TThe Royal Academy of Music has many opera commissions under its belt; only last year (2022) Freya Waley-Cohen’s Witch was commissioned and premiered as part of the 200th anniversary celebrations. The new opera before that was Peter Maxwell Davies’s Kommilitonen!, a joint venture with Juilliard. Both were exciting projects, and the roll-call of singers from the Maxwell Davies includes many names now active in the opera world.
Waley-Cohen is not the first female composer to have an opera commissioned by RAM. That accolade goes to Phyllis Tate with her opera The Lodger, first performed in July 1960 in the Academy itself. Like Waley-Cohen, Tate was an alumna of RAM, having studied there from 1928-32 under Harry Farjeon. The Lodger of the title is Jack the Ripper, and the plot unfolds around his relationship with his landlady as she slowly realises who the quiet, unassuming man in her spare bedroom is. (Interestingly, the libretto is by David Franklin, former principal bass of Glyndbourne and Covent Garden.)
The opera was performed by the traditional double cast over four nights, before going on to have a short run at the St Pancras Festival, sandwiched between Debussy’s Pelleas et Melisande and Monteverdi’s Il Ritorno d’Ulisse in Patria. It then faded somewhat from view, resurfacing a few times over the years, the most recent sighting being a German production in 2018. There is also this 2016 re-release on the Lyrita label of the 1964 off-air recording made by Richard Itter (all releases on this label are from his collection of BBC broadcasts). The cast of Owen Brannigan, Johanna Peters, Marion Studholme, Joseph Ward and Alexander Young were all important parts of the world of new British opera at the time, many of them creating roles in operas by Britten, Benjamin, Tippett and Berkeley. The conductor, Charles Groves, was another musician instrumental in promoting new British music. Such an impressive rollcall of musician begs the question: why is Tate’s beautiful and narratively suspenseful opera not still there with the other operas of the era?
Currently I am fascinated by reviews of historical works, and how those reviews set as well as follow a trend of how the music is spoken about and therefore received. For Tate, these writings often highlight the uneasy relationship between works chosen for the canon and works on the periphery. Tate in particular throws this into stark relief; she was known for her unusual instrumental combinations, something seen on display in this opera in such numbers as the pub song, using celesta and honkytonk piano, but also for her place within a post-war British opera aesthetic. I am not particularly a fan of Britten’s operas (much as I realise this is sacrilege for someone working with British singers), but I recognise a shared aesthetic in Tate’s work. This is not just in subject matter – the general fascination with sinister plots set in a nightmare world has been observed by several reviewers – but also in handling of voices, voice types, and orchestral colour. Reviewers note what they consider to be varying degrees of success in this aesthetic, of both the sinister, quasi-supernatural plot line and of the musical language itself; they range from Harold Rosenthal, who thought that: “Other than Peter Grimes, this is probably the most successful 'first' opera by a native composer since the war,” to Edmund Tracey’s review of the 1964 broadcast which was of the opposite opinion, enjoying neither composition nor performance.
Of course, there is also the usual gendered categorization – “The forthcoming broadcast performance' of Phyllis Tate's opera, The Lodger, serves to focus attention on a musician who has slowly but steadily moved to the front rank of British women composers” – but The Bristol Evening Post takes the crown for its review:
“A real musical rarity will be making its bow next month - a full-length opera by a woman. She is Phyllis Tate, 48-year-old housewife with a publisher husband and two children. Her opera, which took three years to write, is being performed at London’s Royal Academy of Music. Called “The Lodger”, it is based on a story about Jack Ripper. Why such a macabre theme? “I have always been fascinated by the sinister,” she told me. Two of her earlier works Nocturne” and “The Lady Shalott” were concerned with spectacular forms of death.”
Most reviews do tend to be positive and rather more musical astute, underpinning praise with cogent unpicking of the compositional craft. There is a certain amount of probably unavoidable comparison with Britten, and the inevitable focus on instrumentation that Tate always elicits through her unusual choices (for example, the honkytonk piano needed for the bar scene). A highlight is how Tate creates characterization through intervals; one feels instant wariness of the new lodger, despite his courtesy and limpid melody, through the use of tritones, which beginn to pile up in the harmony until they spill forth in the insane aria Mrs Bunting hears from behind closed doors. One criticism that several reviews shared was that Tate did not set words well, but I don’t hear this. There is a reflective quality to her setting, which gives the whole the feeling of a reminiscence from a landlady far in the future – after all, Mrs Bunting is really the main character here, and the tritone of the lodger’s first entry suggests that the landlady we see on stage is not the narrative voice. This perhaps answers a question raised at the time, as to how we should view a woman who allows Jack The Ripper to escape, and thus go on to murder several more women. The terrible dilemma and regret that Mrs Bunting must have had to live with forevermore feels to me a fundamental influence on the musical aesthetic being offered.
In this scene from the opera, Emma Bunting confesses her fear of the lodger.