano Quintet, the Symphony in F sharp, the Passover Psalm and much, much more. Music by Korngold's contemporaries, peers and mentors sets the context, spanning the worlds from Heliane to Hollywood with much in between.

Korngold now has what he has needed the most: top-level international advocacy. With Leon Botstein at Bard, Kaufmann, Petersen and Petrenko in Munich and Christoph Loy in charge of Heliane in Berlin, there's no doubt about the take-up, the appeal and the power. But there's only one thing missing: a real presence in the UK's opera world. One staged production of Die tote Stadt has come to Covent Garden, ever, many years ago. And that was that - which is frankly nuts. Perhaps Korngold is perceived as too European for one lot of Brits and too American for the others. It's time this changed. Thxbi >books plane to Munich<. 

Sarastro gets a sympathy laugh

Wow! Thomas Oliemans as Papageno.
(All photos courtesy of ENO, (c) Donald Cooper)

It's not every day that Sarastro announces "This is the most important assembly we've ever held - the decision we are about to make is of grave importance" - only to find half the audience giving him a belly-laugh. But then, it's not every day that The Magic Flute feels so relevant to our needs that the whole of the House of Commons should be frogmarched into the Coliseum and made to study every word of it. This Magic Flute has got...bells.

ENO's production by Simon McBurney is back for another revival, and gosh, it's just better and better: the storytelling could not be clearer, nor the inventiveness, nor the meaning. In Mozart and Schikaneder's Enlightenment fairytale, wisdom, truth and love battle against the forces of darkness – lies, ignorance, superstition, vengeance, violence. (Sounds familiar?) And the forces of good triumph. (Yes!) Along the way, in their quest, the young couple Tamino and Pamina are tested to their limits, and protected by their steadfast devotion to each other and the power of their music. (Double yes!)

The Magic Flute in person, with attendant bird action

The ingenious designs by Michael Levine turn the spines of books into pillars of the temple of wisdom, and Papageno's birds are their fluttering, faithful leaves. Wisdom, enlightenment itself, comes through studiousness, learning, books, self-discipline, the embrace of art and culture. The transformative effect of music saves Tamino and Pamina's lives and Papageno's too. There is something uniquely moving about a work by one of the greatest musical geniuses who ever lived that pays such a direct tribute to the art to which he devoted his short life.

The Magic Flute is open to infinite numbers of interpretation and reinterpretation, but McBurney's is the only production I've seen in which the emotional climax - the tests of Fire and Water - actually are frightening: an extended, roaring engulfment of flames followed by a magical flood in which Tamino and Pamina must swim for the spiralling surface. There's magic and whimsy aplenty - the sets are live-drawn, the sound-effects produced by a Foley artist in real time (she even has to dodge the attentions of Papageno), and the prince and Papageno are respectively attended by the orchestra's flautist and keyboard player, trotting up from the pit when needed - until Papageno learns to play his own bells.

Rupert Charlesworth (Tamino) and Lucy Crowe (Pamina) swim for their lives

For this revival the musical performance is a little uneven, but chiefly splendid: Lucy Crowe's Pamina brought a blazing emotional gravitas, Thomas Olieman's Papageno a grumpy yet irresistible charm. Brindley Sherratt's Sarastro simply couldn't be bettered (and, um, I think he was speaking those crucial lines perhaps not 100% "in character" which, under the circumstances, is fine with me). Julia Bauer's Queen of the Night delivered her arias with a concentrated punch of energy, making up in scariness for anything lacking in projection. Rupert Charlesworth as Tamino was slightly the opposite, with a powerful tone that nevertheless did not fully bloom into the sort of open generosity one might long for at the top. The Three Ladies had luxury casting in Susanna Hurrell, Samantha Price and Katie Stevenson, Daniel Norman was a splendid Monostatos and Rowan Pierce's Papagena so appealing that you'd wish her to have a great deal more to sing.

Ben Gernon's conducting felt a little hard-driven and businesslike, at least in the first half; there was sometimes too little space for the music to breathe and it seemed to lack the sense of lightness and air that can add the final touch of Mozartian warmth; but in the second half, Papageno's high comedy with the tuned wine bottles and Lucy Crowe's heartbreak aria oddly enough sorted things out as if simply through the power of Mozart himself. And the upside of the briskness is that the drama does bowl along, keeping you on the edge of your seat all the way through.

The performance was dedicated - as McBurney announced at the end - to the memory of its translator, Stephen Jeffreys, who died last autumn. His English version sparkles and twists and shines.

And did we come out of the Coliseum to find that wisdom had prevailed down the road in Westminster? Not quite - and yet, there's progress. Perhaps a parliament trip to this show might help them put the final pieces into place to save us all from the forces of darkness...

Go see. You'll laugh and cry. https://www.eno.org/whats-on/the-magic-flute/