I’ve been listening to the first full recording of Raymond and Agnes, an opera that gives Manchester’s oldest theatre its place in musical history. It’s been achieved by Cheshire-based Retrospect Opera, with the Royal Ballet Sinfonia conducted by Richard Bonynge, CBE. Soprano Majella Cullagh is the heroine Agnes, tenor Mark Milhofer the hero Raymond, and baritone Andrew Greenan is the evil Baron.
The Theatre Royal in Peter Street – long closed for stage
performances – was for many years the city’s home for top-class drama and
opera. Built in 1845, it saw the likes of Charles
Dickens, Henry Irving and
George
Cruickshank tread its boards, and in 1854 Charles Hallé
collaborated with the composer and conductor Edward Loder on one of the most
ambitious opera seasons the city has ever known, before or since.
Loder spent most of his career in London and had some
notable successes there, but from 1851 to 1855 he was resident in Manchester,
as the first purely baton-wielding conductor at the Theatre Royal – previously the
orchestra, like many of the time, was directed by its violinist-leader, Charles
Seymour.
He and the pianist-conductor Hallé (who had similarly
taken over the Gentlemen’s Concerts orchestra directorship from Seymour a few
years earlier but was yet to found the orchestra by which he’s mainly remembered
today) gathered a company of top international operatic singers at the theatre through
the autumn of 1854, and Loder brought to completion the opera that has since
been described as his ‘masterpiece’ – Raymond
and Agnes. It’s a Romantic work in ‘gothic’ style, based on part of the famous
novel, The Monk, by Matthew Lewis
(written in 1796).
But Loder never got it on the stage in 1854 – the Crimean
War got in the way, blighting the entire opera season, according to Hallé in
his memoirs written some time later – and its premiere the following year, with
lesser stars, was hardly noticed. I’ve written about this, and Loder’s career
in Manchester, in ‘Manchester Sounds’ and elsewhere (see ‘Opera in Manchester
1848-1899’ and ‘E J Loder, Charles Seymour and music at Manchester’s Theatre
Royal 1845-1855’) at http://manchestermusicalheritage.blogspot.com/).
It’s a sad story, because there’s every sign that Loder
thought he was writing for soloists of exceptional gifts, and in the event he
had to make do with the Manchester ‘regulars’ who were also billed for comic
operas and suchlike. But Raymond and
Agnes is still the only serious opera of real merit ever to have been composed,
rehearsed and premiered in the North West of England, and Retrospect Opera have
done us all a service with this recording – it’s of the three-act version later
performed in London, whose score is the only one that survives, rather than
Loder’s four-act original, but I doubt that much was lost in the adaptation.
I wouldn’t be the first to point out that the quality of
Loder’s music was not matched by the quality of the libretto, which he got from
one Edward Fitzball before he moved north. Fitzball was the go-to man for
sensational popular ‘gothic’ drama scripts at the time, and tastes have changed
a lot (Gilbert and Sullivan gave them a real send-up in Ruddigore).
One almost wishes that Fitzball’s convoluted lines had
been written in another language – then a clear and natural-sounding English
translation could have been made and we’d have been spared his tortured syntax.
For all I know, some opera classics may sound just as artificial in their
original languages, but most of us would never know it when we read today’s surtitles
in the theatre or hear a modern translation.
But it’s the music that counts, and Loder – though the
quality of his writing varies – at his best is a very good dramatic composer
indeed. His chief model may have been Weber’s Der Freischütz, but I’m convinced he knew his Donizetti and some
Verdi, too, and his work needs only committed interpreters and skilled
performers to spring to life again.
You can get the CD set from Retrospect Opera here.
You can get the CD set from Retrospect Opera here.
