Out of the silent planet
Jun. 26th, 2009 01:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pallas_athenaIt's been a term of obscure operas in Oxford: earlier this summer I saw some friends sing in Schubert's Fierrabras, and tonight I went to the first performance in years of Donald Swann's Perelandra.
Yes, that's Donald Swann as in Flanders and Swann. Like Dudley Moore, he was a better composer than the comedy stuff gave him room for. He was also a big old fantasy nerd: he knew JRR Tolkien and set quite a few of his songs to music. (They're good, if a bit simplistic in places. Treebeard's song is my favourite. I rather prefer Stephen Oliver's settings, composed for the BBC radio dramatisation back in the Second Age.)
Perelandra was completed in 1964. C S Lewis enthusiastically approved the idea, read the libretto and liked it, but died before the first performance. Shortly after Lewis's death, the film rights to the novel were sold, which put a halt to any further performances. (Seriously, how stoned would you have to be to film Perelandra?)
This was a concert performance, and Swann himself thought of the work at times as an oratorio, since the whole thing is a not-entirely-subtle religious allegory. You'd need the wealth of Croesus to stage this thing anyway (space flights! floating islands! giant spiders... who sing!), and Swann does an excellent job of musical scene-painting, so it's fine just to hear and imagine.
Swann's musical idiom is very like William Walton's, with touches of Holst and Elgar thrown in. In the sixties, when every hot young muso was heavily into atonality, Perelandra attracted some critical disdain for its unfashionable abundance of harmony and melody. To my ear, it does still feel kind of purple at times-- I guess a modern listener, used to Britten and Weill, expects more crunch, more dissonance. Maybe I'm being unfair, because Swann does use plenty of dissonance when he's depicting evil. The other adjective I'd use to describe the musical soundscape is that to a person who's spent a lot of time singing in chapel choirs, the whole thing sounds extremely Anglican. I don't know if that makes sense to anyone who isn't a choral singer or organist, but... go figure.
The plot is pretty simple: two people from Earth arrive on Venus. This being Lewis, both are Cambridge professors: Ransom, a philologist (as Lewis was = Good) and Weston, a physicist (=Science =Eeeeevil.) They meet a Lady, nude and green, one of the only two people on Perelandra; Weston tries actively to corrupt her innocence by getting her to imagine good things apart from God, while Ransom frantically urges her not to listen. It turns out that Weston, a scientific rationalist (boooo!) with a belief in a "Life Force" similar to evolution (booooo, hiss) is possessed by the devil (of course). By getting the innocent Lady to think sinful thoughts and separate her will from God's, he hopes to engineer a Fall of Perelandra similar to the Fall of Man on Earth. Since the demonically-possessed Weston can win any argument, Ransom despairs, until the chorus divinely reveals to him that he can win by violence: since Weston's body is the only foothold the devil has on Perelandra, he must destroy that body. (This sort of "muscular Christianity" is typical of Lewis.)
Cue BIG FIGHT, during which Ransom (not just a clever name, you see) suffers horribly at the hands of the supernaturally-strengthened Weston. Meanwhile, the only Perelandran we haven't met yet, a man known as "the King", finds the Lady and takes her with him to the land they are destined to inherit. Ransom, having flung Weston into a fiery abyss (get it?) arrives, is healed of his wounds and hailed as Perelandra's saviour, and is sent home to Earth (Cambridge, that is) in a glass casket-- to be found by colleagues including a bewildered Professor Lewis. The End.
Having written this, I think that the lack of dissonance in the music isn't the modern listener's problem after all. From Swann's music, it's transcendently obvious that he sincerely loved Perelandra -- and sincerity is out of fashion. We (especially in Britain) expect more knowingness in our narrative. The only character in Perelandra who employs irony is Weston the villain. For good or ill, we've tasted the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, and we can't swallow Lewisian allegory at face value, no matter how earnestly he tells us it's good for us.
Preventing the Fall is ardent wish-fulfilment to the likes of Lewis, but his friend Tolkien knew better. Tolkien, who frowned on allegory in general, knew that only in a fallen world is real story possible, because only a fallen world contains humanity-- before the Fall, it's all archetype, and archetypes don't grow or change or have bad hair days or make jokes or make any kind of choices at all. Archetypes do far better in music than in text alone, and I guess that's why Perelandra works far better as an opera than as a novel.
Standout performances included Håkan Vramsmo's excellent Ransom and Leon Berger's Weston; it was extra cool to have Rupert Forbes and Neil Jenkins reprising the roles of Humphrey and Lewis, which they first sang at the premiere in 1964. Several other friends of Donald Swann's were on board, too: the director and conductor had discussed the score with him in the last weeks of his life, and bass Clive McCombie, who sang the crucial role of the giant spider, knew Swann well.
(Another crucial difference between Lewis and Tolkien: in Perelandra, the giant spider is one of the good guys. In your face, Shelob!)
Yes, that's Donald Swann as in Flanders and Swann. Like Dudley Moore, he was a better composer than the comedy stuff gave him room for. He was also a big old fantasy nerd: he knew JRR Tolkien and set quite a few of his songs to music. (They're good, if a bit simplistic in places. Treebeard's song is my favourite. I rather prefer Stephen Oliver's settings, composed for the BBC radio dramatisation back in the Second Age.)
Perelandra was completed in 1964. C S Lewis enthusiastically approved the idea, read the libretto and liked it, but died before the first performance. Shortly after Lewis's death, the film rights to the novel were sold, which put a halt to any further performances. (Seriously, how stoned would you have to be to film Perelandra?)
This was a concert performance, and Swann himself thought of the work at times as an oratorio, since the whole thing is a not-entirely-subtle religious allegory. You'd need the wealth of Croesus to stage this thing anyway (space flights! floating islands! giant spiders... who sing!), and Swann does an excellent job of musical scene-painting, so it's fine just to hear and imagine.
Swann's musical idiom is very like William Walton's, with touches of Holst and Elgar thrown in. In the sixties, when every hot young muso was heavily into atonality, Perelandra attracted some critical disdain for its unfashionable abundance of harmony and melody. To my ear, it does still feel kind of purple at times-- I guess a modern listener, used to Britten and Weill, expects more crunch, more dissonance. Maybe I'm being unfair, because Swann does use plenty of dissonance when he's depicting evil. The other adjective I'd use to describe the musical soundscape is that to a person who's spent a lot of time singing in chapel choirs, the whole thing sounds extremely Anglican. I don't know if that makes sense to anyone who isn't a choral singer or organist, but... go figure.
The plot is pretty simple: two people from Earth arrive on Venus. This being Lewis, both are Cambridge professors: Ransom, a philologist (as Lewis was = Good) and Weston, a physicist (=Science =Eeeeevil.) They meet a Lady, nude and green, one of the only two people on Perelandra; Weston tries actively to corrupt her innocence by getting her to imagine good things apart from God, while Ransom frantically urges her not to listen. It turns out that Weston, a scientific rationalist (boooo!) with a belief in a "Life Force" similar to evolution (booooo, hiss) is possessed by the devil (of course). By getting the innocent Lady to think sinful thoughts and separate her will from God's, he hopes to engineer a Fall of Perelandra similar to the Fall of Man on Earth. Since the demonically-possessed Weston can win any argument, Ransom despairs, until the chorus divinely reveals to him that he can win by violence: since Weston's body is the only foothold the devil has on Perelandra, he must destroy that body. (This sort of "muscular Christianity" is typical of Lewis.)
Cue BIG FIGHT, during which Ransom (not just a clever name, you see) suffers horribly at the hands of the supernaturally-strengthened Weston. Meanwhile, the only Perelandran we haven't met yet, a man known as "the King", finds the Lady and takes her with him to the land they are destined to inherit. Ransom, having flung Weston into a fiery abyss (get it?) arrives, is healed of his wounds and hailed as Perelandra's saviour, and is sent home to Earth (Cambridge, that is) in a glass casket-- to be found by colleagues including a bewildered Professor Lewis. The End.
Having written this, I think that the lack of dissonance in the music isn't the modern listener's problem after all. From Swann's music, it's transcendently obvious that he sincerely loved Perelandra -- and sincerity is out of fashion. We (especially in Britain) expect more knowingness in our narrative. The only character in Perelandra who employs irony is Weston the villain. For good or ill, we've tasted the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, and we can't swallow Lewisian allegory at face value, no matter how earnestly he tells us it's good for us.
Preventing the Fall is ardent wish-fulfilment to the likes of Lewis, but his friend Tolkien knew better. Tolkien, who frowned on allegory in general, knew that only in a fallen world is real story possible, because only a fallen world contains humanity-- before the Fall, it's all archetype, and archetypes don't grow or change or have bad hair days or make jokes or make any kind of choices at all. Archetypes do far better in music than in text alone, and I guess that's why Perelandra works far better as an opera than as a novel.
Standout performances included Håkan Vramsmo's excellent Ransom and Leon Berger's Weston; it was extra cool to have Rupert Forbes and Neil Jenkins reprising the roles of Humphrey and Lewis, which they first sang at the premiere in 1964. Several other friends of Donald Swann's were on board, too: the director and conductor had discussed the score with him in the last weeks of his life, and bass Clive McCombie, who sang the crucial role of the giant spider, knew Swann well.
(Another crucial difference between Lewis and Tolkien: in Perelandra, the giant spider is one of the good guys. In your face, Shelob!)
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no subject
on 2009-06-26 02:52 pm (UTC)Anyway, this sounds like a fascinating performance!