Operatic shipwrecks

Britain misses the boat

‘Why should we not have an opera in our own tongue, sung more or less by our own people, and produced at least in reasonable proportion by our own poets and composers?’ This question was posed by The Times’s music critic with perhaps unwarranted optimism in 1879. Charles Stanford at least tried with no fewer than nine operas – including Shamus O’brien (1895) which some historians suggest set a landmark in Irish opera. More esteemed today is Ethel Smyth’s The Wreckers (1904), her Cornish-set opera attaining its first English staging in 1909.

Yet more successful was Rutland Boughton’s The Immortal Hour, based on a medieval Irish tale and first performed 1914 in Glastonbury at a festival created in emulation of Wagner’s at Bayreuth. It was admired by both Smyth and Vaughan Williams, the latter then writing an even earthier folk-style English ballad opera, Hugh the Drover. But, saddled with a less-than-brilliant libretto, it flopped. Britten’s coronation opera, Gloriana (1953), perhaps turned out to be England’s best if belated answer to Glinka…