Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Preface and Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Early Closing
- 2 The Music of Northampton
- 3 A Number of Scotsmen
- 4 Olive
- 5 Union and Exile
- 6 A Purpose for Cinema
- 7 A War of his Own
- 8 Is Your Journey Really Necessary?
- 9 A Coming British Woman Composer
- 10 Towards a Festival
- 11 Questions of Inspiration
- 13 The Late Romantic
- 14 E-Day
- 15 Symphonic Reflections
- 16 Soundless Music
- 17 The Other Suffolk Composer
- 18 The Blythburgh Operas
- 19 The Stillness
- 20 Living and Learning
- 21 Precious Toy
- Epilogue
- Notes
- List of Alwyn’s Works
- Discography
- Bibliography
- General Index
- Index of Alwyn’s Works
18 - The Blythburgh Operas
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 March 2023
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Preface and Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Early Closing
- 2 The Music of Northampton
- 3 A Number of Scotsmen
- 4 Olive
- 5 Union and Exile
- 6 A Purpose for Cinema
- 7 A War of his Own
- 8 Is Your Journey Really Necessary?
- 9 A Coming British Woman Composer
- 10 Towards a Festival
- 11 Questions of Inspiration
- 13 The Late Romantic
- 14 E-Day
- 15 Symphonic Reflections
- 16 Soundless Music
- 17 The Other Suffolk Composer
- 18 The Blythburgh Operas
- 19 The Stillness
- 20 Living and Learning
- 21 Precious Toy
- Epilogue
- Notes
- List of Alwyn’s Works
- Discography
- Bibliography
- General Index
- Index of Alwyn’s Works
Summary
In the early 1960s Alwyn’s life and career were undergoing changes from which they would not be turned. Now settled into his Blythburgh life with Carwithen, he found time to explore his reading, painting and writing. Musically, it is obvious that his departure from London life marked a major shift of activity, accentuated by the fact that he had decided to end his work as a composer for films. His restless creativity made it necessary, whatever the state of his health, to have musical achievement, and only recently having recovered from a physical and mental breakdown, he set himself a challenge that would make enormous demands – he would write an opera. This decision may in part have been made because he had seen the decline of interest in his orchestral work, with the four symphonies all but forgotten. Opera had always been a fascination; it was now to become an obsession. With no commission to spur him on, he embarked on this new career with no idea of what might become of the new work, or who might be interested in it. He seems not to have considered its fate in a country where (a few miles from his house) the country’s leading opera composer, with a world-wide reputation, lived and worked. This was the adventure of a new career, in which Alwyn had no reputation, a composer who had shown little interest in writing vocal music now attempting a great theatrical work.
The first of the Blythburgh operas, Juan or The Libertine had a subject that had been much explored by composers and librettists, most famously in Mozart’s Don Giovanni and Richard Strauss’s symphonic poem Don Juan. The fascination with Juan was international: Italian (Lattuada’s Don Giovanni, Naples 1929); Spanish (Carnicer’s Don Giovanni Tenorior, premiered in Barcelona in 1822 although sung in Italian); German (Don Juan’s letztes Abenteuer, Leipzig 1914), and England (Don Juan de Manara by Eugene Goossens, with a libretto by Arnold Bennett, produced at Covent Garden in 1937). With such a background of work on the subject, Alwyn began a task that was to take him seven years. He keenly felt the need to write it.
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- The Innumerable DanceThe Life and Work of William Alwyn, pp. 228 - 247Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2008