Britten's “Let's Make an Opera!”

Extract

It is only eighteen months since the first performance of Let's Make an Opera!, but it is not surprising to learn that this “Entertainment for Young People” is already being produced as far away as in Tel-Aviv, for it has been greeted with enthusiasm by audiences of all ages, wherever it has been performed. One of the most outstanding achievements of the opera has been the remarkable way in which it transforms the expression on the faces of the grown-ups in the audience during the interval in which the four Audience Songs are rehearsed. Before this interval, their expressions may have shown polite and intelligent interest in the experiment, but by the time the rehearsal is over they look so radiant with triumph that it is difficult to recognise any resemblance to the passive listeners of twenty minutes ago. And yet how painfully embarrassing this experiment might have been if it had not been managed so skilfully. One thinks with horror of other attempts at “group activity”—self-consciously determined efforts to make unwilling audiences “join in all together.” Britten avoids any such pitfalls by taking it for granted that the audience will be needed as an essential part of the opera, just as he avoids the pitfall of making his child-performers sound like a prize elocution class by giving them, as a matter of course, the things that they will most enjoy doing. They enjoy doing them so much that they achieve an almost fanatical seriousness of purpose which prevents any hint of preciousness from creeping into the production.