Christoph Willibald Gluck, La corona and Il Parnas.Bruno Skulte, The Heiress of Vilkači (1947).André Grétry, Richard Coeur-de-lion (1784).Michael Dellaira, The Secret Agent (2011).Yevhen Stankovych, When the Fern Blooms (1979).Ethan Gans-Morse, The Canticle of the Black Madonn.But it's definitely understandable that it would be treated mainly as a curiosity. It's certainly not a chore to sit through. The music certainly points the way to Britten's later work, and although I wouldn't call it transcendent, there are good moments throughout. So it's sort of hard to know how one seriously one should take all this: an opera (operetta, they call it, although even with a small amount of spoken dialogue, it doesn't really have that feel to me) about Americana written by two Englishmen? Is this meant to be taken straight, or is it some sort of satire? And if the former, does it actually succeed at this, or not? I mean, it really is kind of hard to know: I think, okay, what would you think if this had been written by Americans? But that doesn't really help! I still feel like it could go either way! I suppose my subjective opinion is that it reads like an homage, sometimes successful, sometimes clumsy. Well, that's about all, except that there are stabs throughout at capturing some sort of mythical 'Americanness.' Is that a position in great demand? Maybe. In the end, all these characters leave: Hel to work for the government in Washington, Tiny and Slim to New York City (don't think it's specified as to why), and Inkslinger to Hollywood to be a.lumber consultant. Helson decides to rebel against Paul, but gets smacked down we think he's dead for a few minutes, but then he's not, and everything's fine. There's Paul's daughter Tiny (ironic name, don't you see?) who falls in love with the cook, Hot Biscuit Slim. There's a guy called Johnny Inkslinger working as Paul's, I don't know, accountant. He gets some lumberjacks from around the world to work for him, including a Swede named Hel Helson as the foreman. And, Inkslinger himself is at one remove from the collective, a man of words and thoughts, reflecting on his actions and motives, achievements and future paths, much like Auden himself at this time he is decidedly not one of the herd.

Well, at any rate, what there is is this: Paul-who only appears here as an offstage voice-grows up and gets big (and some random cowboy troubadour sings about his exploits). In fact, I was very strongly put in mind of Kurt Weill's Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny: they're both in some sense 'about' America (although this one lacks the overt political edge of that), both of them feature characters who, while named, are nonetheless extremely vaguely defined, and neither has a plot to speak of.

NUTS.īut as for the work itself.well, it's definitely not plot-heavy. It has a WH Auden libretto, and-this is kind of mind-boggling-at the time Britten and Auden were living in New York and sharing a house with Gypsy Rose Lee and Carson McCullers. It's never achieved the popularity of his later works, obviously, but as a completist, I had to see it, and someone recently uploaded a 1998 performance from New York City Opera (presented by Beverly Sills, no less). I wanted to see it when I was working my way through his catalogue, but until recently, the only video of it was sung in German with German subtitles.

Britten paul bunyan johnny inkslinger