The Timely Traditions of Albert Herring

Every summer, for seven summers now, Isa had heard the same words; about the hammer and the nails; the pageant and the weather. Every year they said, would it be wet or fine; and every year it was—one or the other. The same chime followed the same chime, only this year beneath the chime she heard: "The girl screamed and hit him about the face with a hammer."¹

—Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts (1941)

Set in the idyllic grounds of an English country house, Virginia Woolf's Between the Acts tells of the preparation and performance of a village pageant on the eve of the Second World War. The spectacle takes the form of a journey through literary history, staging a series of vignettes ranging from a Shakespearean dialogue to the conceptual art of the present day. Between these acts we glimpse a group of villagers who congregate to endure this tradition with mixed reactions that turn to shared frustration as they scratch their heads in search of an elusive message. As scholars have often explained, Woolf's novel stages a collision between cultural tradition and the apocalyptic events of the midcentury. By setting the novel in the shadow of an impending war, it is not simply the pageantry but also the manners and habits of the characters that come to appear unacceptably trivial. While Lucy Swithin fastidiously frets about posters, rain, and the freshness of the interval spread, Isa Oliver reads in the newspaper of soldiers raping young girls. No longer capable of speaking to the experiences of the modern world, tradition becomes a mode of escape. It allows people to imagine continuity where there is division and destruction, to block their eyes and ears to the pressing concerns of the day. But far from simply dismissing the pageantry of the past, Woolf's novel often revels in the cultural traditions it critiques; its sporadic allusions to contemporary events are overshadowed by an emphasis on historical continuity, its satirical send-ups are suffused with affection, and the pageant's pastiche spills over into the novel proper. For all its apparent self-consciousness about the pitfalls of nostalgia, Between the Acts offered traditional images of village life at a time when these traditions were under threat. In doing so, it implicated itself and—perhaps more important—its readers in the very myopia that it diagnosed, making for a reception marked by defensiveness and selectiveness as commentators sought to stylize the novel as more "timely" than it might at first appear.

Premiered six years after the publication of Between the Acts, Benjamin Britten's Albert Herring (1947) appears to present many of the same critical problems. Set in the turn-of-the-century Suffolk countryside, the opera tells the tale of a group of village busybodies who, in an effort to encourage modesty, revive the tradition of appointing the most virtuous girl to the position of "May Queen." When this group declares no young lady suitably virtuous to merit the title, they decide to crown Albert—a naive greengrocer—as "May King" instead. Spurred on by some rum-laced lemonade at his humiliating coronation ceremony, Albert rebels against the social strictures that oppress him, taking off for a night of drunken debauchery. When he returns home to his indignant elders, he plucks up the courage to stand up for himself and reproach them for their narrow-mindedness. Having asserted his independence, he integrates better with his peers and, at the same time, teaches the village elders a valuable lesson. Much like Woolf's novel, Albert Herring plays with themes of cultural obsolescence, nostalgia, and irrelevance, offering a detailed sketch of archaic traditions that were bound to appear precious in the shadow of the Second World War. Instead of an annual pageant play, the villagers of Loxford busy themselves with preparations for their May Day festival, but still the two narratives draw on identical images from village life, elevating them over the ostensibly more serious and timely concerns to which they sporadically allude.

It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that Britten's comic opera has provoked many of the...