From the musical times 50 years ago

Musical Times, Summer 2003 by Anderson, WR

From 'Round aboul radio' (MT June 1953)

ARTHUR BENJAMIN'S 'romantic melodrama', for which Cedric Cliffe ingeniously made a libretto out of Dickens's 'A Tale of Two Cities', is one of the two most striking British stage works I have heard since Ethel Smyth's day, neither of which has been put on the stage. The other, Alan Bush's 'Wat Tyler', I heard from a German theatre production, too dimly for safe judgment, though what I could hear was immediately gripping. Both works won Arts Council awards, and this is as far as we get towards production! There is something wrong there. Benjamin was bold and, I think, wise in by-passing some old, expected procedures: in centring his melodrama upon Madame Defarge and making her a soprano (the versatile Marjorie Westbury rose splendidly to the chances), and in casting Dr. Manette as a tenor (Heddle Nash, now numbered among our veterans, and ever welcome) and Dickens's hero as a baritone (Frederick Sharp). By hearing alone, the result may be described as exciting. As befits the melodramatist, the composer does not disdain 'sensation music'. Like most writers today, he is apt to strain attention by very frequent modulations and harmonic slides: indeed, he perhaps packs the score too tightly. Much could be argued concerning the relation of pace to the older melodic-harmonic securities. As ever, I wanted some tunes to take away, apart from bits of airs (with a minuet as a slight leitmotiv) of contemporary (French Revolutionary) style. These devices I can never much enjoy. Puccini's Japanese trifles are apt enough in 'Butterfly', but now that those old leisurely melodic days are past - to my sorrow - I wish composers would stick entirely to their own present-day methods, for good or (as it so often seems) for ill. Benjamin achieves much, despite what seemed, on a first hearing, the defects of too many indeterminate short snatches and 'effects'. The crowd scenes are powerful: only the Russians, I think, have matched them. The broad pictorial elements are cleverly limned by this versatile composer.

It seems unwise to complain if character (particularly Carton's) be insufficiently developed. One - especially if one be a deep-dyed lifemember of the Dickens Fellowship cannot have everything! Judgment of such a work is painfully handicapped when its impact is confined to what can be made of a radio hearing, without previous knowledge, or sight of a score. No work designed for the stage can really be assessed off it. I thought the singers seemed rapt up to the occasion, in a powerful work which, if we can get to see and study it properly, and lorget about opera as we knew it up-to-Puccini (and on-to-Menotti), should reveal more of the striking aspects of its crowded - perhaps over-crowded - life.