‘Gallimaufry’ at Covent Garden Purcell's The Fairy-Queen in 1946

Abstract

Michael Burden, who is director of the New Chamber Opera, has been Lecturer in Music at New College, Oxford, since 1989. He is the editor of The Purcell companion and of the first complete edition of The Fairy-Queen, to be published by Eulenberg. he history of Henry Purcell's opera The Fairy-Queen is well known to those who take an interest in such matters. After its premiere to popular acclaim in 1692 at the Dorset Garden Theatre it was revived the following year, the score lost some time after Purcell's death in 1695, found in 19oo in the library of the Royal Academy of Music and mangled in performances by 'enterprising' opera companies, producers and composers thereafter.' What is less generally known is that the opera was chosen to open the Covent Garden Trust's first opera season, the season that established the theatre, however shakily, as one of the world's pre-eminent opera houses.2 Its cast list included names still familiar today: Moira Shearer, Margot Fonteyn, Michael Soames danced; Robert Helpmann spoke and danced; Michael Hordern played the part of Bottom the Weaver; Constant Lambert reorganized the score and conducted the performances; Michael Ayrton designed the sets and costumes; and Frederick Ashton produced and choreographed. The whole production was recorded by the well known theatre photographer Edward Mandinian, and many of his photographs were reproduced in a souvenir book, together with essays by Edward Dent, Lambert and Ayrton.3 Apart from Ayrton's designs, the Mandinian photographs were, until recently, the primary record of this production, but a cache of negatives taken by the accomplished amateur photographer Eric A. Sharman has come to light.4 As far as the stills themselves are concerned, they add little to our knowledge of the production; indeed, it seems likely that both he and Mandinian worked side by side during the photocalls, since many of the poses and angles are the same. However, the significance of Sharman's stills is that they are part of a series of negatives he took using colour film, a series which includes the famous pictures of the designer Oliver Messel's post-war Sleeping beauty and the choreographer Ninette de Valois's Checkmate. There are some 24 negatives in the collection, covering Act 3 of the production; the remainder are either missing, were failures as photographs, or perhaps Sharman recorded only this act. Sharman's photographs, together with the previously unremarked production books for the 1951 revivals held in the Covent Garden archives, have provided a stimulus for a reconsideration of this important production.5