Angela Carter's fiction: The Bloody Chamber

A continuation of my series on Angela Carter's fiction.

The Bloody Chamber (1979): Carter's development of the Rossinian narrative voice she employed in Wise Children seems to have originated in the story "Puss-in-Boots," which was among the last stories she wrote for her collection of re-imagined fairy tales, The Bloody Chamber. In that story Puss-in-Boots helps his master (known only as Master) woo and bed a beautiful young woman who is held virtual prisoner by her miserly, impotent, elderly husband. Yes, we are firmly in opera buffa or commedia dell'arte territory; to underline the point the lady's husband is named Signor Panteleone (Pantalone is a stock commedia character).

The ribald tone of this story at first seems out of place in this collection based on dark fairy tales such as "Bluebeard," "Little Red Riding Hood" and "Beauty and the Beast." But there is darkness in Carter's "Puss-in-Boots" as well: the cat does not just outwit the aged Signor Panteleone but contrives his violent demise, freeing his young widow to marry the handsome young Master. Carter's fierce Puss is perhaps inspired by the illustrations of Perrault's tale by Gustave Doré:

Image from the Milwaukee Public Library Rare Books Room

In the remaining stories in The Bloody Chamber Carter's language is lushly evocative and creates a looming sense of dread and the uncanny that is often tied to sexuality. Here is the narrator of the title story lying in her bridal chamber after the wedding night:

. . .the last thing I remembered, before I slept, was the tall jar of lilies beside the bed, how the thick glass distorted their fat stems so they looked like arms, dismembered arms, drifting drowned in greenish water. [1]

It's a vision of horror that will prove all too prescient when she discovers the fates of her husband's previous wives.

But these stories often have endings that diverge from those of the tales on which they are based, and make us view their heroines in a different light. What if Little Red Riding Hood, unafraid and eager, climbed into bed with the wolf? Or Beauty, instead of transforming the Beast into a man through her love, embraced her own animal nature? The stories in The Bloody Chamber are beautifully written and strikingly imaginative; you will never think of fairy tales in quite the same way again.

The story "The Company of Wolves" from The Bloody Chamber was adapted into an outstanding feature film in 1984 produced by the Independent Television Channel (ITC), directed by Neil Jordan and co-written by Jordan and Angela Carter.

Next time: The Magic Toyshop
Last time: Wise Children

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1. Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber and other adult tales, Harper & Row, 1979, p. 22.

Angela Carter's fiction: Wise Children

A continuation of my series on Angela Carter's fiction.

The Dolly Sisters on the cover of the  first British edition of Wise Children

Wise Children (1991), Angela Carter's final novel, takes the working-class ventriloquism of Nights at the Circus and sustains it more consistently and entertainingly. Perhaps recognizing that the most enjoyable sections of her previous novel were the parts in which Fevvers recounted her life story, Carter wrote Wise Children entirely in the first-person voice of music-hall performer Dora Chance.

Raised by a woman they think of as their grandmother, Dora and her twin sister Nora are destined for the stage from an early age. Their career as the Lucky Chances (loosely based on the real-life vaudeville stars the Dolly Sisters) spans eight decades of popular entertainment, from pantomime and music hall to movies (a Hollywood version of A Midsummer Night's Dream that bears a close resemblance to Max Reinhardt's 1935 Warner Brothers production), the West End (a Shakespearean revue variously entitled What You Will, What? You Will? or What! You  Will!), and finally burlesque. Television also makes an appearance in the person of game-show host Tristram Hazard, who is either the cousin or half-brother of the Chance twins.

Still from Max Reinhardt's A Midsummer Night's Dream (1935)

As the uncertain relationships among the characters imply, as well as the names "Chance" and "Hazard" (one of whose meanings is "chance"), the wise (or otherwise) children in this novel do not know their own fathers. The chief perpetrators of this ambiguity are the Shakespearean actor Melchior Hazard and his twin brother Peregrine, who between them beget three pairs of twins on Melchior's various wives and lovers.

The novel is organized around a series of celebrations that quickly descend into disaster, as revelations, resentments and jealousies erupt. There's a catastrophic Twelfth Night party which ends with Melchior's country manor, Lynde Court, burning to the ground; a calamitous 21st birthday party for Saskia and Imogen, the twin daughters of Melchior (or is it Peregrine?), which ends with the birthday girls smashing everything in sight when Melchior announces his remarriage to a woman no older than they are; and an ill-starred Hollywood triple wedding, which ends with the mother of Nora's groom dumping a vat of tomato sauce over the bride's head ("What? Her son marry a born-again virgin? Not good enough for Little Italy!" [1]).

The Dolly Sisters

So when Dora and Nora crash Melchior's hundredth birthday party in the company of his long-ago discarded first wife, we know that chaos is about to ensue (another meaning of "hazard," of course, is "danger"). As it does, but by this time the impending debacle has become a bit too predictable.

Wise Children is breezy reading, and bursts with Shakespeare, opera, literary and pop-cultural references. There are characters who bear strong resemblances to F. Scott Fitzgerald, Mickey Rooney, Jack L. Warner, and John Christie, the founder of the opera festival at Glyndebourne (to which Lynde Court bears more than a passing resemblance [2]). And Dora's narrative voice is delightful, even if in the dark it would be impossible to tell her apart from Fevvers.

So it seems perverse to complain that the novel is too enjoyable, but somehow that's my feeling. I was a bit surprised to learn from Gordon's biography of Carter that I'm not the only person to feel this way; both Victoria Glendinning and Harriet Waugh "agreed that the hilarity came at the expense of emotional depth." [3] Wise Children is like a relentless Rossini farce instead of a mature Mozart opera. I have to say that while I can enjoy The Barber of Seville I much prefer The Marriage of Figaro, which reveals "the shadows of human sadness cast by the sunlight of comedy." [4] Your reaction may vary.

Wise Children has been adapted into a play by Emma Rice, which premiered at the Old Vic, London, in October 2018: https://www.oldvictheatre.com/whats-on/2018/wise-children

Next time: The Bloody Chamber
Last time: Nights at the Circus 

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1. Angela Carter, Wise Children, Chatto & Windus, 1991, p. 161.
2. Just so I'm not accused of seeing Glyndebourne references where they don't exist, Carter regularly attended the Festival Opera in the 1970s and 1980s. 
3. Edmund Gordon, The Invention of Angela Carter, Oxford University Press, 2017, p. 405.
4. Spike Hughes in Glyndebourne: A History of the Festival Opera, Second edition, David & Charles, 1981, p. 259.

Angela Carter's fiction: Nights at the Circus

When I consider my favorite fiction writers, some are on the list because of the consistent pleasure they afford. Others earn their place for one or two works towards which I feel a special affinity. [1]

For me Angela Carter is in the second category, for the collection of re-imagined fairy tales The Bloody Chamber (1979) and her dreamlike second novel The Magic Toyshop (1967). It had been many years since I last read them, but Edmund Gordon's recent biography The Invention of Angela Carter (2017) inspired me to read them again, along with two books I had found disappointing when they were first issued, Nights at the Circus (1984) and Wise Children (1991).

Of course there's a risk in revisiting the work of favorite writers. While there are novels that only grow richer with re-reading, for others we may discover that aspects of the work we once felt were powerfully engaging and original can seem less so after the passage of time. As our taste evolves, our discernment develops and we ourselves change, once-favorite works can appear diminished, at least in comparison to our fond memories and associations. So it was with a certain amount of trepidation that I approached this project.

As it turned out, I needn't have worried. What follows in this and the three subsequent posts are some of my thoughts about each of these four books, in the order in which I re-read them.

Nights at the Circus is the story of Fevvers, a circus aerialist at the turn of the twentieth century. In the first part of the book she tells her life story to Jack Walser, an American journalist. Against his better (or at least more rational) judgment Walser is charmed by Fevvers and winds up joining her circus in order to write about it from the inside. (The name "Jack Walser" seems to pay simultaneous homage to Jack London and to the Swiss writer Robert Walser, who among other parallels with the character also learned a highly ritualized profession—butlering—in order to write about it.)

It's not only Fevvers' name that's unusual. That name is an approximation of the Cockney pronunciation of "feathers," because (in her telling) as a foundling infant she bore a "little bit of down, of yellow fluff, on my back, on top of both my shoulder blades," which burst forth as full-fledged wings when she turned fourteen. [2]

The emergence of Fevvers' wings at puberty and her heart-pounding attempts to learn to fly are brilliant metaphors for the disturbing transformations and beckoning freedoms of adolescence. Fevvers tells Walser, "I suffered the greatest conceivable terror of the irreparable difference with which success in the attempt [to fly] would mark me. . .I feared the proof of my own singularity." Carter's conceit perfectly captures the teenaged anxiety of feeling utterly unique and at the same time yearning to belong. [3]

The metaphor's richness continues into Fevvers' adulthood: she tells Jack that to make a living as a performer (rather than as a sideshow attraction) she has to pretend to be a fake. She embodies the predicament of women who, in order to make their way in the world, find they must conceal their true powers and conform to confining (male) expectations. This is all made even more complicated by a hint in the final pages that Fevvers' wings may be fake after all. If so, she is pretending to pretend not to have powers that she really doesn't have.  (All performers are fakes, Carter suggests, and that's part of their appeal.)

Nights at the Circus may be a parable about the constricting roles forced on women, but the circus setting also provides Carter with plentiful opportunities to spin rollicking yarns. We witness the triumphs and disasters that occur both in performance and backstage and meet a menagerie of other performers, both animal and human. These include a cowardly strong man, a clown whose act careens into drunken murderous rage, dancing tigers tamed by the sound of music (but who occasionally break free and wreak havoc), a clan of rival aerialists who sabotage Fevvers' trapeze, and a fortune-telling pig.

But when in the final section of the novel the circus train derails in the snowfields of Siberia, the narrative also seems to go off track. Carter introduces new characters but fails to fully develop their stories, and at the same time she seems to lose interest in some of her extensive cast. Compared to the headlong momentum of the first two parts of the book, the last third feels static and ultimately anticlimactic.

There's also a strange shift in voice. For the first two parts of the novel the story is told in the third person, largely from Walser's point of view. In the last part some paragraphs abruptly shift into the first-person thoughts of Fevvers, but they are rendered in an utterly different voice than that of the Cockney raconteuse of the earlier part of the novel. If Carter is intending to remind us that performers are always on stage even in the presence of an audience of one, it's a point that by now surely has been made. It's hard to avoid the conclusion that this novel, Carter's longest, could have used some significant revision in the last section.

In the final pages of Nights at the Circus two of the stranded performers, the singer Mignon and her lover, the tiger-taming pianist Princess, meet a marooned music teacher, the Maestro. "'It's as though he found his long-lost daughter,' said Lizzie [Fevver's loyal dresser]. 'As at the end of one of Shakespeare's late comedies. Only he's found two daughters. A happy ending, squared.'" This passage, with its reference to doubles, reunions, and Shakespeare's comedies, seems as though it may have been the moment of gestation of Carter's next novel, Wise Children. [4]

Nights at the Circus has been adapted into a BBC Radio 4 drama, first performed in September 2018: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0bkqcqh 

Next time: Wise Children

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1. In the first category are writers such as Jane Austen, Elizabeth Gaskell, Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis and Anthony Trollope; in the second, writers such as Felipe Alfau (for Locos), Daphne du Maurier (for Rebecca), George Eliot (for Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda) and Philippe Soupault (for Last Nights of Paris) 
2. Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus, Chatto & Windus, 1984, p. 12. 
3. Carter, Nights at the Circus, p. 34.
4. Carter, Nights at the Circus, p. 272.

The Invention of Angela Carter

Why read writers' biographies? The aspect of their lives that we most want to know about—"the unique motivations and the psychological origins of literary production," as one critic has written, or as I would put it, "How did they do it?"—is one that is largely inaccessible to an external observer. If the goal of literary biography is to "help us to comprehend. . .how literary art happens," another critic writes, "this admirable objective never seems to be reached." It's telling that a recent book on literary biography is entitled The Impossible Craft. [1]

So it was in full consciousness of the inevitability of disappointment that I began reading Edmund Gordon's The Invention of Angela Carter (Oxford University Press, 2017). The title refers, of course, to her self-invention as a writer and a person, but it could also apply to the posthumous growth of her reputation and the accretion of distorting myths around her. Gordon writes in his epilogue that his biography "is intended as a first step towards demythologising Angela Carter." [2]

Ironically, Carter is far more widely read, appreciated and studied now than at any time during her tragically truncated life. As a sign of this change, in 2012 Nights at the Circus (Chatto & Windus, 1984) was named the best novel ever to have won the nearly century-old James Tait Black fiction prize. Previous winners had included novels by D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Forster, Robert Graves, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, Muriel Spark, Nadine Gordimer, John Berger, Iris Murdoch, John le Carré, J. M. Coetzee, J. G. Ballard, Salman Rushdie, Zadie Smith, and Cormac McCarthy: heady company.

I don't remember when I first encountered Angela Carter's work, or even which of her books I read first. I suspect that it was her short story collection The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (first published by Gollancz, 1979), parts of which were adapted into a striking film directed by Neil Jordan, The Company of Wolves (1984). Other early encounters included her second novel, The Magic Toyshop (Heinemann, 1967), adapted into an excellent film in 1987, and her book-length essay on the writings of the Marquis de Sade, The Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of Pornography (Pantheon, 1978). With the film adaptations, her extensive journalism, and the success of her novels Nights at the Circus and Wise Children (Chatto & Windus, 1991), Carter had begun to achieve some popular acclaim in the early 1990s when she was diagnosed with inoperable cancer. She died in February 1992 at age 51, less than a year after her diagnosis.

Gordon has produced a thoughtful, thoroughly researched and well-written biography; if you are interested in Carter's writing you will find that it provides much to reflect on. But on occasion in describing connections between Carter's life and work he can be reductive, and there are other areas that he simply doesn't investigate fully—leaving as an exercise for the reader questions that perhaps he should have probed more deeply.

In the first category is Gordon's tendency to identify Carter's fictional characters as versions of her family and acquaintances. Carter wrote that "all fiction is symbolic autobiography" (a quote she later attributed to Balzac, although I have been unable to trace it). [3] Gordon, though, often seems to discount or ignore the modifier "symbolic."

For example, he asserts that Uncle Philip in The Magic Toyshop "was a grotesquely exaggerated version of [Angela's first husband] Paul Carter." [4] Angela had married Paul when she was only 20 to escape her stultifying family home; later in her journal she described this act as a "flight from a closed room into another one." [5] According to Gordon, Paul was undemonstrative, uncommunicative, and resented Angela's initial success, but he was not an ogre. During their marriage he had at least one serious bout of depression; perhaps it was during that period that Angela came to feel that "he needed me for a mother." [6]

Uncle Philip, in contrast, isn't dependent, withdrawn or depressed. Instead he is a creepy, controlling and perverse father-figure. Even if Paul matched Uncle Philip's attributes more closely, though, to attempt to map the character so directly onto a real person is to turn the sinister, dreamlike atmosphere of the novel—in my view and Gordon's one of her best—into that of a mundane domestic drama.

If at places Gordon can be too insistent about making direct connections between Carter's fiction and her life, though, what about the many characters in her novels who are orphans? (Her mother was, if anything, overprotective rather than absent.) And what are we to make of the many scenes in her fiction of incest and rape? Incest features in her short stories "The Events of a Night," "The Executioner's Beautiful Daughter" and "Penetrating to the Heart of the Forest," and in the novels The Magic Toyshop and Wise Children. Should we assume that these motifs are thinly fictionalized versions of her own experience, or is their significance purely imaginative? Carter herself wrote approvingly of "a fiction absolutely self-conscious of itself as a different form of human experience than reality." [7]

There are also moments where Gordon makes some odd, or at least superficial, judgments. The screenplay Carter co-wrote for The Company of Wolves employs as a framing device the dream of a teenaged girl, Rosaleen, about the terrors and allurements of adolescence.  Gordon writes that this "is largely an excuse to bombard the viewer with strange and disturbing scenes and images. A lot of it wasn't intended to signify anything in particular."

To illustrate this lack of meaning Gordon describes the following scene:

At one point, Rosaleen runs away from an 'amorous boy' and climbs a tree towards a stork's nest in the crook of a bough. The bird flies away, and Rosaleen looks into the nest, which contains four eggs and a small mirror with a gilt handle. She begins applying her lipstick in the mirror. As she does so, the four eggs burst open to reveal four statuettes of babies. [8]

Far from signifying "nothing in particular," this scene seems if anything overdetermined with meaning and oversaturated with symbols of sexuality and fecundity. If Gordon didn't tell us that Carter was pregnant while writing the screenplay, we might have guessed it from this scene.

Gordon interviewed the film's director (and screenplay co-writer) Neil Jordan, but he is a bit too ready to accept what Jordan tells him. Gordon writes,

The only constraints on the writing of the film were those of the medium of cinema itself. Angela wanted it to end with Rosaleen waking from her dream and diving into her bedroom floor, as into a pool of water. 'It was such a simple image, it would be easy to do now,' Jordan reflected in 2014. 'But then it was impossible.' [9]

Really? Somehow the "constraints. . .of the medium of cinema itself" did not prevent Jean Cocteau from showing a character plunging through a mirror as if into a pool of water in his film Blood of a Poet, made in 1929. More than five decades of cinematic innovation later, and such a shot was "impossible"? Permit my skepticism, and my suspicion that Jordan preferred his ending, in which a pack of wolves bursts into Rosaleen's bedroom and she screams in fear.

Angela was dismayed: 'When I went to the screening I sat with Neil and I was enjoying the film very much and thinking that it had turned out so well—just as I had hoped,' she told an interviewer a few years later. 'Until the ending, which I couldn't believe—I was so upset. I said, "You've ruined it."' [10]

It's been many years since I've seen The Company of Wolves, but I don't remember feeling that the ending had ruined the film. It is, though, the mirror image, as it were, of the ending Carter had wished for. In her version, Rosaleen wakes from her dream only to choose to plunge deeper into the unconscious; in Jordan's version, the dream-world (in the form of the wolf pack) terrifyingly irrupts into Rosaleen's reality.

I don't want to be too negative; Gordon's book is very worthwhile, and future writers about Carter's life and work will rely heavily on his interviews with Carter's intimate friends and on the many letters and journal passages he has unearthed. And it will undoubtedly inspire readers to discover or rediscover Carter's writing, which is the greatest compliment that can be paid to a literary biography. But as Gordon himself acknowledges of his subject, "She's much too big for any single book to contain." [11]

One of those readers that Gordon has inspired to rediscover Carter's writing is yours truly. In future posts I hope to discuss my re-reading of two of my favorite of her works, The Magic Toyshop and The Bloody Chamber, and two novels I found disappointing when they were first published, Nights at the Circus and Wise Children.

Update 22 December 2018: For my responses to re-reading Angela Carter's fiction, please see:

• Nights at the Circus
• Wise Children
• The Bloody Chamber
• The Magic Toyshop

The Invention of Angela Carter was selected for my Favorites of 2018: Books.

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1. "Unique motivations": John Richetti, "Writing about Defoe: What is a critical biography?" Literature Compass 3/2 (2006): 65–79, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2006.00302.x; "help us to comprehend": Daniel Green, "Literary Biography," The Reading Experience: On Contemporary Literature and Criticism, http://www.thereadingexperience.net/tre/literary-biography.html; Scott Donaldson, The Impossible Craft: Literary Biography. Penn State University Press, 2015.
2. Edmund Gordon, The Invention of Angela Carter. Oxford University Press, 2017, p. 420.
3. Angela Carter, Introduction to Walter de la Mare, Memoirs of a Midget. Oxford University Press, 1982.
4. Gordon, p. 90.
5. Quoted in Gordon, p. 48.
6. Quoted in Gordon, p. 113.
7. Quoted in Helen Simpson, "Femme fatale: Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber." The Guardian, 24 Jun 2006. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2006/jun/24/classics.angelacarter 
8. Gordon, pp. 335-36.
9. Gordon, p. 336.
10. Gordon, p. 336.
11. Gordon, p. 421.

The first Glyndebourne Mozart recordings

Glyndebourne in the 1930s. Photo: Glyndebourne Archive

Today, when it seems that every sizeable English country estate offers its own summer opera series, the utterly radical nature of the Glyndebourne Festival Opera at its inception may not be readily apparent. Of course, at the time of the founding of the Festival in 1934 there were long-established opera festivals on the European continent. But Glyndebourne was unprecedented in several respects:

The setting. Spike Hughes writes in Glyndebourne: A History of the Festival Opera that "ever since the Teatro San Cassiano was opened as the world's first public opera house in Venice in 1637, opera had always been an essentially urban form of entertainment." [1] Not quite "always," perhaps, but before Glyndebourne only princes had built opera houses on their country estates. And performances at, for example, Esterháza or Versailles were entertainments for the court, not a ticket-buying public. Opera festivals that depended on selling tickets located themselves in cities, such as Munich and Salzburg. Even Bayreuth at the time of the founding of the Wagner Festival had a population approaching 30,000. In contrast, in 1931 the population of the village of Glynde was 257. [2]

The funding. Other opera festivals were not only located in urban settings, they were the undertakings of whole communities. They were funded publicly, by musical societies, and by private donors. The financial and logistical burdens of the Glyndebourne Festival were borne entirely by one man: Glyndebourne's owner, John Christie. Over the first three seasons the Festival's deficit totaled £21,000 (close to £1.5 million today). [3] Christie, undaunted, continued the Festival until World War II forced a hiatus, and resumed it after the war ended. The Festival's survival is a monument to Christie's dual devotions: to opera, and to his wife, the soprano Audrey Mildmay.

The languages. At the end of January 1934, it was announced that the first season of the Glyndebourne Festival would involve six performances each of Le nozze di Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro) and Cosi fan tutte (That's what they're all like) sung in Italian. In our current era of supertitles, performing an opera in the language in which it was originally written may not seem unusual. But in Britain at the time of the Glyndebourne Festival's founding Mozart's operas were generally sung in English. Before marrying John Christie, Audrey Mildmay had regularly performed the role of Zerlina in Don Giovanni with the Carl Rosa Opera Company, but she had to re-learn the part in Italian for the 1936 Glyndebourne première.

The recordings. As Paul Campion and Rosy Runciman write in Glyndebourne Recorded, before Glyndebourne "no attempt had ever been made to record a Mozart opera." [4] But after the Festival's opening night on 28 May 1934 had made clear both the high quality of the musical performances and the suitability of the theater as a recording venue, The Gramophone Company sent a mobile unit to Glyndebourne. On Wednesday, 6 June 1934, the Festival cast and orchestra performed 14 excerpts from Figaro (primarily the ensembles from Acts II and IV), most recorded on two "waxes" simultaneously as insurance against damage. All but four of the excerpts were recorded in one take.

The recordings were judged a success by all involved. During the Festival's second season in 1935 the mobile unit returned to Glyndebourne to record much of the rest of Figaro as well as Cosi fan tutte, and the following season Don Giovanni was recorded.

All of these recordings have been reissued (and re-ordered, in the case of Figaro) on the Naxos Historical label. After our experience of Glyndebourne, and especially after seeing David Hare's play The Moderate Soprano on the life of Audrey Mildmay Christie and the founding of the Glyndebourne Festival, we were very curious. As I wrote in my post on Audrey Mildmay, "The Glyndebourne recordings were the first (nearly) complete recordings of Mozart's operas in Italian, and so are landmarks of recorded music." But how well would these recordings stand up after the passage of more than eight decades?

As it turns out, remarkably well. Few allowances need to be made for the age of the recordings. They have all been splendidly remastered by Ward Marston, reducing surface noise without dulling the sound. They are in mono, of course, lack the full frequency range of modern studio recordings, and the orchestra is somewhat recessed relative to the singers. But we found that our ears soon adjusted. The performances of the singers are generally quite good, and some are extraordinary.

Le nozze di Figaro

Recorded 6 June 1934, 24 & 28 June 1935. Released as The Mozart Society Volume One (June 1935), Volumes Two and Three (December 1935).

One reason the Glyndebourne performances sound so accomplished is that they were all preceded by an unusually extensive rehearsal period. Hughes states that there were twenty-four full orchestral rehearsals for Figaro, and the results are certainly audible in the crispness of the orchestral playing and in the cohesion of the vocal ensembles. Conductor Fritz Busch "had endeared himself to the players from the first moment when, on raising his baton to rehearse the overture to Figaro for the first time, he had dropped his arm and said 'Already too loud!'" [5]

Busch favored extremes, not only of dynamics, but of tempo. The overture is so fast that I wondered briefly whether, in order to fit it onto one 78 rpm side, it was recorded at the wrong speed (it wasn't). Busch flashes through it in under four minutes (3:55 to be exact), requiring some truly astonishing feats of musicianship from the Glyndebourne Festival Orchestra (made up of players from the London Symphony). For some later comparisons, in his 2004 period-instrument recording René Jacobs takes 4:11, while in his classic 1959 version Carlo Maria Giulini (whose tempos strike me as very well-judged) requires 4:16.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_SqZB_tZ12Y

If Busch's overture is among the fastest on record, he takes some arias more slowly than I'm used to (for example, both of the Countess's arias, and Susanna's "Deh vieni"). Although the slow tempos allow us to revel in Mozart's gift for melody, they also slow the momentum of the comedy. Busch's tempos seem to work best in the ensembles, which thanks to the cast's long stage work together are wonderfully vivid (and where some of the rapid patter had me laughing out loud).

Hughes writes that "Audrey Mildmay's success as Susanna was not done justice to on the Glyndebourne recordings, for it was the result of a unique combination of charm of spirit and temperament and physical attraction which no record could possibly capture." [6] Not having seen Audrey Mildmay on stage, I can't compare her live to her recorded performances, but her "Venite, inginocchiatevi," sung in the Countess's bedroom while Susanna is dressing the ardent page Cherubino in women's clothes, seems full of charm:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FNFGUzguqPQ

SUSANNA Venite, inginocchiatevi; Restate fermo lì. Pian piano, or via, giratevi: Bravo, va ben così. La faccia ora volgetemi: Olà, quegli occhi a me. Drittissimo: guardatemi. Madama qui non è. Restate fermo, or via, giratevi, bravo! Più alto quel colletto. . . quel ciglio un po' più basso. . . le mani sotto il petto. . . vedremo poscia il passo quando sarete in pie'. piano alla Contessa Mirate il bricconcello! Mirate quanto è bello! Che furba guardatura! Che vezzo, che figura! Se l'amano le femmine han certo il lor perché.

SUSANNA Come, kneel down; Stay right here. Keep quiet, now turn around: Bravo, that's very good. Now turn and face me: Here, keep your eyes on me. Straight ahead: look at me, Madame isn't here. Keep still now, Turn around, bravo! That collar a bit higher. . . Those eyes lowered. . . Your hands clasped before you. . . Now get on your feet And let's see how you walk. softly to the Countess Look at the little scamp, How beautiful he is! What roguish glances, What airs, what graces! If women fall in love with him, They have good reasons why.

The Countess of Aulikki Rautawaara is the outstanding performance of this first Figaro recording, and she is ably partnered by the stentorian Count of Roy Henderson and the hearty Figaro of Willi Domgraf-Fassbaender (father of Brigitte Fassbaender). As Cherubino, Luise Helletsgruber may not sound very much like a teenage boy, but that's true of many other recorded Cherubinos as well.

This first Figaro was recorded with substantial cuts. Left out were almost all of the recitative, the Act I chorus "Giovani lieti," and the Act IV arias of Barbarina (Winifred Radford), Marcellina (Constance Willis), and Don Basilio (Heddle Nash). Nonetheless, if you know the opera it's easy to follow the story. Busch also omitted all unwritten appoggiaturas, an omission that most of us won't notice as to this day appoggiaturas are applied very inconsistently. (For an explanation of appoggiaturas, see NPR's "Another Take on The 'Appoggiatura.'")

So while I wouldn't recommend this recording to someone coming to Figaro for the very first time, it's fascinating document of the first season of Glyndebourne. The "freshness of the voices," "the precision of rhythm" and the "perfection of ensemble" noted by reviewers certainly remain audible, even after the passage of nearly a century. [7]

Cosi fan tutte 

Recorded 25, 26, 27 & 28 June 1935. Released as The Mozart Society Volumes Four, Five and Six (March 1936).

The impression that conductor Fritz Busch was at his best in ensembles is borne out by the recording of the ensemble opera Cosi fan tutte. Hughes writes that the first audiences for the Glyndebourne Cosi "enjoyed an experience that was even more exhilarating than the opening Figaro. . .To most people in the audience Mozart's last Italian comedy came not only as a revelation but in many cases as a complete novelty." [8] (The reasons Cosi was so rarely performed in the years before Glyndebourne are discussed in the post "Was Mozart a misogynist?") Mary Hunter writes that Cosi did not enter "the canon of routinely performed Mozart operas until three decades into the twentieth century; it is generally agreed that the Glyndebourne production of 1934 was the turning point." [9]

It's easy to hear why. In "Di scrivermi ogni giorno," the violins pulse in time with the heartbeats of the four lovers—Fiordiligi (Ina Souez) and Guglielmo (Willi Domgraf-Fassbaender), Dorabella (Luisa Helletsgruber) and Ferrando (Heddle Nash)—as they promise to write one another every day during their enforced separation. That the men are playing a cruel trick on the women is known to the audience and commented on in asides by Don Alfonso (John Brownlee), but is unacknowledged by the sublime music:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45D5ftMVaOA (the chorus "Bella vita militar," calling the men away to war, begins at 2:01)

As he did in Figaro, Busch chooses slow tempos for some of the arias, especially Fiordiligi's "Come scoglio" (Like a rock) and "Per pièta" (Have pity). And one feature of the recording that will strike a modern listener as dated is the treatment of the recitative: the accompaniment is a piano playing single chords, one chord per measure (or two or three) of singing. The difference in the sound-world between the accompanied sequences and the spare recitative is a bit jarring. Nonetheless, thanks to Mozart's gorgeous ensembles and Ina Souez's striking performance as Fiordiligi, it's clear why this recording had such an impact. Fiordiligi and Dorabella in "Ah, che tutta in un momento si cangiò la sorte mia" (All in a moment my fate has changed), their first acknowledgment of an attraction to the two handsome strangers (their fiancés in disguise, of course):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J16TWAlg-70

Curiously, Souez almost did not participate in the second Glyndebourne season. According to Hughes, at the end of the first season in June 1934 Souez had been told that she would be hired to repeat the role of Fiordiligi the following year. However, Glyndebourne's artistic management did not send her a contract until mid-February 1935, by which time she had quite understandably made other commitments. It wasn't until 5 May—just over three weeks before the opening night of Cosi on 30 May—that Souez was secured. It didn't seem to affect her performance in the house or on the recording.

Hughes writes that "the Glyndebourne performance revealed this enchanting work in all its glory." [10] In 1936 an anonymous critic in the New English Weekly wrote of the recording, "It is Mozart at his very best, sparkling like champagne." [11] The critics' glowing praise for an opera that before Glyndebourne had been rarely performed is a testament to the excellence of both the production and the recording.

Don Giovanni 

Recorded 29 & 30 June, 1, 2, & 5 July 1936. Released as The Mozart Society Volumes Seven, Eight (March 1937), and Nine (May 1937).

In the 19th and early 20th centuries Don Giovanni was far and away Mozart's most popular opera. So it's interesting that the Glyndebourne Festival, wholly devoted to Mozart in its first years, didn't stage it until its third season in 1936. Don Giovanni didn't appear on the Glyndebourne stage until after Figaro, Cosi, Die Entführung aus dem Serail (Abduction from the Harem), and Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute). Perhaps Glyndebourne was trying to offer audiences experiences they couldn't readily have elsewhere.

Hughes called the Glyndebourne Don Giovanni "a performance that left no corner unilluminated of this score's miraculous variety." [12] (A corner of variety? Never mind.) Even with the limited frequency range of these recordings the "Don Giovanni" chords that begin the overture send shivers up the spine:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hV1JYphjNw

Hughes thought that the 1936 season offered Audrey Mildmay's best singing; he wrote that she "was bewitching and unforgettable as Zerlina." [14] The slow tempos that Busch chooses for Zerlina's music make her character seem less flirtatious and more serious than she is sometimes portrayed, as you can hear in her duet with Don Giovanni (John Brownlee), "La ci darem la mano" (There we will join hands):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cB-xE7gFrsM

DON GIOVANNI Là ci darem la mano, Là mi dirai di sì. Vedi, non è lontano; Partiam, ben mio, da qui. ZERLINA (Vorrei e non vorrei, Mi trema un poco il cor. Felice, è ver, sarei, Ma può burlarmi ancor.) DON GIOVANNI Vieni, mio bel diletto! ZERLINA (Mi fa pietà Masetto.) DON GIOVANNI Io cangierò tua sorte. ZERLINA Presto. . .non son più forte. . . . DON GIOVANNI Andiam! Andiam! ZERLINA Andiam! A DUE Andiam, andiam, mio bene, a ristorar le pene d'un innocente amor.

DON GIOVANNI There we will join hands, There you will tell me 'yes.' See, it's not far; Let's go there, my dearest. ZERLINA (I would like to, and I wouldn't, My heart is trembling a little. True, I might be happy, But it could be a trick.) DON GIOVANNI Come, my beautiful delight! ZERLINA (I feel pity for Masetto.) DON GIOVANNI I will change your fate. ZERLINA Soon. . .I won't be able to resist. . . . DON GIOVANNI Let's go! Let's go! ZERLINA Let's go! BOTH Let's go, let's go, my dearest, To soothe the pain Of an innocent love.

There was a dispute involving the Don Giovanni recording. It had become regular practice for two takes—and on rare occasions three takes—of each number to be recorded. Busch would then listen to test pressings and select the take to be issued on the final album.

But after the Don Giovanni albums were released John Christie and Audrey Mildmay took issue with Busch's choices for two of Zerlina's arias. Christie wrote to The Gramophone Company,

My wife maintains quite definitely that some of her worst records have been used. For instance, record No 9 in Act 1 of Don Giovanni. The record was made, I think, three times. The one chosen shows her quite often to be flat. The alternative records, I believe, did not do so. [14]

A meeting was held on 20 June, and a letter was sent shortly afterwards to Audrey Mildmay:

This confirms our interview yesterday on the alternative recordings. Altogether we heard three records, and in two cases we will alter the previous masters.

2ER 149-1   Batti Batti — original master
2ER 149-2      "       "    — new master

2ER 169-2   Vedrai carino — original master
2ER 169-1       "         "      — new master

So two different versions of the opera were issued commercially. As a result it can be impossible to determine which takes of Zerlina's arias appear on the various reissues of these recordings. I notice that the timing of "Vedrai carino" on the Naxos Historical Don Giovanni is several seconds different from the version that appears on the Warner Classics Fritz Busch at Glyndebourne compilation, which may indicate that different versions were used. Which is which, though?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J85OwMikyYI

The Glyndebourne Don Giovanni has also stood the test of time. Reviewing a reissue in 1989, David Cairns wrote that "[John] Brownlee remains in many respects an ideal Don Giovanni. His voice may lack honey, and his Italian is a little suspect, but he sings with superb authority. . .Ina Souez's fiery Donna Anna is one of the best on record" [15].

There are many excellent later recordings of each of the three Mozart-Da Ponte operas that feature full-spectrum stereo sound and accomplished singers. Nonetheless, these early recordings are invaluable, if inevitably imperfect, documents of Glyndebourne's early seasons. But more than that, they remain highly pleasurable listening after nearly a century. They are another remarkable aspect of Glyndebourne's unique legacy.

Further reading:

• Glyndebourne
• The moderate soprano: Audrey Mildmay

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1. Spike Hughes, Glyndebourne: A History of the Festival Opera, David & Charles, 1981, p. 15.
2. GB Historical GIS / University of Portsmouth, Glynde CP/AP through time | Population Statistics | Total Population, A Vision of Britain through Time. URL: http://www.visionofbritain.org.uk/unit/10290454/cube/TOT_POP, accessed 5 August 2018 
3. Bank of England inflation calculator: https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetary-policy/inflation/inflation-calculator
4. Paul Campion and Rosy Runciman, Glyndebourne Recorded: Sixty Years of Recordings 1934-1994, Julia MacRae Books, 1994, p. 7.
5. Hughes, p. 58. If I rely rather heavily on the testimony of Hughes in what follows, it is because he was an eye-witness, as so many later writers (including me) weren't.
6. Hughes, p. 63.
7. Quoted in Campion and Runciman, pp. 10-11.
8. Hughes, p. 71. 
9. Mary Hunter, Mozart's Operas: A Companion, Yale University Press, 2008, p. 163.
10. Hughes, p. 71. 
11. Quoted in Campion and Runciman, pp. 16-17.
12. Hughes, p. 105. 
13. Hughes, p. 105. 
14. Quoted in Campion and Runciman, p. 23. "Record No 9" is probably "Batti, batti"—it appears on the flip side of the first record in Volume Eight, making it the ninth record (18th side) of the complete set. Two takes of this aria were recorded, both on 1 July 1936.
15. Quoted in Campion and Runciman, p. 24.