Re-directing Britten
This week, we're meeting another of Richard Jones' recent rethinkings of a Britten opera. Unlike his tough modern Grimes for La Scala, this revival of Gloriana is nostalgic and even witty. And that Grimes was for this director a pretty safe adaption. Read this interview for glimpses of some of his other radical productions of operas you know. Hey, look what he did to the Ring Cycle! (Warning to traditionalists: he's directing the Met's next Ring, with the same production, in 2025. They may be wishing back the Machine!)
But he's gentler with Gloriana, arguably the most problematic of Britten's operas. As one review comments, he makes it 'an exercise in post-second world war nostalgia'.
What is almost miraculous about all of Richard Jones’s productions is his ability to involve every person on stage to the utmost, something that you rarely see in the opera house. It’s as though he’s worked individually with every chorus member, as well as principal, and they all know why they are there and what they have to do. It makes for an incredibly tight and effective ensemble, all the more impressive as it’s still evident in close-up.
Jones does over-egg things sometimes and, with all the surrounding paraphernalia in this production, he could be accused of it here but the distancing effect really works for me, drawing attention away from the opera’s weaker points.
More about Richard Jones and the 'opera within an opera' approach below. But meanwhile...
That Premiere!
To understand this most neglected of Britten’s works, start at the opening night – count the tiaras here! (Menzies enters at 3.51). What a way for a controversial composer to launch a radical opera about royal misbehaviour! ROH is having a great honour, we are told, as it’s more than 200 years since a reigning monarch attended a first performance at Covent Garden. 3,000 roses adorned the Royal Box but you wonder what they are expecting. Britten doesn’t feature on the film. You wonder what he was thinking. We do know he was unenthusiastic later about “an invited audience of stuck pigs”.
Famously, the opera that night was a (predictable?) flop. Lord Harewood, who brought Britten to write it, declared it “one of the great disasters of operatic history”. You’d think he would have foreseen this. ‘The audience of nobility, politicians and other dignitaries, expecting a jolly “Merrie England” entertainment, was unprepared for Britten’s musically sophisticated, psychologically probing portrait of Elizabeth I and her ill-fated relationship with the Earl of Essex.’ Apparently it had been pretested on the new queen at an improbable dinner party the week before the premiere. What was she meant to say?! Here’s the story of how it was commissioned. According to Bachtrack, 'The Queen was diligent in studying the opera beforehand and polite in her response (the experience does not seem to have engendered an enduring love of opera); for most of the invited first night audience, Gloriana predictably went down like a lead balloon.'
Britten is reported to have fumed at the response. ‘“Clap, damn you, clap”! Benjamin Britten, enraged, leaned out of his box at Covent Garden and railed at the lukewarm audience response to curtain-down at the premiere of his seventh opera, Gloriana.’ He later referred to it as his ‘slighted child’.
This reflection is fun! It quotes the librettist Plomer, still bitter in a 1965 interview in London Magazine:
Were these chatterers interested in anything beyond a plenteous twinkling of tiaras and recognizable wearers of stars and ribbons in the auditorium? Did they perhaps expect some kind of loud and rumbustious amalgam of Land of Hope and Glory and Merrie England, with catchy tunes and deafening choruses to reproduce the vulgar and blatant patriotism of the Boer War period? If so, they didn’t get it.And did this debacle affect the future of British opera? A full report here for the diamond jubilee.
The opera came back in a fanfare in the UK with first a famous 1999 production by Opera North. Listen here to the trailer when it was filmed for the BBC (cast details and reviews here) and ENO (1984), then the Britten centenary (2013) ROH production that we’ll view.
The music? Some of Britten's best, several experts ruled, but it is patchy, uneven, reflecting, no doubt, the mixed goals of the opera’s creation.
Because of its ceremonial nature, Britten and librettist William Plomer made Gloriana a number opera, alternating spectacle with intimate moments. The scenes set out in the open, notably an extended masque and ballet in Act II, are tedious and trite, but the personal segments—duets between Elizabeth and Essex, the Queen’s self-questioning monologues—contain some of the composer’s most inspired work.
This wasn’t Britten’s first ‘big’ opera – both Peter Grimes (1945) and Billy Budd (1951) were far from chamber opera size and style. But it was the first that played with the spectacle of opera in Verdi tradition. ( Here’s the chorus ‘Long may she keep this realm’ and the triumphant ‘Let trumpets blow’ from the Opera North production, Josephine Barstow as the queen.) Here’s the same scene from the ROH production.
Britten’s love of Verdi shows in the choruses, the complex crafting of the opera, its big orchestration and the complexity of the plot and shift from personal drama to ceremonial performance. Listen to the ‘courtly dances here. But it also contains the famous ‘Lute Songs’ sung by Essex – written for Peter Pears, who sings the second here. In the context of this extraordinary premiere, the words carry a strong message – ‘Happy were he..” Read them here.
It’s a testing role for Britten sopranos (for whom all his operas offer testing roles). Read about the ENO production with Sarah Walker here.
And don’t forget the Earl of Essex, a fascinating romantic role for any tenor. Donizetti first launched Essex in opera, with an entirely imaginary plot and wonderful arias. There’s a great account here:
In real life, Robert Devereux, the Earl of Essex, was a charming, self-serving rogue who never understood that he couldn’t always bend the Queen to his will. And that cost him his life at the age of 34. S.T. Bindoff describes him in Tudor England as a “unique complex of charms…which first captured royal favor and then time and again recovered it after follies which would have doomed a less ornamental offender... Essex died as he had lived, a man of one idea, the idea of his own aggrandizement.” That’s a far cry from the admirable operatic character who goes to his death rather than compromise his lover by revealing her name.
In the hands of Britten’s (hitherto untried) librettist, Essex has a less complicated love life but is just as interesting a courtier. And Britten gives him fascinating music as he moves between charming flirt and determined revolutionary. Once again, it was a part written for his partner, and the music challenges in many ways.
Our production
We're watching that production by Richard Jones for Royal Opera House, in 2013. Six decades from the premiere, and six decades into the reign of Elizabeth II, ROH staged their second production – for the diamond jubilee of Elizabeth II.
(I can’t find if she attended, but doubt it. She’d seen it once, after all.)
The ROH website declared,
The centenary in 2013 of Britten’s birth prompted this new Royal Opera production, in which director Richard Jones uses the setting of a celebratory pageant in 1953 to explore the work’s alternating splendour and intimacy. This theatrical, inventive and colourful staging has at its core the symbolic reflections between the Tudor Elizabethan and the New Elizabethan ages that characterize the opera. The juxtaposition of the modern and the archaic in William Plomer’s libretto is wonderfully amplified in music that artfully fuses the sounds and manners of Tudor England – from lute songs to courtly dances – with Britten’s own distinctive style.
Susan Bullock, the queen in the ROH production, writes about the role here. There's a video here of her discussing it.
And Essex? Listen here to Toby Spence, Essex in the ROH production, on playing the part.
It’s also a testing task for directors – how to present this complex piece? In 1953 the goal was doubtless to avoid offence to the newly crowned Queen Elizabeth and a monarchist audience. (This goal was definitely not achieved!)
So what does Richard Jones do with it? He tackles the timelines of Gloriana head on.
There’s something slightly sycophantic about the whole undertaking (as there is with the official commissions of poet laureates). What you can rely on Jones to do, though, is subtly undercut the less appealing aspects of any work (he did it brilliantly with his production for Welsh National Opera of the troubling Mastersingers of Nuremberg). Here he cleverly steers between blatant subversion and acquiescent worship by framing the opera as a play within a play and in the process, ironically, allows the work to speak for itself.
Clive Page applauded in Limelight: ‘Richard Jones’ witty retro pageant production comes over as a great deal more fun than has previously seemed the case. Jones’ conceit presents the work as a show within a show – a royal variety performance, set in something akin to the Public Hall Budleigh Salterton circa 1953, complete with new Queen in gracious attendance. It’s all very droll, echoing the sense of civic hope and pride that must have been in the air at the time of the Coronation, but also allowing us a smile at the pompous side of such amateur confections. Ultz’ ingenious design is all cardboard and strings and the costumes have a delightfully makeshift quality to them while just about staying on the right side of naff.’
Post script: Elizabeth II remained firm supporter of Britten, if not of opera. The Queen (above) opened Snape Maltings Concert Hall in 1967. She opened it again after it was rebuilt, in 1970. Lots more royal trivia available here!