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Not the marrying kind: Britten's Albert Herring

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 August 2008

Clifford Hindley
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Extract

At the climax of his account of a night of drunken adventure, Albert Herring, who has at last thrown off conventional restraints, suddenly breaks off: ‘a nightmare example of drunkenness, dirt, and worse…’. At which point the Glyndebourne production of a few years ago had Albert produce from his shirt an outsize pair of women's bloomers. The visual aid was presumably deemed necessary because the text does not make clear what inference we are to draw. The nature of Albert's desire is left open, and at least one early reviewer recognised that there might be a less conventional understanding of the superficially hilarious romp that Albert Herring presents. More recently, Philip Brett has trenchantly argued that the opera is a parable of the ‘coming out’ of a young gay man set against the oppression of small-town respectability, a view I believe to be in essence correct. There may, however, be room for a more detailed study of those elements in the text that enable us to affirm it with confidence.

Type
Research Article
Information
Cambridge Opera Journal , Volume 6 , Issue 2 , July 1994 , pp. 159 - 174
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1994

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References

Extracts from the libretto and musical score are reproduced by permission of Boosey & Hawkes Publishers Ltd.

1 Stuart's, Charles ‘Maupassant Reversed’, The Observer (22 06 1947)Google Scholar, spoke of ‘a shyness so tormenting that opera goers of a certain sort are sure to start grubbing frantically for bits of Freud between the lines’.

2 Brett, Philip, ‘Character and Caricature in “Albert Herring”’, Musical Times (10 1986), 545–7.CrossRefGoogle Scholar See also Porter, Andrew, ‘Musical Events’, The New Yorker (3 07 1978), 76–8.Google Scholar

3 The quotation is from the Everyman Edition of Short Stories, trans. Laurie, Marjorie (London, rpr. 1985), 85.Google Scholar

4 Brett has some interesting remarks on the absence in France of the suspicions aroused in England by the thought of a single man living with his mother.

5 Mitchell, Donald, ‘The Serious Comedy of Albert Herring’, originally published in the Glyndebourne Festival Opera Programme Book 1986Google Scholar, reprinted, The Opera Quarterly, 4/3 (1986), 45–59.Google Scholar (Page references for this article are to the Opera Quarterly publication.) see also the brief review by Cardus, Neville, Manchester Guardian (10 10 1947).Google Scholar

6 See Brett, , 547.Google Scholar

7 See Mitchell, , 47.Google Scholar

8 Law, Joe K., ‘Daring to Eat a Peach: Literary Allusion in Albert Herring’, The Opera Quarterly 5/1 (1987), 1–10.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9 Law, , 6–7.Google Scholar The reference is to the Song of Solomon 2: 11–12.Google Scholar

10 See Peake's Commentary on the Bible, ed. Black, M. and Rowley, H. H. (London, 1962), 468, 471.Google Scholar

11 Such an interpretation seems to lie behind the oblique language of the gay Jewish mystic and painter Simeon Solomon, in his now forgotten prose poem, A Vision of Love Revealed in Sleep.He there uses words from the Song of Solomon 2: 17Google Scholar as a kind of refrain in the context of his vision of transcendent love as a beautiful young man. This work, originally published in 1871, is reprinted in Reynolds, Simon, The Vision of Simeon Solomon (Stroud, 1985), 39–79.Google Scholar

12 It is tempting in this context also to make mention of Lady Billows's likening of Loxford to Sodom and Gomorrah. But her outbursts are so wildly eccentric and misdirected (she later calls for electromagnets to assist the manhunt!) that we should resist the inclination to attach any significance to this allusion.

13 Not quite the last. The chord returns in an uncomplicated fashion in the course of Sid's dialogue with Nancy, to underline his good intentions in providing the rum (Act II, between figures 79 and 80).

14 Evans, Peter, The Music of Benjamin Britten (London, 1979), 151.Google Scholar

15 Law, , 9Google Scholar and n18. The additional Marvell reference is to the poem ‘The Garden’.

16 Law is not quite explicit, but I infer from his description of Nancy's kiss as ‘a reward [Albers] has dreamed of’ that he shares the majority view.

17 Evans, , 156.Google Scholar

18 See Law, , 18.Google Scholar

19 Stanza 8 of ‘The Garden’, Andrew Marvell: The Complete Poems, ed. Donno, Elizabeth S. (Harmondsworth, 1972; rpt. 1981), 101.Google Scholar It is this poem's allusion to the nectarine and peach that Eric Crozier mentioned to Law.

20 See Brett, Philip, Benjamin Britten: ‘Peter Grimes’ (Cambridge, 1983)Google Scholar and my ‘Homosexual Self-affirmation and Self-oppression in Two Britten Operas’, The Musical Quarterly, 76/2 (Summer, 1992), 143–68.Google Scholar

21 The danger of challenging convention is reflected in Prufrock's comparison of his situation with that of John the Baptist: ‘Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a platter,/I am no prophet – and here's no great matter’. Is it too fanciful to see a parallel to this thought in the ceremonial bearing in of Albert's disfigured wreath on a tray, especially as there is no such ceremonial in Maupassant?

22 Mitchell's, DonaldOpera QuarterlyGoogle Scholar article (see n. 5) has made a notable attempt to reverse this judgement, arguing that the Threnody unites the whole community in a grief that is the appropriate reaction to the presumed facts of Albert's death.

23 The Times Literary Supplement (19 07 1985), 799.Google Scholar

24 See my ‘Homosexual Self-affirmation and Self-oppression’ (n. 20).

25 A few years ago, the BBC broadcast a television discussion on homosexuality. Three couples took part, each of whom had a gay son. One of the fathers, a fundamentalist Christian whose son had committed suicide on account of his homosexuality, averred that as a counsellor he had encountered many families who felt that they had suffered a bereavement on learning that their son was gay. (The programme, Family Matters, was broadcast on 4 04 1990.)Google Scholar

26 From ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, in Eliot, T. S., Collected Poems: 1909–1962 (London, 1963; rpt. 1968), 16.Google Scholar

27 Luke, 16: 31Google Scholar (Revised Standard Version). In considering the relevance of so apparently indirect an allusion, one must recognise that biblical references with a significant shift in meaning are found (as Law has demonstrated) at several other places in Albert Herring.

28 Law, , 9.Google Scholar One might then also suppose that it is not just the pleasure of assonance that causes Albert to add ‘resurrected’to the catalogue, ‘re-elected, re-selected, re-expected’, when predicting his future at the beginning of Act II Scene 2.

29 Law, , 7.Google Scholar The allusion is to Genesis 2: 24.

30 Baker, Janet, ‘Working with Britten’, in David Herbert, The Operas of Benjamin Britten (London, 1979), 1.Google Scholar