Four Hundred Ninety-Sixth Program of the 2011-12 Season _______________________ Indiana University Opera Theater presents as its 422nd production Albert Herring Music by Benjamin Britten Libretto by Eric Crozier Based on the novella Le Rosier de Madame Husson by Guy de Maupassant Arthur Fagen, Conductor James Marvel, Stage Director James Marvel, Set & Costume Concept Patrick Mero, Lighting Designer _________________ Musical Arts Center Thursday, February Ninth Friday, February Tenth Saturday, February Eleventh Eight O’Clock Sunday, February Twelfth Two O’Clock music.indiana.edu Rosenkavalier Richard Strauss Conductor: David Effron Stage Director: Vincent Liotta Set & Costume Designers: William Forrester & Linda Pisano Last produced in 1966! Couple photo by Ken Howard, courtesy of The Santa Fe Opera. NEW Production Your once-in-a lifetime opportunity to FEBRUARY enjoy Strauss’s elegant world of the 7PM glitterati in this grand new production! 24, 25 MARCH For tickets and subscriptions, visit the Musical Arts Center Box Office, (812) 855-7433, or go online to music.indiana.edu/operaballet. 2, 3 7PM Opera Insights 6pm Synopsis Takes place in the village of Loxford, East Suffolk. Act I Scene 1: Home of Lady Billows The aristocratic Lady Billows has decided to revive the local May Day Festival. She appoints a small committee to help identify a suitably chaste village girl to be crowned May Queen and offers 25 guineas as the prize. When the committee has its final meeting in April, the evidence against its nominees is universally damning—not one of the local girls still qualifies to win the prize. The Superintendent of Police comes to the rescue. If there are no qualified candidates for Queen, why not have a May King? Why not Albert Herring, whose timidity is universally known? The rest of the committee eventually agrees, and Lady Billows seizes the opportunity to rebuke the tawdry Loxford girls. The committee sallies forth to deliver the good news to Albert and his mother. Scene 2: Herring’s Greengrocer Shop Albert is working in the family shop and is soon joined by Sid and his new girlfriend, Nancy. Their flirting makes Albert uncomfortable, and they eventually leave. The committee arrives to announce Albert’s proposed coronation. He objects to the honor, but his mother overrules him, attracted by the 25 guinea award. Intermission (20 Minutes) Act II: May Day Scene 1: The Vicarage Garden Nancy and Sid are making preparations for tea, while everyone else is at the Parish Church celebrating Albert’s coronation. Sid persuades Nancy to join in a practical joke, and they lace Albert’s lemonade with a liberal dose of rum. The guests arrive, bouquets are presented, speeches made, the prize delivered, and all join in a toast to the new May King. Albert takes a long swig from his glass and demands more lemonade. Scene 2: The Shop, Later that Evening Albert comes home in a state of semi-drunken exhilaration but hides when Sid and Nancy appear outside. They laugh about Albert’s appearance and personality but soon forget about him as their flirtation continues. After they leave, Albert’s excitement and embarrassment suddenly create a wild desire to experience much more of life, and he leaves for an evening of previously inexperienced pleasures. His mother returns and locks up the shop, thinking Albert is already in bed. Intermission (20 Minutes) Act III: The Morning After Albert’s disappearance has thrown the town into an uproar. When his coronation wreath is discovered, having been crushed by a cart on the Ipswich Road, everyone assumes the worst. They begin a lamentation over Albert’s demise, only to be interrupted by the arrival of the profligate himself, disheveled but unbowed. His description of his evening of sin shocks the village elders, while Sid and Nancy are impressed. Albert flings his coronation wreath, secure in the knowledge he can stand up for himself in the future. Program Notes by Ryan Young When Benjamin Britten and Eric Crozier set to work on Britten’s third full opera, Albert Herring, they did so with an ambitious goal in mind: the reestablishment of an English operatic tradition. Albert Herring was to serve as the first production of the English Opera Group (EOG), an organization Britten, Crozier, and John Piper founded in 1947 to promote and perform new and old operatic works by English composers. “We believe the time has come when England … can create its own operas,” the group’s prospectus proclaimed, adding “we believe the best way to achieve the beginnings of a repertory of English operas is through the creation of a form of opera requiring small resources.” Albert Herring, a chamber opera like Britten’s previous work The Rape of Lucretia (1946), certainly fulfilled this requirement. It was Crozier who first suggested Guy de Maupassant’s Le Rosier de Madam Husson (1887) as the basis for Britten’s follow-up opera to Lucretia; the comic nature of the Maupassant’s tale certainly offered a welcome contrast to the tragic subject matter of that opera. Though it was his first attempt at libretto-writing, Crozier crafted a delightfully witty text rich with literary allusion—a skewering of English provincial culture with sharply defined characters that Britten would exploit to the fullest. Just as Crozier used formal and informal language and speech patterns to clearly delineate the two worlds that Albert finds himself caught between—the stuffy, moralistic, and repressive world of Lady Billows and the village worthies, and the bohemian world of Sid, Nancy, and the children—Britten assigned to the two worlds contrasting musical styles. Lady Billows and her confederates sing always in clichéd, backward-looking styles: 19th-century parlor music, Italian popular opera, overblown Handelian grandeur, etc. This is nowhere more clearly illustrated than in the markedly old-fashioned fugue that accompanies the words “We’ve made our own investigations” in the first scene of Act I. This music is set in relief against the music of the free people—Sid, Nancy, and the children—which is characterized by a less formal, more vernacular style; lilting, swinging rhythms; and some of Britten’s most passionate love music. Many have attributed the worldwide success of the opera to these wonderfully wrought caricatures of east-Anglian provincials, but one of the most remarked-upon passages in the opera—the astonishing Threnody of Act III, “In the midst of life is CandideConductor:CdConductor: KevinKKev iNin Noe Leonard BernsteinBernstein StageStage Director: CandaceCanC dace EvansEvans SetSeS t & Costume Designer: C.C. DavidDavD id HigginsHiggins Poor Candide. He’s mindless with optimism in what APRIL he has been taught is “the best of all possible worlds.” Bernstein’s treatment of the Voltaire masterpiece in 6, 7 this fast-paced operetta is not to be missed! 13, 14 For tickets, visit the Musical Arts Center Box MAC 8pm Office, (812) 855-7433, or go online to Opera Insights 7pm music.indiana.edu/operaballet. death”—reveals Albert Herring to be more than just a simple burlesque. There is a deeply serious side to this comic opera, a darkness that broods just beneath the surface. The Threnody weaves the internal thoughts of the major characters, expressed by each in his or her individual musical style, into an elaborate counterpoint set against the fatalistic chanting of the chorus. The passage, read by some as a collective expression of ritualistic grief, contains some of the composer’s most affecting and sincere music. And yet we quickly realize that the mourning is nothing more than pretense. The moment Albert reappears, he is greeted not with relief or happiness, but with admonishment. “Where have you been? Wrecking the whole of our daily routine?” More than the inconvenience of this disruption, Albert’s violation of social norms, his “monstrous” and “revolting” behavior (the fact that he stayed out all night), is at the core of the villagers’ anger. Albert has failed to conform to society’s accepted modes of behavior, to adopt its sense of decorum, however superficial such decorum has just been revealed to be. Therein lies the central conflict of the opera, the source of the darkness that shades the otherwise farcical comedy: the conflict of society and the individual, or (perhaps better) society’s oppression of the individual—a common theme that runs through much of Britten’s work, especially his first three operas. Albert is a young man who feels trapped by the expectations laid upon him by the community and yearns to be free of them. Unlike Maupassant’s Isidore, on whom the character of Albert was based, Albert does not wear the title of May King as a badge of honor. Rather, he is mortified. He recognizes that the title and the cash prize that accompanies it (which he derisively calls his “virgin ransom”) comes with strings; to bear the title is in a sense to conform to the Loxford elite’s narrow definition of virtue and thus to allow society to define who he is. Albert, however, longs to define himself, to assert his will above the will of society. His liberation comes in the form of a rum-laced glass of lemonade, as is made clear by Britten’s musical scoring. The quotation of Wagner’s Tristan motive that underscores the moment when Sid pours the rum into Albert’s glass, in addition to adding to the comedic effect of the scene, serves to imbue the act with a special, almost magical significance. The rum is Albert’s love potion; it alters his state of mind and ultimately frees him from his oppression. This bit of Dutch courage gives Albert the final push he needs to do “what must be done by everyone,” to break free of the burden of society’s expectations.