Richard Bratby has narrated this article for you to listen to.
British opera was born with Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, and then vanished for two-and-a-half centuries, apparently. Between the first performance of Dido in 1689 and the première of Britten’s Peter Grimes in 1945, serious British operas effectively didn’t exist – or so we’re told in textbooks and biographies. But what if there was a different story; a forgotten story of a lively, eclectic British operatic tradition that thrived in those missing centuries, and was buried only through a combination of accidents, economics and our enduring national snobbery about theatre that’s sung rather than spoken? And what if there was an organisation devoted to excavating these forgotten works and giving them a chance to live again?
For more than a decade, the non-profit record label Retrospect Opera has been doing just that: researching, resurrecting and then recording British operas from the age of Garrick through to the 1920s. Its newest release, Granville Bantock and Marjory Kennedy-Fraser’s 1924 ‘Celtic folk opera’ The Seal-Woman, comes out in June after years of research. It’s a rare and lovely thing: a Hebridean tragedy of a Selkie bride that weaves traditional Scottish melodies into a glowing, autumnal chamber orchestra setting. For Retrospect Opera’s founder, Valerie Langfield, it’s a near-perfect demonstration of what they’re trying to achieve.
‘It’s hard work to persuade a country that its own composers are worth championing,’ she says. ‘But before Britten, there was, at the very least, Ethel Smyth, who is the big name at the moment. And throughout the 19th century there were dozens of English-language operas, all really popular. Michael Balfe wrote 29 operas, and they all got staged, in Europe as well as in Britain. But while you can read about these pieces, you can’t actually hear them. Unless you have the score in front of you and can read music, you’re stuffed. So that’s what we’ve always tried to do: to bring these operas off the page so that people can hear them and make an informed decision about what they’re really like.’
The results – 11 original recordings, with more on the way – open a lost world of British music and society. They range from the ‘table entertainments’ of the 18th-century composer Charles Dibdin – witty, salon-sized chamber operas designed to be performed at home by a group of friends around a piano – to full-scale romantic scores such as Ethel Smyth’s 1916 comedy The Boatswain’s Mate. Stanford’s Shamus O’Brien, a swashbuckling tale of the 1798 Irish rebellion, was a West End hit in 1896, and transferred to New York before Stanford – an ardent Unionist – withdrew it for fear of inflaming Irish nationalism. It existed only on paper until Retrospect got involved: their 2023 recording was nominated for a Gramophone Award.
That’s significant in itself. Fans of rare repertoire are used to getting the crumbs from the table – scratch performances, bootlegs and brave amateur revivals. Langfield and the small team of unpaid fellow enthusiasts and scholars who set up Retrospect believe that if these works are to have a fighting chance, a recording that is merely ‘good enough’ is – well, not good enough. ‘We had three core principles when we set up the label,’ says Langfield. ‘It was going to be properly managed, it was going to be properly funded, and we were going to use all professional personnel. It’s tough raising the money, and that’s why we don’t record things more often.’
A lively, eclectic British operatic tradition thrived in those missing centuries
She sounds almost apologetic, but in an era of rocketing costs and minimal returns, to release a dozen operatic recordings in little more than a decade is an achievement that even a major label might envy. Retrospect’s artistic quality is consistently high, with such blue-chip names as the conductors Richard Bonynge and Odaline de la Martinez. Singers include Nadine Benjamin, Yvonne Howard and (ideal for those Regency comedies) the veteran Savoyard Simon Butteriss. The Orchestra of Scottish Opera played for Shamus O’Brien and has returned for The Seal-Woman.
Meanwhile, the fact that Retrospect’s core staff are unpaid means that everything they release is a passion project. Recordings are crowdfunded: they’re currently recruiting backers for Smyth’s 1925 Anglo-French comedy Entente Cordiale and Stanford’s 1901 adaptation of Much Ado About Nothing. Then the process of getting an unheard opera into the recording studio can take months (sometimes years) of research and preparatory editing. That’s necessary, because in the pre-digital age original scores were frequently doctored, damaged, or lost by publishers. Retrospect scoured the UK for the missing orchestral parts of Entente Cordiale – libraries, archives, publishers – before taking Smyth’s own advice and deciding to do it with a piano instead.
In the case of The Seal-Woman, they had better luck. Andrew King, a Bantock scholar and the recording’s executive producer, led the search. ‘Back in 1924, there was no published full score – they just used the composer’s manuscript,’ he explains. ‘The last performances were in the 1970s, and after that, the score went missing. I’d started to reconstruct it using a piano score – then fast-forward to 2015 and I got a job at [music publishers] Boosey & Hawkes just as they were relocating their archive from Holborn to Croydon. We were in there one day, boxing things up, and the head of publishing took the lid off a box, and there was the manuscript score of The Seal-Woman.’
‘I worry that curiosity is becoming an increasingly niche activity’
There’s a lesson there, somewhere, about the fragility of an art form and the role of chance in deciding what gets performed by posterity. Conspiracy theories – BBC blacklists, Establishment cabals, our old friend the Patriarchy – make headlines, but the more you dive into the Retrospect catalogue, the more you realise that we’ve mislaid much of our operatic heritage through carelessness and pure bad luck. Anyway, thanks to Retrospect Opera it’s back, and all that matters now is whether it actually sounds any good. John Andrews, who conducts The Seal-Woman, is entirely convinced.
‘Bantock and Kennedy-Fraser do astonishing things,’ he says. ‘These are the most beautiful folk melodies that they could find; the most sensuous, the most inviting of all of those traditional Scots and Hebridean tunes, and Bantock has woven them together in a way that’s absolutely seductive. When Marjorie Kennedy-Fraser went out and collected them, she was acutely conscious of what we would now call cultural appropriation. She was aware that these melodies might be lost for ever, but at the same time, she knew that in preserving them she was corrupting them. There’s something very poignant about her sensitivity to that, and I think you feel that in the opera. There’s a melancholy, a desperation to preserve something.’
Where Retrospect Opera is concerned, that mission to document and restore a lost tradition is surely an unalloyed positive. Their efforts are already bearing fruit. It’s hard to believe that recent and planned revivals of Smyth’s The Wreckers and Fête Galante (from Glyndebourne and Pegasus Opera) would have happened without Retrospect’s quiet, persistent process of profile-raising; in opening up the archives and showing us that where opera is concerned, there is a world elsewhere – possibly right under our noses. Lost masterpieces? That’s debatable, but it’s also beside the point, which is that now at least we have a chance to decide for ourselves. For a certain kind of opera-lover, it’s an invitation that’s hard to resist. Andrews sums it up:
‘These pieces don’t fall neatly into the usual categories. I worry that curiosity is becoming an increasingly niche activity, and I want to stimulate people’s interest in these unknowns, because I hope that it’s training the muscles of their curiosity. It’s important to keep teasing people with what they don’t yet know.’
To support Retrospect Opera visit their website: retrospectopera.org.uk.
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