Albert Herring
Albert Herring, Op. 39, is a chamber opera in three acts by Benjamin Britten.
For the 1959 Australian television play based on the opera, see Albert Herring (film).Albert Herring
English
Composed in the winter of 1946 and the spring of 1947, this comic opera was a successor to his serious opera The Rape of Lucretia. The libretto, by Eric Crozier, was based on Guy de Maupassant's novella Le Rosier de Madame Husson, with the action transposed to an English setting.[1]
Composition history[edit]
After having composed and staged The Rape of Lucretia, Britten decided he should attempt a comedy, preferably set in England.[2] Crozier suggested adapting the Maupassant short story Le rosier de Madame Husson and transplanting it to the Suffolk landscape already familiar to Britten from his home in Snape.[2] Britten composed Albert Herring at his home, The Old Mill at Snape, in the winter of 1946 and the spring of 1947.[2] He scored the opera for the same instrumental forces he had used in his first chamber opera The Rape of Lucretia, intending it like the earlier opera for performance by the English Opera Group.[2]
Performance history and reception[edit]
The opera premiered on 20 June 1947 at Glyndebourne, conducted by the composer. According to one writer, the owner and founder of Glyndebourne, John Christie, "disliked it intensely and is said to have greeted members of the first night audience with the words: 'This isn't our kind of thing, you know'."[3] Some 38 years later Glyndebourne's 1985 production was "one of the most successful the opera has had".[3]
The opera received its U.S. premiere on 8 August 1949 at the Tanglewood Music Festival.[3] In 1949, Britten's English Opera Group toured with both Rape of Lucretia and Albert Herring, giving ten performances between 12 and 23 September in Copenhagen and Oslo.[4] An almost complete recording of one of the Copenhagen performances has been released commercially.
Sviatoslav Richter called it "the greatest comic opera of the century"[5] and in 1983 staged Albert Herring as part of the December Nights Festival at Moscow's Pushkin Museum.[6]
The opera was performed at Buenos Aires's Teatro Colón in 1972. The Chicago premiere was given by Chicago Opera Theater in 1979. In 2008–2010, over 55 performances were given by companies such as those at Glyndebourne and the Portland Opera in Oregon (2008 season); the Opéra-Comique in Paris and the Opéra de Normandie in Rouen (2009);and, for 2010, at the Landestheater in Linz, the Finnish National Opera in Helsinki and the Santa Fe Opera.[7] The Santa Fe production was given by the Los Angeles Opera in 2011. Vancouver Opera presented the work, in a co-production with Pacific Opera Victoria, in 2013.
Musical style and character themes[edit]
Albert Herring is a musically complex work, despite its somewhat light-hearted subject matter. The text is genuinely humorous, and the score, while matching the text in character, includes myriad musical quotations as well as some complex forms. Like Peter Grimes and other works by Britten, this opera explores society's reaction to an odd individual, although, in this case at least, it is from a generally humorous and lighthearted perspective.[14][15] Some of Britten's contemporaries saw in the title character a satirical self-portrait of the composer.[16]
Notes
Additional sources