Music: How to Make an Opera

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The tuxedoed and evening-gowned audience that filled little Jubilee Hall at Aldeburgh on Britain's windswept Suffolk coast last week was beginning to feel self-conscious and uncomfortable. They had just learned that they could not sit back and listen to the premiere of Benjamin Britten's sixth opera, Let's Make an Opera!; they had to take part.

The cast did its best to put them at ease. That technical word aria, it was explained, is "nothing to be afraid of—it simply means 'song' in Italian." Ensemble —"that's when everybody sings together." By the time the audience had been let in on a few secrets of stage lighting, greasepaint, and how to put up the scenery, it was beginning to relax.

Then energetic Conductor Norman Del Mar bounced into the tiny pit for some rehearsing. Explaining how to count time and watch his baton for cues, he put the audience through four songs, three to be sung in turn before the opera's three scenes and a finale to be bellowed out with the opera's cast (one-third professional, two-thirds schoolchildren). That done, intermission was announced; in their growing enthusiasm, most of the audience did not even realize that Let's Make an Opera!, otherwise known as The Little Sweep, was already half over.

By the time Conductor Del Mar came back, this time in full dress, to lead his six-piece orchestra into the introduction, everyone was ready to roar the first number, The Sweep's Song:

Sweep! sweep! sweep!

Saddle your donkey and set on your way!

. . . chimneys need sweeping at Iken today ...

The well-swept, uncluttered story of Sam, a little boy who is sold into service as a chimney sweep, then rescued by the five children of the house where he is sweeping, moved swiftly along; and Benjy Britten's simple but satisfying score, written in eight days, did not slow it down. Most popular chorus: the Night Song, in which the audience is divided, for singing purposes, into owls, herons, turtledoves and chaffinches. After they had joined gleefully in the final Coaching Song, there was nothing left to do but applaud themselves and the opera's makers. Curly-haired Composer Britten and Librettist Eric Crozier (who also wrote the book for Britten's third successful opera, Albert Herring*) had to take a dozen curtain calls.

*Scheduled for its U.S. premiere at Serge Koussevitzky's Berkshire Music Center in August.