Lovers’ tangle

Elegy for Young Lovers
Young Vic, in rep until 8 May

Albert Herring
Blackheath Halls

Hans Werner Henze’s Elegy for Young Lovers, with a libretto by Auden and Chester Kallman, is less familiar than one might expect. Never recorded complete, it has rarely been performed in the UK since Glyndebourne staged it in 1963. Yet in the excellent new production at the Young Vic, the concentration awarded by the audience was instantly apparent, and maintained throughout the three hours the piece lasts. ENO has got Fiona Shaw to direct, and one of the results is that the performers behave like human beings rather than opera singers, and even speak their lines — there is a considerable amount of spoken dialogue — naturally. That, combined with the skill with which Auden (I shall use his name only from now on) gets the piece under way, makes for a set of immediately credible characters. The singers drop things, fall downstairs, and recover themselves in a way that leaves you wondering whether or not it was intentional — just as it should be. Given the complexities of the piece, the amount of text, and the placing, in the Young Vic, of the orchestra at a higher level, the sheer smoothness of the proceedings is a source of pleasure.

Not all the roles are ideally cast, but the performers all act with a conviction which makes that matter less than you’d expect. Gregor Mittenhofer, the central character, an egoistic monster of a poet, is fortunately incarnated in Steven Page, one of our finest baritones and actors, here looking like Bertrand Russell, another old goat with high ideals. Though the opera is about him, in that Auden was fascinated and repelled by the artistic personality — Yeats, Wagner, himself — which ruthlessly uses other people in the interests of great creations, it is about many other things too, and it is only after it has been going for most of Act I that one starts to wonder whether even so adept a pair of craftsmen as Auden and Henze can cope with them all.