BRITTEN: Albert Herring

ALBERT HERRING
Opera in 3 Acts by Benjamin BRITTEN
Text by Eric Crozier after Guy de Maupassant
Glyndebourne Festival Opera (1985)
Soloists of the London Philharmonic Orchestra
Conducted by Bernard Haitink

I finally watched my first British opera on DVD: Benjamin Britten’s Albert Herring. This opera, composed in the 1940’s and premiered at Glyndebourne, is the British’s attempt at carving their position in the world of opera, of which they are conspicuously not prominently represented. After Henry Purcell in the 15th century, no other English composer (other than the very minor reputation of John Gay) of musical renown comes to mind.

Unfortunately, the musical environment Britten found himself already eschews the old, florid styles of singing and orchestration of the Franco-Italo-Germanic vein which the musical world has come to embrace, with the advent of Schoenberg’s 12-tone school and the neo-classical styles of the Russians like Rimsky-Korsakov and Prokofiev in the early part of the 20th century. With contemporary works of Richard Strauss of the Wagnerian school and on the opposite end, Alban Berg of the revolutionary Schoenberg’s, does Britten stand a chance of being recognized at all in this opera?

Oh yes, to some extent, although I venture out to say he’s neither an innovator nor a fantastic musical colorist. The opera Albert Herring is extremely funny, but that is largely due to an excellent libretto by Eric Crozier, adapted from Guy de Maupassant’s Le Rosier de Madame Husson, rather than the music itself. It is a parody of life in a bygone England, and what a ride it is.

It is a tale about Albert Herring- gullible, naïve greengrocer lad who, much to his consternation, is made Village May King when the guardians of morality realized there are no longer girls with the necessary virtuous qualifications. Unfortunately, this came at a time when Albert no longer wished to be treated like a village idiot or some plastic saint because he’s missing all the fun by being a good boy all throughout his life. In other words, a wimp.

The children were particularly funny. I like the scene where the teacher, aptly named Miss Wordsworth, during the Coronation where Albert had to wear virginal white suit to symbolize his purity of heart, but which made him look like a fool, tried to make the children sing a welcome tribute. They kept on forgetting their lines, mispronouncing them (‘ale’ instead of ‘hail’, ‘halbert’ instead of ‘albert’), and reciting verses as if they were reading the ingredients from a cereal box.

The speeches I found extremely funny as well, especially the impassioned appeal for moral regeneration from the town’s rich patroness, Lady Billows. And of course Miss Wordsworth, who gave Albert a two-volume set of Fox’s Book of Martyrs “to be read during rainy afternoons”.

The music is extremely dull and hopelessly unmelodic. But then of course, most operas from this period aren’t any different. The fact that the recitative style decays into speech, it clearly mimics Claude Debussy’s Pelleas et Melisande, but without the ravishing and dream-like orchestration. This is unlike Francis Poulenc’s searingly dramatic Dialogues des Carmelites premiered at La Scala in the late 1950’s, a contemporary work.

Britten knows how to pick his material. But whether or not he is able to bring it to new heights through his music is another matter.