Hinterland

Featuring a wizard, a princess and a magic potion, Holst’s lost opera is a world away from The Planets

The ballet music from Gustav Holst’s 1923 one-act opera The Perfect Fool was once a staple of concert programmes: I first heard it at a Prom in the 1970s. But just as the rest of his “minor works” have declined in popularity, so too has this gem: and the opera from which it is taken remains largely unknown, even to those who value Holst beyond the increasingly suffocating fact that he wrote The Planets.

Please don’t misunderstand me – The Planets is a work of genius, and I treasure the prehistoric acoustic recording I have of the composer himself conducting it almost a century ago as one of music’s great historical documents. However, the fame and ubiquity of this one piece seem to have eradicated the notion that Holst wrote anything else.

A new Lyrita disc of The Perfect Fool should help to correct that. Richard Itter, who founded Lyrita in 1959, arranged for many of the unrecorded glories and neglected composers of the English canon to be immortalised on vinyl (and, from the 1980s, on CD). But also, driven by a passion for works of the English musical renaissance, he would use state-of-the-art equipment to record pieces having rare performances on the BBC, building a library of these for his own private consumption.

Now, by arrangement with the BBC, Lyrita is issuing a number of these recordings; the latest being a performance of The

Perfect Fool, broadcast on the

Third Programme on May 7 1967. Another recent issue was a set of three one-act operas by Lennox Berkeley – A Dinner Engagement, Ruth and Castaway – broadcast between 1966 and 1968. The Holst and the Berkeley are all in mono, but the digitisation process and, more to the point, the quality of the technology Itter used to record the performances make it hard to believe that these are not stereo recordings.

The Perfect Fool had its debut just as Holst had made his name as one of the country’s leading composers, but this new opera was not universally acclaimed. Holst blamed some critics for taking it too seriously: he was simply telling a fairy story.

The tale concerns the Wizard (superbly sung by the bass Richard Golding) who seeks to use a magic elixir – which if he drinks will make him irresistible – to marry a beautiful Princess (Margaret Neville). However the Wizard ends up being tricked by the mother of a boy – the Fool (the contralto Pamela Bowden) – so that the Princess instead wants to marry her son. The Wizard reacts by promising death and destruction all round, but succeeds only in destroying himself and his cronies. It is not so much an opera, as Holst’s daughter Imogen observed, as a rather sophisticated pantomime for grown-ups; and one is left concluding that the perfect fool of the title is not, after all, the idiot boy who is set up to marry the Princess, but the Wizard himself, deluded by his own magic.

Holst wrote the libretto himself, which was a main cause of the critical distaste his work attracted: his literary skills did not match his musical ones. There is a narrator and a couple of characters with speaking parts, which makes the piece a little wordy, though some of the speech was cut for this BBC performance. He also asserted that he was writing a satire – two of the characters are a Wanderer and a Troubadour, who mock Wagner and Verdi respectively – and perhaps people familiar with his previous opera, Savitri, which was deeply serious, could not cope with this.

While Holst was holed up at Thaxted writing The Perfect Fool, Maurice Ravel was at Montfort l’Amaury writing his own one-act opera about magic – L’enfant et les sortilèges, albeit to a superior libretto by Colette – and in many ways they are comparable. Although Ravel’s idiom by the early 1920s was more radical than Holst’s, the English composer produces music very much of its time and context: amusing, unstuffy, sensitive but above all escapist. Ravel was doing the same thing for a society also so recently ravaged by war and still damaged by unemployment. Holst’s music has beauty and charm, and the quality (or lack of it) of his libretto is neither here nor there. The Perfect Fool is a real discovery, and those who have not already done so should get on and discover it.

The Perfect Fool is not so much an opera as a smart pantomime for grown-ups