OTD in early British television: 24 January 1938
John Wyver writes: the whole of the afternoon schedule on Monday 24 January 1938 was occupied by a presentation of act 2 of Richard Wagner’s music drama Tristan and Isolde. In the evening this was played again, in perhaps the most uncompromising cultural transmission of the pre-war period. Inevitably, the producer responsible was the innovative and uncompromising modernist Dallas Bower. The reaction was, well, mixed.
Encouraged by the response to Stephen Thomas’ broadcast shortly before Christmas of Hansel and Gretel (see the earlier blog post), and keen to take advantage of the spaciousness offered by working across the two studios, Bower applied the mime technique that Thomas had pioneered in what is essentially an extended love duet, sung in Frederick Jameson’s English translation. Four years before he had written in Cinema Quarterly about ‘the obvious association of Wagnerian music-drama theory and sound film,’ and arguing for its adaptation ‘into the medium that fits it best’.
Now, for television rather than the cinema, he first created short film sequences of crashing waves and a hunting party, and then worked in the studio with his regular collaborator Antony Tudor on the actors’ movements. Basil Bartlett, Oriel Ross (above, as the lovers) and others performed in one studio in front of three cameras, with a plot of only just over 30 shots, creating a visual treatment that was described as ‘predominantly static’ and ‘funereal’. A fourth camera was next door, with the unseen singers and the orchestra under Hyam Greenbaum. In-house designer Peter Bax created the decor and costumes.
Although Bower’s choice of composer for a first presentation of grand opera might seem eccentric, in her richly interesting book Opera in the Jazz Age Alexandra Wilson reminds us that
Wagner was an unusual composer in cutting across highbrow-middlebrow boundaries in interesting ways… By the 1920s… he was regularly referred to as “the most popular operatic composer of the day”, and his works were perceived as simultaneously popular and intellectual.
The casting of singers was strong, with the great Isobel Baillie, known primarily for oratorio performances, giving voice to Isolde, and the admired Wagnerian tenor Walter Widdop as Tristan. ‘The musical part of the performance was on the whole good,’ admitted ‘G.G.W.’ in The Listener. ‘The short wave length used by television for its sound is known by now for the quality of its reproduction and the singing was worthy of it.’ But for the Times critic, while the singers sang the words with more than usual clarity, the result was ‘unsatisfactory and a trifle ludicrous.’
Tristan and Isolde was among the most-commented-on programmes of the pre-war years, and everyone who recorded a response felt that the mimed acting was problematic. For The Times, again, ‘[a] sinuous Isolda [sic] with writhing arms that were hardly ever at rest, and a Tristan whose love-making seemed to be maladroit and timid, were hardly calculated to produce in the spectator the sense of sublime ecstasy which he may get from two good singers.’
The respected music critic Francis Toye concurred: ‘Certainly there was nothing in the love-scene between Tristan and Isolde to distinguish it from the common-place love-scene of every day; which definitely shocked even so lukewarm an advocate of Wagner as the present writer.’
‘Tristan was not a success,’ concluded ‘G.G.W.’, echoing the reaction of most of those who saw the broadcast. ‘But it was a courageous attempt, with just that touch of imagination and originality which is so easy to criticise and so hard to create. At this stage it is the attempt that matters, and AP’s next attempt at opera is to be awaited with interest.’
Bridling at a response he perceived as misguided and patronising, Bower wrote to The Listener to defend with passion this most personal of projects, as well as the new artform he was working to bring into being:
The reasons for my choice of Act II of this particular opera, at which ‘G.G.W.’ and others have so wondered, are precisely that Tristan, Act II, is one big visual problem from beginning to end, that most points of Wagnerian music drama may be found in it, that nowhere else in opera may the relational problems of drama and action be better studied for the very good reason that visually the whole act is practically static.
lt is consequently an admirable model with which to experiment, not only in the matter of pulling Wagnerian theory to the test, but particularly so in a new medium and more than ever so in one which happens to be physically free.
When your critic says that Wagner studied the visual side of opera too carefully to leave much that a producer can change without changing for the worse, he is here presumably talking of the opera-house. I was working in television.
Is it seriously suggested lhal television should deny its birthright and refuse to exploit the peculiar advantage of physical freedom which it shares with the cinema? Is it not reasonable to suppose that Wagner himself would have rejoiced in the greater freedom which it is now possible lo bring to the interpretation of his work?
Director of Television Gerald Cock, however, was unconvinced by both the broadcast and Bower’s spirited defence. As Lionel Salter noted in his reminiscence of the early days of opera on television, published in Opera magazine in 1977, ‘after [the] disappointing reaction… television turned its back on operatic heavyweights.’
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