The Sound of a Poet Singing Loudly: A Look at Elegy for Young Lovers

The Sound of a Poet Singing Loudly: A Look at Elegy for Young Lovers Marc A. Roth When W. H. Auden wrote to Igor Stravinsky to accept the offer to write the libretto for The Rake's Progress, he closed his letter with an unusually unguarded expression of joy: “I need hardly add that the chance of working with you is the greatest honour of my life.”l Auden’s remark, besides praising Stravin­ sky, reveals the reverence which characterized his view of operatic collaboration. Auden saw opera as the remaining verbal art form which employed the “High Style,” and could offer a modem poet the chance to sing loudly.2 His fondness for musical theatre grew as he answered requests for new libretti and trans­ lations. One could say that opera became a serious business for Auden, since he boasted that the commissions given to him and his collaborator Chester Kallman paid quite well. During his later years opera came to occupy a significant place in his criti­ cism and public lectures. In the series entitled Secondary Worlds given as the T. S. Eliot Memorial Lectures in 1967, Auden devoted his most comprehensive talk to the world of opera. The following year, Auden was invited to deliver the prestigious open­ ing address at the Salzburg Festival. His speech, entitled “Worten und Noten,” dealt with the relationships between language and music, and standing before the Salzburg audience Auden said that “opera is now to me the most fascinating of art-forms.”3 The critical neglect of the bulk of Auden’s operatic colla­ borations is curious, especially given the poet’s own devotion to the genre. With the exception of a few scholars (e.g., Monroe Spears, John Blair, and Ulrich Weisstein), the majority of Auden’s critics have avoided giving serious consideration to his works written in collaboration for the musical theatre. More­ over, the absence of an edition of Auden’s collected libretti 99 100 Comparative Drama further testifies to the lack of attention given to this aspect of his poetic canon. Through the efforts of Stravinsky’s assistant, Robert Craft, the exchange of letters between composer and poet over The Rake’s Progress was documented and appeared in Stravinsky’s Memories and Commentaries (1960). The opera itself has received extensive commentary in musical circles, and has been described by Joseph Kerman as one of the major operas of the twentieth century which “show most triumphantly the continuing life of dramma per musica in our time.”4 Auden’s next ventures as a librettist were with the German composer Hans Werner Henze. Auden and Kallman wrote the texts for Elegy for Young Lovers which was produced in 1961, and The Bassairds, an operatic adaptation of The Bacchae commissioned for the 1966 Salzburg Festival. These works have received their appropriate notoriety in the musical world, but have suffered from an unexplainable and systematic neglect by Auden’s liter­ ary critics. For example, in the tribute to Auden compiled after his death by his literary executors and Stephen Spender, there was no article by or about Henze, nor was there any commen­ tary about Elegy for Young Lovers or The Bassairds. Robert Craft, however, did contribute an entertaining update of Auden’s relationship with Stravinsky during and after the writing of The Rake’s Progress.5 Especially in the case of Elegy for Young Lovers, the critics have avoided commenting upon a unique international collaboration which in the last two decades has become a highly significant work in the contemporary musical theatre. Elegy for Young Lovers was first performed in a German translation of the English libretto at the Schwetzingen Festival on May 20, 1961. It was the third in a series of new operas commissioned for this festival by the South German Radio (Suddeutsche Rundfunk). The opera received subsequent per­ formances in German at Zurich before being heard in its orig­ inal English version at the Glyndeboume Festival on July 19, 1961. Successful productions of the German version took place at the Munich Festival of 1961, the Berlin Festival of 1962, and the Holland Festival of 1967. All of the above-mentioned German performances were staged by the composer...