Opera, Emotion, and the Antipodes Volume II

Applied Perspectives: Compositions and Performances

Jane W. Davidson, Michael Halliwell, Stephanie Rocke, Jane W. Davidson, Michael Halliwell, Stephanie Rocke

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000300116
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Opera Music

There can be little doubt that opera and emotion are inextricably linked. From dramatic plots driven by energetic producers and directors to the conflicts and triumphs experienced by all associated with opera's staging to the reactions and critiques of audience members, emotion is omnipresent in opera. Yet few contemplate the impact that the customary cultural practices of specific times and places have upon opera's ability to move emotions. Taking Australia as a case study, this two-volume collection of extended essays demonstrates that emotional experiences, discourses, displays and expressions do not share universal significance but are at least partly produced, defined, and regulated by culture. Spanning approximately 170 years of opera production in Australia, the authors show how the emotions associated with the specific cultural context of a nation steeped in egalitarian aspirations and marked by increasing levels of multiculturalism have adjusted to changing cultural and social contexts across time. Volume I adopts an historical, predominantly nineteenth-century perspective, while Volume II applies historical, musicological, and ethnological approaches to discuss subsequent Australian operas and opera productions through to the twenty-first century. With final chapters pulling threads from the two volumes together, Opera, Emotion, and the Antipodes establishes a model for constructing emotion history from multiple disciplinary perspectives.

Part I
Australian composers and their operas

1 From European romantic to ‘wild colonial boy’? John Antill and post-colonial¹ Australian opera

David Symons

Introduction

In 1953 there occurred performances in Sydney and Melbourne of John Antill’s early opera Endymion (1929–1930). The gentle, Romantic emotional character and “pastoral” musical idiom of this opera – and its classical mythological subject – came as a surprise to audiences, for whom the name of John Antill (1904–1986) was synonymous with Corroboree (1944) – Antill’s nationally and internationally acclaimed ballet, with its colourful and abrasive “primitivist” idiom, a work which had by then become celebrated as an icon of Australian nationalism in music.²

In the wake of Corroboree’s enormous success, Antill, during the remainder of his creative career, concentrated in his theatrical compositions on the genre of ballet and completed only two operas – namely The Music Critic (1952) and The First Christmas (1969). However, during his early pre-Second World War career, he had composed only operas. These early operatic projects – mostly incomplete – were essayed at a time in the history of the Australian arts that has been described by Geoffrey Serle as a period of “colonial dependence.”³ Reflecting this “cultural cringe,” during the years from Federation to about 1930, only three of an enormous total of 57 operas by Australian composers were on Australian subjects.⁴ Furthermore, the subjects, textual language and emotional world of these operas were predominantly late Victorian in character; while their musical idioms were firmly based on late Romantic and English “pastoral” styles. Antill’s early operatic forays, not surprisingly, can be seen to reflect this essentially European Romantic context. However, from the 1930s to about 1960 – Australia’s later post-colonial period – there was a radical shift among composers towards a far greater depiction of Australian themes. Although Christine Mercer’s chapter on the Melbourne composer, critic, and polymath Henry Tate (Volume I, Chapter 5), profiles his pioneering efforts in this regard from early in the twentieth century, few composers followed his lead until the 1930s.⁵ This newly awakened nationalism was nowhere more marked than in music for the theatre – ballet and opera – that were now predominantly Australian in their subjects and settings.

Antill’s turn to Australian themes first appeared during the 1930s, with the composition of two “light” operas in response to the requirements of a competition, as will be discussed below. His post-war output continued to reflect this growing tide of nationalism – its subjects ranging from Aboriginal (in Corroboree and several later ballets) to post-settlement (his remaining ballets and the two operas mentioned earlier). While the “Aboriginal” ballets continue, in a milder manner, the “primitivist” character of Corroboree, the ballets and operas with colonial and post-colonial settings display a generally lighter neo-classical idiom, while the opera texts adopt a colloquial style and often betray a raffish sense of humour or irony.

Emphasising the emotions encapsulated within Antill’s completed operas, this chapter will also track the shift of emphasis in all his operatic output, which moved from European Romantic to Australian themes. His Romantic essays completed prior to the Second World War include highly fantastic and supernatural, as well as mythical, historical and even Biblical subjects while his two post-war operas on Australian themes feature a vividly contrasting emotional climate encompassing both comedy and verismo.

Antill’s early operatic essays

As stated in the Introduction, during the first stage of Antill’s career – up to the Second World War – his works for the theatre comprised exclusively operas.⁶ In these pre-war years, Antill commenced no less than eleven operatic projects, of which only three were fully completed and are extant. These are as follows:

• Ouida (?1914–1918) – libretto by composer (lost)
• Princess Dorothea (1919–1920) – libretto by composer
• Heroida (early 1920s?) (lost)
• The Sleeping Princess (early 1920s?) (lost)
• Endymion (1929–1930) libretto by composer (after John Keats)
• Here’s Luck (1931–1932) – libretto by Margery Browne
• The Glittering Mask (1931–1932) – libretto by Margery Browne
• The Gates of Paradise (1933–1934) – libretto by Margery Browne – incomplete
• The Serpent Woman (c.1938) – libretto by John Wheeler – incomplete
• The Lost Child (c. 1940) – libretto by John Wheeler – fragment only
• The Scapegoat (c.1943) – libretto by John Wheeler – fragment only⁷

The above list and chronology show that Antill’s fascination for the stage and for the opera began at a remarkably early age. Antill’s biographers, Beth Dean and Victor Carell, report that Antill attended a “musical matinee” at a local theatre in Sydney – probably in early 1914 just prior to his tenth birthday – and immediately began writing his own plays as well as constructing a miniature theatre stage.⁸ Clearly a peak emotional experience for the young Antill, this soon inspired his first operatic project, Ouida, written probably during his later school years and completed (or abandoned) around 1918.⁹

This initial essay at the operatic genre, on the scant evidence extant (no identifiable music sketches, but a plot outline and fragments of a libretto)¹⁰ shows clearly Antill’s predilection – even as a teenager – for an operatic plot of a romantic nature, concerning as it does the love of a French nurse, Ouida, for a British soldier named Henry during the First World War. This predisposition was to remain in all of Antill’s subsequent pre-Second World War operatic projects on serious subjects and reflects the generally romantic nature of all Australian operatic plots (even those very few with Australian settings) during this period. Antill’s embrace of such romantic plots from a stage before he had had any formal tuition in composition or any direct opportunity for contact with opera, raises the question as to his awareness of the Australian operatic climate at this time. Interestingly Antill commented later, vis-à-vis the youthful genesis of his operatic output, “I had written two operas before I ever saw or heard one. My knowledge in this respect being gained by reading and asking.”¹¹ There is no record of what knowledge Antill gained by his “reading and asking,” but by his first (more or less) completed and extant opera, Princess Dorothea, written around the age of fifteen or sixteen, Antill is shown both inventing a highly romantic, fanciful plot as well as adopting a basically “through-composed” operatic structure that resonates – the former totally and the latter mostly – with Australian composed operas of the period – by such composers as Alfred Hill (1869–1960), Fritz Hart (1876–1949), Hooper Brewster-Jones (1887–1949) and many others.¹² The plot of Princess Dorothea, like that of Ouida, was written to Antill’s own libretto, and both exhibit considerable naivety in story, text, musical language and the extravagant orchestral forces envisaged.¹³ Princess Dorothea’s plot concerns Edward – a sea captain shipwrecked on a mythical island – who meets and falls in love with a beautiful, immortal princess, Dorothea, who desires to become mortal that she may wed him. After many complications, Edward and Dorothea are united and both borne off to heaven.¹⁴

These initial operatic endeavours are of historical rather than purely artistic interest; however, they show the direction that Antill was to go in the emotional world of his pre-Second World War “serious” operas. Both were written while still at school, or in the case of Princess Dorothea, possibly during the years (1920–1925) of Antill’s apprenticeship (at his family’s insistence) as a draughtsman at the New South Wales Government Railways.¹⁵ During this time, Antill claims that he “wrote two more operas”¹⁶ – presumably the “lost” Heroida and The Sleeping Princess. These four operas were therefore written before Antill had received any formal tuition in composition.

Following his period of apprenticeship at the Railways, Antill began serious advanced musical study, first privately and subsequently (1926–1929) at the (then) New South Wales Conservatorium of Music where his composition teacher was Alfred Hill. Hill’s compositions included many operas – serious romances and comedies – written during the late colonial and post-Federation periods; and Antill no doubt gleaned much from his mentor as well as witnessing operatic productions – including contemporary Australian works – at the Conservatorium during his years there and afterwards. However, there is no record of Antill’s composition of further operas until after the completion of his Conservatorium studies – soon after which he composed the one completed and performed opera from this period – namely Endymion. Antill had by then received a comprehensive training as a composer and practical musician, and was soon to join the ABC, his employer throughout his creative career to his retirement in 1969. Antill, by now a true “Kapellmeister,” was then fully occupied with the broadcaster – variously as a composer, arranger, conductor, orchestral musician and administrator.¹⁷

Endymion¹⁸

Antill’s first and only completed and performed opera from the pre-Second World War period occupied him over the years 1929–1930.¹⁹ This short opera was performed in Sydney and Melbourne in 1953 as part of a double bill, along with Arthur Benjamin’s The Devil Take Her! Endymion is described in Antill...