Albert Herring Research Articles

Reinterpreting The Bartered Bride: Vašek as a Model for Britten’s Albert Herring

The musical and textual delineation of the eponymous hero of Benjamin Britten’s Albert Herring can be linked to the fascination Britten and his creative team had with the character of Vašek from Smetana’s The Bartered Bride. Smetana’s stuttering character became one of Peter Pears’s signature roles after the Sadler’s Wells 1943 production of The Bartered Bride, with an English text prepared by Eric Crozier, the librettist of Albert Herring. Whereas mid-twentieth-century performers and stage directors approached Vašek as a buffoonish simpleton, Crozier and Pears depicted him sympathetically as an oppressed social misfit, prefiguring the comedic, yet compassionate, portrayal of Albert.

A Dinner Engagement (1954) de Lennox Berkeley : un opéra-bouffe anachronique ?

Commissioned by The English Opera Group, written on a libretto by Paul Dehn and created at the Aldeburgh Festival on 17 June 1954, A Dinner Engagement is a comic opera by Lennox Berkeley (1903-1989). The instrumentation follows that of Benjamin Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia and Albert Herring. As regards Albert Herring, it served to a certain extent as a model for Berkeley’s opera as is illustrated by the way the text was set to music, by the use of the repetition of musical motifs, etc. A Dinner Engagement’s musical language is essentially tonal and the structure of the work is akin to a number opera. Musically speaking, the opera of the British composer is closer to some operas by Britten, Menotti and Poulenc than to works by Berg, Schoenberg and the composers of the European avant-garde of the 1960s. The musical tensions between vernacular and extra-vernacular elements foreground the difficulty of defining what an English opera is, most particularly at a time when Benjamin Britten tried to renew English opera.

The Timely Traditions of Albert Herring

The Timely Traditions of Albert Herring

Music and sexuality in Britten: selected essays

Preface George Haggerty Introduction Susan McClary 1. Britten and 2. Grimes Is at His Exercise: Sex, Politics, and Violence in the Librettos of Peter 3. and Lucretia 4. Salvation at Sea: Britten's Billy Budd 5. Character and Caricature in Albert Herring 6. Britten's Bad Boys: Male Relations in The Turn of the Screw 7. Britten's Dream 8. Eros and Orientalism in Britten's Operas 9. Keeping the Straight Line Intact? Britten's Relation to Folksong, Purcell, and His English Predecessors 10. Pacifism, Political Action, and Artistic Endeavor 11. Auden's Britten 12. The Britten Era Afterword Jenny Doctor Appendix: Philip Brett's Britten Scholarship Works Cited Index

Letters from a Life: Selected Letters of Benjamin Britten, Vol. 3: 1946–1951. Ed. by Donald Mitchell, Philip Reed, and Mervyn Cooke. pp. xxvi + 758. (Faber, London, 2004, £25. ISBN 0-571-22282-X.)

Volumes 1 and 2 of Letters from a Life: Selected Letters and Diaries of Benjamin Britten, published in 1991, covered the years 1923 to 1945 in 1,403 copiously annotated pages. Now Volume 3—no diaries this time, just ‘selected letters’—appearing thirteen years later, covers six years in 758 pages: or rather 620 pages, preceded by an Introduction by Donald Mitchell, a further selection of letters from the years 1936–45, and an essay by Mitchell about Britten’s correspondence (1942–5) with Edward Sackville-West, which has only recently been made available for study. A very rough average of a hundred pages per year is far from excessive, given Britten’s multifarious and immensely important activities in the wake of Peter Grimes, and his often laconic and hurried letters benefit greatly from being placed within this kind of documentary biography, so that the reasons for haste can be explored, the significance of passing references and allusions unscrambled. The editorial team score highly in avoiding redundant or pedestrian annotation. Informed comment may be voluminous, but speculation is kept to an absolute minimum, and even the initially plausible argument that materials like the extensive newspaper reviews of Britten premieres would best be shunted off onto a website (as may happen with later volumes) loses force when their presence on the page among the correspondence and other documentation serves to reinforce so vividly what really mattered about these years for Britten, and for British music. For example, the material about responses to The Rape of Lucretia and Albert Herring, with conflicting views on the former passionately expressed by Grace Williams, Imogen Holst, Michael Tippett, and Edward Sackville-West, among others, is the more striking when placed in the context of Britten’s own involvement in the work’s early performances; and the detailed biographical notes devoted to other figures—a good instance is Clifford Curzon (p. 190)—also provide fascinating and relevant information at exactly the point where it is most useful.

After Long Pursuit The English Opera Group and Albert Herring

Journal Article After Long Pursuit The English Opera Group and Albert Herring Get access ERIC CROZIER, ERIC CROZIER Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar NANCY EVANS NANCY EVANS Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Opera Quarterly, Volume 11, Issue 3, 1995, Pages 3–16, https://doi.org/10.1093/oq/11.3.3 Published: 01 September 1995

Not the marrying kind: Britten's Albert Herring

At the climax of his account of a night of drunken adventure, Albert Herring, who has at last thrown off conventional restraints, suddenly breaks off: ‘a nightmare example of drunkenness, dirt, and worse…’. At which point the Glyndebourne production of a few years ago had Albert produce from his shirt an outsize pair of women's bloomers. The visual aid was presumably deemed necessary because the text does not make clear what inference we are to draw. The nature of Albert's desire is left open, and at least one early reviewer recognised that there might be a less conventional understanding of the superficially hilarious romp that Albert Herring presents. More recently, Philip Brett has trenchantly argued that the opera is a parable of the ‘coming out’ of a young gay man set against the oppression of small-town respectability, a view I believe to be in essence correct. There may, however, be room for a more detailed study of those elements in the text that enable us to affirm it with confidence.

Daring to Eat a Peach Literary Allusion in Albert Herring

Daring to Eat a Peach Literary Allusion in <i>Albert Herring</i>

Character and Caricature in 'Albert Herring'

Character and Caricature in 'Albert Herring'

The Serious Comedy of Albert Herring

The Serious Comedy of Albert Herring

NOTES AND OBSERVATIONS: 'ALBERT HERRING'

Journal Article NOTES AND OBSERVATIONS: ‘ALBERT HERRING’ Get access G. B. G. B. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar English: Journal of the English Association, Volume 6, Issue 36, Autumn 1947, Pages 285–286, https://doi.org/10.1093/english/6.36.285 Published: 01 October 1947

Form in Opera: ‘Albert Herring’ Examined

To watch the growth of a composer has been the great interest of my life. It is a fascinating experience to see how they all begin from some older composers whom they love, and how they assimilate from them congenial ideas and idioms until their own personality and language is fully developed. I have observed several composers from the start who later gained distinction and great fame, and though the cases were as different as the individualities, some incidents always seem to recur with the inevitability of natural laws. There is always at first more public reaction against, than receptiveness for, the new message; and later, when the composer has grown to fuller stature, his earlier, originally censured works, are often preferred to his new ones. Obviously it takes some time until people become accustomed to what is unfamiliar.

Foreword to “Albert Herring”

During the last three years I have spent much time with Benjamin Britten when he was planning and writing his operas Peter Grimes and The Rape of Lucretia. As producer for both works I shared in discussions between composer and poet, and could follow their progress from first ideas to final performance. Lately, I have tried to profit by this invaluable experience in writing the text for Albert Herring.