QUICK GUIDE TO…
ALBERT HERRING Benjamin Britten
Five key facts about a work being performed this month (Choice 20)
Albert Herring is a comic chamber opera in three acts which Britten composed in the winter of 1946 and spring of 1947.
The libretto was by Eric Crozier and based on Guy de Maupassant’s 1888 novella Le rosier de Madame Husson, with the action transposed from France to the imaginary Suffolk village of Loxford. It was premiered at Glyndebourne in June 1947 with Britten conducting and tenor Peter Pears as the lead.
Albert Herring is set at the turn of the 20th century and pokes fun at village stereotypes. The action revolves around a May Day festival. Lady Billows needs to elect a May Queen but on discovering the disreputability of the local girls she turns to Albert Herring – a lad who works at the local greengrocer’s – to be May King. But on the day his drink is spiked and he has a night of debauchery, leaving the villagers to think he has gone missing.
Britten enjoys using lots of musical parody. Lady Billows is accompanied by a pompous patriotic theme that has traces of Baroque opera and Elgar. When Albert’s drink is spiked, the music quotes the love potion motif from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. In Act III, when the townsfolk believe Albert to be dead, a nine-part vocal lament begins as a parody but becomes an outpouring of grief from the villagers.
Although Glyndebourne’s founder John Christie disliked the work – he told audience members ‘This isn’t our kind of thing’ – it went on to gain an international reputation. The pianist Sviatoslav Richter called it ‘the greatest comic opera of the century’.
Peter Hall’s 1985 Glyndebourne production, with tenor John Graham-hall in the lead, was considered a masterpiece.