No 37 -- Summer 1991 Edited by Michael Walters
I enjoyed Derrick McClure's review of Princess Ida [GG 33, p. 14] but I would take issue with the remark that Lady Blanche's aria should be cut. It is a brilliant satire on Tennyson's maunderings about the great "To–Be". Indeed I featured it in my Ph.D. thesis on Victorian fiction as a satire on Tennyson (and the Victorian German Philologists). I was once in a production where Blanche sang the song while holding a lecturer's wand and pointed to a blackboard featuring the various tense combinations (with MUST in bright red at the bottom). She gave the aria as a lecture to the audience. The combination of "abstract" linguistics and seething personal jealously (of Ida) made a piquant mixture. The audience loved it, and one night the song was sung twice. Incidentally, a professional musician (conducting now at a German Opera House) told me that, in his view, it was one of the four best numbers in the score (the other three being the Princess's two solos and Arac's Handelian song). Surely there are, on balance, more reasons for keeping the number in than for throwing it out. In any case, the contralto rle is reduced musically to minute proportions if the number is omitted.
RICHARD MOORE
So what are you up to? Are you still writing blistering critiques and infuriating people? I hope so. There is nothing in the world so inspiring to an amateur performance as unified hatred of one or more critics. If they can manage to hate all the critics –– ah what bliss!
STANLEY GERMAN
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