Music: Old Beggar in New Clothes

For the ticketseller at London’s Sadler’s Wells Theater, the words themselves made music: “Sorry, sir, no seats—we’re a success.” For a fortnight, Londoners had been flocking to hear the new opera of lanky Benjamin Britten (TIME, Feb. 16)—his fourth in four years.

The setting, the plot, and the words were familiar enough to Londoners. For it was the same bawdy Beggar’s Opera that John Gay had written more than two centuries ago. Unlike some others who had tinkered with Gay’s libretto (Frederic Austin, Kurt Weill, Duke Ellington), Britten had followed it carefully, keeping to the squalor and backside-slapping of 18th Century London. The music, in its latest disguise, was something else again.

Using all the tricks of variation he likes so well, Benjy Britten had made Composer Johann Christoph Pepusch’s original music barely recognizable. As the townswomen trooped onstage, Britten represented each with a different solo instrument—chilling woodwinds, a whining oboe, a trumpet or cymbals. Smack in the middle of Over the Hills and Far Away, he suddenly switched from a major to a minor key. In one duet between Lucy Lockit and her father, he ran two separate songs together, to make a striking question & answer fugue. At times, London critics found themselves listening to such tart dissonances as a C sharp and C natural grinding together; at other times, to an orchestral accompaniment that was as clear and gentle as Mozart. The songs seldom ended in the same key as they had begun, often wound up with a different tempo. But whatever Gay or Pepusch might have thought, London’s critics came away cheering.

Said the Daily Telegraph: “The familiar tunes [as] handled by Britten . . . may be hated by traditionalists . . . But what may seem like impudence is really the artistic assurance of a musical creator who knows exactly what he wants and how to get it with disarming brilliance . . . There is hardly a fault of style, and scarcely a moment’s violence is done to Gay’s satire.” The Observer’s Charles Stuart was more lyrical: “… I have been wakening up every morning with new filaments of the exquisite score running through my . .. head. There, I think, you have a sure test of fine music . . .”