Britten has many heritages - but perhaps the most far reaching and delightful is the continuing joy of local productions of his opera from a Chester Miracle Play, Noyes' Fludde. It's also perhaps the most happily discussed work of his extraordinary operas. The discussions are all about goals of music that he clearly treasured. Here, the music links communities, and especially children's communities. It links Biblical and old English and current coastal England. It gathers the enthusiasm and fun and beauty of children's voices, and it introduces them to music through play. And then there's the reach and complexity of his composition - bringing together biblical hymns and evocative, pictorial sounds of emotion and physical events - fear and joy, flood and storm, peace and arrival.
And intriguingly, you'll find this little opera praised by experts in blogs and books, where people are writing about the dramatic skill of Britten's work. Here's a good example.
The images too show the spirit of the piece. Explore the Olivier award winning 2020 Stratford East production here. You can watch the story of bringing it together here.
That Britten loved children and loved working with children is well documented, and often critically discussed. Less common is commentary about how perfectly he could fit music and stories to children's sense of drama - scaled down drama, for small places like churches, and small actors. (It also scales up delightfully! Tune in here to the Mid Wales project training video for the schools that took part in a 2011 collaborative production, across five venues and involving hundreds of school children across Wales. ) Here's the video of the project once it got underway.
The instruments required are a collection of sounds - including 'slung mugs'. The Times reporter commented after the Aldeburgh premiere, "It is Britten's triumph that in this musically slender piece he has brought to new life the mentality of another century by wholly modern means. These means included a miscellaneous orchestra such as he alone could conceive and handle." The cast is huge and greatly weighted to the voices of children. The Sunday Times concluded it was "a curiously moving spiritual and musical experience". There's a 10min video here about the premier performance.
And how it has lasted! Despite (or because of) the demands for orchestra, children's trained choir, not to mention costuming a wild variety of small animals, the opera grew in popularity. It was performed in churches and halls across Britain and widely beyond, and in at least two zoos (Nuremberg and Belfast). Online you'll find a gaggle of local productions, and the comments on the videos tell of more, equally happy, community performances, adapted to the culture and the concerns of modern children. One comment on the Mid Wales production we'll discuss in our meeting tells of a NZ adaption.
How nice that they sang two verses of Eternal Father in Welsh! Two weeks ago in Wellington, we sang a verse of The Spacious Firmament in Maori. (The animals included a weta, a tuatara and a moa. Noah was a Kiwi farmer in black singlet and checked shirt, his wife was a frumpy housewife with her hair in rollers and a dressing gown. The Gossips had a small barbecue. God was some kind of televangelist or Kentucky Colonel.) Since there are several anachronisms - St John, Jesus, Mary - in the libretto, why not a few more?
And back at Aldeburgh on the (2013) centenary of Britten's birth, a new production graced the festival, conducted by Australian Paul Kildea (also author of a recent biography of Britten). The production, suitably modern, high tech and high coloured, was still local and for local children. The New York Times reviewed it here.