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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 31 July 2015
Britten and Auden’s ‘choral operetta’ Paul Bunyan, written in New York in 1939–41, has often been seen as out of touch with its American context and as an anomalous precursor to the triumphant Peter Grimes (1945). A closer look, however, suggests a more complex engagement with American musical life and with the problem of American operatic populism. Indeed, if Paul Bunyan offered one set of answers to this problem, toying with popular genres and smaller forms, the rejection of this approach in Peter Grimes also seems tied to shifting American ideas about contemporary opera. Attention to Paul Bunyan in its American context highlights the transatlantic nature of both American and British operatic developments in the mid-twentieth century, while also recasting Britten’s operatic trajectory, restoring a sense of scepticism and uncertainty to his operatic project at its very beginnings.
Heather Wiebe, King’s College London; [email protected].
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24 Paul Bunyan programme, 5.
25 Activities of the Alice M. Ditson Fund of Columbia University: Allocations and Administration, First Half Century 1940–1989, Book 1 (New York, 1989).
26 Paul Bunyan programme, 4. Also see Downes, Olin, ‘Chamber Opera: League of Composers Launches Plan to Help American Lyric Theatre’, New York Times (16 March 1941)Google Scholar.
27 Information about the Columbia Theatre Associates’ repertory is from ‘Columbia Theatre Associates 1893–1958’, Box 1, Columbia University Rare Book & Manuscript Library, New York.
28 Paul Bunyan programme, 2.
29 ‘Columbia Theatre Associates 1893–1958’; Graf, Opera for the People, 194, 142. Aside from A Tree on the Plains, which premiered at Converse College in 1942, these were all premieres.
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31 Graf, , Opera for the People, 188–190 Google Scholar. Graf points out that Grimes was also given a successful early performance by the opera workshop at Stanford University, founded in 1940 (192). This performance was in May 1948 (see ‘Players Give Peter Grimes’, Stanford Daily (17 May 1948)).
32 Britten to Ralph Hawkes, 19 October 1939, in Letters II: 712. Britten also publicly mentioned the possibility of a Broadway premiere in a 1940 interview: William G. King, ‘Music and Musicians’, New York Sun (27 April 1940) (BPL).
33 Kildea, Paul, Benjamin Britten: A Life in the Twentieth Century (London, 2013), 179 Google Scholar. Also see Mitchell, , ‘The Origins, Evolution and Metamorphoses of Paul Bunyan’, 88–91 Google Scholar, 97–8; Reed, Philip, ‘A Rejected Love Song from Paul Bunyan ’, Musical Times 129 (1988), 283 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Both Mitchell (91) and Reed (283–4) point out that Broadway increasingly accommodated political and social seriousness in the 1930s.
34 One article, which quotes Colin Graham, states, ‘Britten wrote it about three years before Oklahoma! was written and it is a real traditional American musical’ (East Anglian Daily Times (2 June 1976) (BPL)). Also see Dennis Barker, ‘London Letter’, The Guardian (5 June 1976) (BPL). The positioning of Paul Bunyan as a musical also had to do with the company performing it in 1976, the English Music Theatre Company, which replaced Britten’s disbanded English Opera Group and was meant to perform musicals as well as opera. On the ‘musical-isation’ of the work, also see Ward-Griffin, Danielle, ‘“The Wrong Piece in the Wrong Place”: Resituating the Operas of Benjamin Britten’, Ph.D. diss (Yale University, 2012), 237–238 Google Scholar.
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36 See Fauser, , Sounds of War, 162 Google Scholar. On Broadway in the 1940s, also see Graf, , Opera For the People, 133–150 Google Scholar. On Porgy and Bess, Oklahoma! and the Theatre Guild’s development of ‘opera’ and ‘highbrow’ musicals on Broadway, see O’Leary, James, ‘ Oklahoma!, “Lousy Publicity,” and the Politics of Formal Integration in the American Musical Theater’, Journal of Musicology 31 (2014), 139–182 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, especially 148.
37 Marc Blitzstein, untitled (‘In America…’), Orson Welles Manuscripts, Lilly Library, Indiana University, Box 5, f22, quoted in Denning, The Cultural Front, 285.
38 Garafola, Lynn, ‘Lincoln Kirstein, Modern Dance, and the Left: The Genesis of an American Ballet’, Dance Research 23 (2005), 18–35 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Steichen, James, ‘The American Ballet’s Caravan’, Dance Research Journal 47 (2015), 69–94 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Copland could have been one point of contact with Kirstein (see Letters, II: 646). However, Auden knew Kirstein independently; indeed, it was Kirstein who provided funds for the Brooklyn house where Britten, Pears and Auden lived during the creation of Paul Bunyan ( Tippins, , February House, 37–38 Google Scholar). Britten went on to write Matinées Musicales for Kirstein’s American Ballet Caravan in 1941 (Letters, II: 646).
39 ‘American Lyric Theater [sic] Makes Debut May 18’, Chicago Daily Tribune (7 May 1939), 7, quoted in Jerry L. McBride, Douglas Moore: A Bio-Bibliography (Middleton, WI, 2011), 418. The performances were at the Martin Beck Theatre, at the start of the Broadway off-season.
40 See Garafola, , ‘Lincoln Kirstein’, 25; Steichen, ‘The American Ballet’s Caravan’, 71 Google Scholar. In its earliest stages, however, James Steichen has argued that the Ballet Caravan was not particularly focused on American identity, and was instead more continuous with the American Ballet’s European orientation, in a smaller-scale, more practical format (70–1).
41 ‘The Cultural Front’, Direction (March 1939), in Denning, The Cultural Front, Fig. 1. Also see Metzer, David, ‘The League of Composers: The Initial Years’, American Music 15 (1997), 55 Google Scholar; Garafola, , ‘Lincoln Kirstein’, 24 Google Scholar. Steichen points out that the Ballet Caravan’s collectivist image was somewhat illusory (‘The American Ballet’s Caravan’, 71, 77).
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43 Garafola, , ‘Lincoln Kirstein’, 22 Google Scholar. Blitzstein similarly articulated the goal of reaching an audience new to the theatre (Denning, The Cultural Front, 286).
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56 Bagar, Robert, ‘Britten Work Has Premiere at Columbia’, New York World-Telegram (5 May 1941)Google Scholar (BPL); E.B. (Eugene Bonner), The Musical Record (June 1941), 14; Time (19 May 1941) (BPL).
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64 ‘Messalina’ is an anonymous poem from Henry Youll’s madrigal collection Canzonets to Three Voices (1608).
65 Many critics and listeners, to be sure, hear the song as more straightforward. See Evans, The Music of Benjamin Britten, 71; and Peter Pears, ‘The Vocal Music’, in Benjamin Britten: A Commentary on His Works from a Group of Specialists, ed. Donald Mitchell and Hans Keller (London, 1952), 61. Mitchell is one of the few critics to hear something amiss (Britten and Auden in the Thirties: The Year 1936 (Seattle, 1981), 41).
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68 Auden, W.H., Plays and Other Dramatic Writings, 1928–1938, ed. Edward Mendelson (Princeton, 1988), 350 Google Scholar. There are multiple versions of this section of The Ascent of F6. In Britten’s manuscript, it is set for chorus, with two pianos and percussion (British Library Add. MS 60622, ff. 43–46v, www.bl.uk/manuscripts/FullDisplay.aspx?ref=Add_MS_60622). In some early performances it was sung as a solo by Hedli Anderson, for whom Britten wrote the Cabaret Songs (Sidnell, Dances of Death, 196–7).
69 Here I am referring to the version in Add. MS 60622, cited above.
70 The recording is held at the BPL (BPLCD00018).
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81 ‘Promenade Concert: Benjamin Britten’s Concerto’, The Times (London) (19 August 1938) (BPL).
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