OTD in early British television: 20 January 1939
John Wyver writes (a little later than usual, given all of the activity prompted by yesterday’s post and follow-ups): the afternoon of Friday 20 January saw the fourth performance of one of the new medium’s undoubted ‘high culture’ hits.
Billed as ‘a masque to the music of Humperdinck’, this was a staging of a reduced version of Engelbert Humperdinck’s opera Hansel and Gretel, which had been first performed in Weimar in 1893. Stephen Thomas’s presentation involved actors miming before the cameras while singers performed off-stage.
The one-hour production had been first seen two days before Christmas 1937, and it had been revived the Sunday before this final repeat. Collaborating with mime specialist Hilary Pepler (see the blog post for 4 December 1937), who played the Witch (above), and with Andrée Howard as choreographer, Thomas deployed cameras in both AP studios to produce the show. As Leonard Salter wrote in his engaging account of opera on early television (Opera, April 1977):
It represented a total departure from tradition in that it was produced as a mime, with the actors (in a separate studio from the musicians) not moving their lips at all. The perennial problem of finding singers who would look the part had just begun to impinge seriously on the television medium, and a preliminary [untraced] article had stressed the impossibility of even petite sopranos portraying children on the intimate screen.
In this fourth performance Gretel was sung by Sybil Hambleton and played by 17-year-old Muriel Pavlow, who was already an experienced child actor; in her 90s (she died in 2019) she was delighted to claim that she had made the earliest TV appearance of anyone living.
Pavlow was partnered by Charlotte Leigh as Hansel, a part acted by Roberta Berek. Pepler’s role, with the artist accoutred in the hideous mask, was sung by tenor Powell Lloyd. (Hambleton and Lloyd sang the roles at Sadler’s Wells in 1938.)
For act 2, Andrée Howard, who in early 1937 had choreographed her celebrated Death and the Maiden for Ballet Rambert, staged an elaborate dream pantomime which photographs of the scene (above) record involved a spectacular chorus of angels. The 22-piece BBC Television Orchestra, conducted by Hyam Greenbaum, was supplemented with eight additional instrumentalists.
For Salter, this television variant was ‘enormously successful’, and he recalled that the mime technique was met with ‘almost universal approval’. Which in early 1938 led to television’s most controversial opera production to date, Dallas Bower’s presentation of Act 2 of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde. But that is to get ahead of ourselves – see the forthcoming post for 24 January 1938.
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