MY LIFE AS AN IMPECUNIOUS OPERA LOVER by Peter M. Scott There are a number of reasons why a taste for the opera, once acquired, can prove difficult to satisfy, but the one most commonly encountered, in my experience, has been the expense involved. I have chosen, therefore, to begin this account of my own addiction to it by proposing that the primary objective of opera, as an artform, should be to combine music and drama in ways which give greater pleasure than might be obtainable from either of these elements separately at a lower cost. Serious students of the genre may see this as a statement of the obvious, but, in my case, it is a conclusion drawn from my own experience as a consumer of opera rather than a criterion adopted in advance. It is also a proposition with which some other consumers of opera, and even some producers of it, would seem, on the evidence available, to disagree, and I am willing to concede that it may only hold good for an operagoer who is also, like me, a concertgoer and playgoer, and of limited means. Not that I had been to many, if any, plays or concerts when, against all possible odds, I attended my first opera in the wartime Britain of 1941 at the age of only fifteen, having spent a solidly working-class childhood in the backstreets of Bradford, Yorkshire, where my only musical education had been derived from a few gramophone records, the local chapel, the cinema, and, eventually, the radio, which my parents were unable to afford until I was nearly ten years old. The gramophone records, however, had been a part of my life for as long as I could remember, because most of them had been acquired before, or soon after, my own arrival on the scene (the first of three hungry mouths), as had the remarkable piece of furniture which stood against the rear wall of the overcrowded living room of our back-to-back terrace house. On four elegant legs, veneered, varnished, and gleaming warmly in the firelight, a fine example of the cabinet maker's art, its purpose, in repose, was not immediately apparent, although a small round hole in its right side for a winding handle gave a clue to the fact that its polished top was a lid, which, when raised, would disclose the workings of a large acoustic gramophone. On closer inspection, two small doors in the front would open to reveal the fretwork covered outlet of the large horn, which, aftr winding down behind the clockwork motor from the needle in the head, would funnel the sound up and out with increasing amplitude, to provide us, for much of my childhood, with the only in-house entertainment we did not have to make for ourselves. Since this cabinet of wonders had always been part of the furniture, I took its presence entirely for granted, never enquiring how it came to be there, but it was the finest example of the manual acoustic gramophone I ever came across in all the years I subsequently spent winding other models up. The 78rpm. record collection, on the other hand, was a very mixed bag indeed. Apart from comic monologues, such as "The Lost Policeman", by a comedian called Sandy Powell, and a couple of military band pieces, it consisted entirely of vocal music with lyrics ranging from the sublime to the ridiculous, examples of which, from both ends of the spectrum, are engraved forever on my memory. In addition to a selection of popular songs of the 1920s (some of which find favour, still, with jazz musicians), and a number of yodelling records I would rather forget, there were several ballads by the incomparable Frank Crummit, including "Riding down from Bangor" and "Abdul Abulbul Amir", both of which I can still sing in full, a comic song or two, eg. "The Flies Crawl Up the Widow" by Jack Hulbert, and - a clue to my father's origins - a couple of ethnic pieces such as "The Road to the Isles" sung by Sir Harry Lauder. Fortunately for me, there was a more serious side to the collection, including negro spirituals by the great Paul Robeson and several songs by the Australian baritone, Peter Dawson, who was amazingly popular in the 20s and 30s. In addition to his better known "Trees" and " Floral Dance" there were several pieces now consigned, not unfairly, to the dustbin of history, like the lugubrious "Sailor's Grave" and the egregious "Jovial Monk", but there were two very attractive songs, on each side of the same record, one entitled "Sirs, Your Toast" and the other, equally puzzlingly, "Room for the Factotum" (why not "Toreador" and "Figaro", I wondered?) which I was later to realise were famous operatic arias from Bizet's "Carmen" and Rossini's "Barber of Seville" respectively - the first I had ever heard. More recognisably, at the time, however, there was, thank goodness, operetta, and at its very best, too, in the shape of works by that blessed pair, Gilbert and Sullivan. Three 12" records entitled "Vocal Gems from The Pirates of Penzance, The Mikado, and HMS Pinafore", and it was by these, if anything, that the seed was planted which would eventually flourish and bear fruit. But not for some time yet. When we finally got the radio, I took a much greater interest in the popular songs performed by the famous dance bands of the day than in anything of an operatic nature that might have been available over the airwaves. The most serious composer to figure in my parents' record collection was, of course, Handel, whose oratorio "The Messiah" was the cultural bedrock of the non-conformist Yorkshire of the time, with performances every year in every town in the West Riding, or so it seemed. It was represented here by the two great choruses "Hallelujah" and "Amen", and several of the arias, including "Comfort Ye", "Every Valley", and "I know that my redeemer liveth", all of which I enjoyed, but not as much as the Gilbert and Sullivan. Strangely enough, although exerpts from "The Messiah" were frequently performed at my local chapel, of which I was a regular patron (largely because I was sent there by my mother, and it was the only entertainment then available on a Sunday), I did not attend a full-length professional performance of it until after I had been to my first opera. Even stranger is that I owe this latter experience, in the first instance, to no less a personage than Adolf Hitler, because it would not have occurred if I had not been sent, at the age of barely fourteen as a wartime evacuee, from Bradford to the small town of Keighley (pronounced Keethley), only eighteen miles away, where I was left largely to my own devices for two very enjoyable years. My first piece of luck was to make friends with one of my new classmates at the local grammar school, who was, in addition to being agreeable company, an accomplished pianist, good enough, already, not only to provide the accompaniment to whatever hymns we were obliged to sing at morning assembly, but also to be the resident organist at his own local chapel. Fortunately, too, his family made me welcome in their home, where the two of us began to hold regular sessions at the piano, devoted, almost entirely, to the Savoy operettas, of which he possessed, and was familiar with, most of the scores. Although unable, at that stage, to read music or play a musical instrument, I was good with words, and, thanks possibly to the gramophone lessons of my childhood, had a keen enough ear to master any of the popular songs of the day after hearing them only a couple of times on the radio. I was not, therefore, inadequately equipped to pull my vocal weight in our duets, which were purely recreational, of course, but nourished my interest in music generally and left me with an abiding repect for the talents of W.S. Gilbert and Sir Arthur Sullivan. It seems more than likely that my affectionate familiarity with these witty musical comedies prepared the ground for my appreciation of the weightier music dramas I was soon to experience. Frivolous they may be, but never shallow, and, when judged against their design objectives, masterpieces of their kind, which may even, in performance, teach a valuable lesson to their more serious operatic relatives about the importance of articulating both the music and the words if the fullest impact of the whole on the listener is to be achieved. My next piece of luck was to become involved, together with my new friend and a few other boys, in out-of-school activities of a communal nature initiated by the school's Art Master. My subsequent friendship with this gifted individual, who was later in life to became a Catholic priest, affected my personal development in a number of ways, but it is only of relevance here that, in addition to aspiring to sainthood, he was a man of wide culture, having studied at the Royal College of Art and travelled on a scholarship extensively in Europe and the Middle East before becoming a professional artist, and that he lived in a small cottage with no main services on the Airedale edge of Ilkley Moor where we were free to visit him whenever we felt like it. In addition to a piano, which he could play astonishingly well, a small library of books, and a modest shrine to the Virgin, the cottage also contained a portable gramophone and a large collection of records which, played over and over again, significantly enlarged my appreciation of serious music.