Music: Back to Nature

One of the triumphs in the career of Dr. John Doolittle, Hugh Lofting’s hero who mastered the language of the animals, was the formation of an opera company consisting entirely of canaries and other singing birds. Readers who have wondered ever since what the bird stars sounded like got a hint last week at the Berlin Festival in a concert by the Berlin Philharmonic under Herbert von Karajan. Occasion: the première of French Composer Olivier Messiaen’s Réveil des Oiseaux, an 18-minute atonal orchestral work consisting mainly of the songs of 38 different forest birds.

Clattering Birds. Composer Messiaen, who has long regarded himself “almost as much an ornithologist by profession as a musician,” transcribed his bird arias in the course of annual spring field trips to European bird sanctuaries. On the orchestral score last week the name of each bird was noted in the part of the instrument that represented it, together with a series of birdcall cues to the players. A nightingale, to Messiaen’s ears, goes “Tio, tio, do, tiolaborixe.” An oriole is “Gondiliyo,” a thrush “Piperrere, piperrere.” The piano soloist, who finds himself at various times in the role of a greenfinch, titmouse, wren, starling and robin, requires special preparation: “In the spring, preferably very early, a few walks in the woods to orient oneself to living models.”

Réveil started on a spring midnight with the cry of the nightingale, moved to a pre-dawn climax signaled by the melodious warbler, the hoopoe and the thrush (trumpets, woodwinds and strings). The work clattered on through a forenoon piano cadenza representing the blackcap, ended at high noon on the hushed cry of the cuckoo, again played by the piano soloist. The audience was puzzled but seemed to be impressed. As for 51-year-old Composer Messiaen, who is at work on a huge project to put the bird songs of the entire world into a series of piano pieces, he had some advice for younger composers: “Simply leave men and get back to nature—get out into the country, listen. Nature is terrible, direct, infinitely variable. But it is true.”

Audiences at Venice’s Contemporary Music Festival last week also got a strong whiff of animal life in the shape of two bawdily irreverent one-act operas: Gino Negri’s Il Circo Max (Max’s Circus) and Luciano Berio’s Allez Hop.

The Negri opera featured a parade of animals, representing various habitues of the gossip columns, marching onstage to themes from famous composers. A black cat named Barbara (obviously Barbara Hutton) kept hooking men with a fishing rod into a diamond-studded coach to snatches of Beethoven’s Pathétique. Two gentle poodles (those feuding balletomanes, the Marquis de Cuevas and Choreographer Serge Li far) fought a duel with ostrich feathers to the music of Claire de Lune. Minerva the black panther (Callas) appeared in a red wig to music from Weber’s Der Freischutz and devoured a chesty white dove (Tebaldi). Casarosa the old sheepdog (Rubi Rubirosa) pounced on two young things to Mendelssohn’s Fingal’s Cave Overture, fainted dead away while Ringmaster Max explained: “Casarosa isn’t as young as he thinks he is.” In a mad finale, the “God of the Press” arrived in a thunderclap to terrify the revolting animals into submission. Corriere Delia Sera’s critic echoed the cheering audience, found Composer Negri’s patchwork pastiche “irreverent and thoroughly delightful.”

Carnivorous Fleas. Berio’s Allez Hop had to do with a flea escaped from a trained flea act and carried to an official government reception. There the flea so harried the politicians that they were driven to a declaration of war. In the opera’s finale, the war was over and the world peaceful but so boring that the trainer decided to release the flea again and start the cycle all over. Although most critics found the atonal opera “a joke in bad taste,” some had kind words for its opening striptease scene executed to a honky-tonk blues refrain that seemed to summarize the composer’s sense of futility:

Now I’ll get up and pour myself a drink

With a bottle of tonic and some gin

I’ll get some ice cubes from the refrigerator

Then I’ll sit down again.