Music: Opera in Two Easy Steps

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Grand opera, like port wine, is a commodity the English are in the habit of importing. No Englishman has ever written a successful opera, though young Benjamin Britten's may one day make the grade, (TIME, Aug. 19). Even good English opera singers are rare. London has long been without a topnotch opera company.

London's historic Covent Garden opera house, reopened last year, has been doing a big business with the famed Sadler's Wells ballet. The Garden managers, counting their profits, decided to take a flyer on a permanent opera company. To play it as safe as they could, they imported promising young Sopranos Audrey Bowman and Virginia MacWatters from the U.S. and hired as director an Austrian refugee named Karl Rankl, who had conducted opera in Vienna, Berlin and Prague.

The Covent Garden Opera Co. opened its first opera season shortly before Christmas—not with an opera but with a 255-year-old musical revue, The Fairy Queen. In 1692 Composer Henry Purcell and an anonymous playwright dashed off a travesty on Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. Its original seven hours now whittled down to three, The Fairy Queen was a lavish, confusing show full of dancers, coloratura arias, drunken comics and a Chinese grand finale. To put it on, Covent Garden had to call in its Sadler's Wells Co. and eight professional actors.

By last week The Fairy Queen had established Covent Garden's opera as a business; now it had only to succeed as an opera company. Next week, as its first real opera, Covent Garden scheduled Carmen.