Reflections on a Golden Style: W. H. Auden's Theory of Opera

Abstract

OR SEVERAL decades now, W. H. Auden has been regarded as the most representative English writer (or, at least, the most representative British poet) of the generation following that of T. S. Eliot. In recent years, literary historians and critics begun to scrutinize his works; and even his criticism-much of it conveniently gathered in the volume, The Dyer's Hand and Other Essaysl-has attracted attention in the world of scholarship. Its growth and scope been surveyed in essays by Edward Callan and Cleanth Brooks.2 As a playwright, too, Auden has found himself in the critical limelight, notably regarding his contributions to the repertory of the British Group Theatre in the thirties (The Dog Beneath the Skin and The Ascent of F 6, both written in collaboration Christopher Isherwood). What literary scholars, few exceptions, thus far failed to realize is that, because of his close and intimate contact music, Auden's theatrical interests gradually shifted from the spoken verse drama to the music drama, which he now regards as one of the only two contemporary vehicles of the Golden and High Style required by a public art-the other being the ballet. As a sheer artifice, that is to say, opera is not ashamed of the rhetoric from which the modern playwright shies away. Whereas Joseph Warren Beach refuses to treat Auden's librettos with critical solemnity, since they have been one