These venues were structured to be intimate, populist, not a little vulgar, risqué, and with a mischievous, open invitation to the nagging art of disapproval. The choice of Wilton’s Music Hall was inspired. It is with this instrumentation (string quintet, double wind, harp, timpani, percussion, piano/celeste, guitar) that we heard the piece performed by English National Opera (as part of ENO Studio Live). This version with a much smaller orchestra was made for touring with Britten’s newly founded English Music Theatre Company (EMTC) in 1976. Britten significantly revised the oper(ett)a in 1974 -5, immediately following the death of Auden. This disagreement to agree worked well in the finished product however, with only a small concession to Britten that it should now be called an operetta.įor reasons I won’t pause to enumerate, the opening night of Paul Bunyan at Brander Matthews Hall, Columbia University on, was a flop. Auden knew that Britten had a natural gift for melodic invention – the kind of music which sounds as though it wrote itself – though such a talent was not high on the composer’s scoreboard. What was coming out was Britten playing Sullivan to Auden’s Gilbert. My own guess is that puzzlement was intentional on the poet’s part, in the belief that it would stimulate Ben’s musical imagination. Britten, Pears, Auden and Kallman lived briefly under the same New York roof during the composition of Paul Bunyan.īritten went through so many rewrites of Paul Bunyan, that musical history has had trouble counting them.
#Britten paul bunyan johnny inkslinger full#
Auden was able to become a full American citizen in 1946.
Wystan Auden was also in New York with his lifetime partner, Chester Kallman (much younger than Wystan) who also collaborated with writing opera libretti, including what would be Britten’s first, Paul Bunyan. It was no surprise when after his death, his lifetime partner, Peter Pears, came out of the closet in an unequivocal, passionate declaration. This theme dominates all Britten’s works – not just the stage music.īen remained in the homosexual closet all his life. And all of them dealing with the question of innocent suffering. When several centuries earlier, the Pilgrim Fathers had sailed across the big pond, they did not rid the land of hope and glory of extreme Protestantism, but they imported it very successfully into American life and culture where it still reigns today, albeit under other names.īenjamin Britten wrote sixteen operas – not counting the two stage works for children – all of them different – forward looking as well as backward looking – and all of them searching for a suitable form for opera of the twentieth century. W H Auden and Benjamin Britten – both pacifists – spent the years of the Second World War in America, for which they were alternatively cheered and jeered, depending on which of those two prejudices you subscribed. The voice of Paul Bunyan – Simon Russell Beale
(JB) Elgan Llyr Thomas as Johnny Inkslinger (c) Genevieve Girling
United Kingdom Britten, Paul Bunyan: Soloists, English National Opera Chorus and instrumentalists / Matthew Kofi Waldren (conductor), Wilton’s Music Hall, London.
0 kommentar(er)
