Appreciation by Ron Mitchell

Where would opera be without the supernatural? Much impoverished, judging from Michael Lessiter's wide-ranging survey of the subject, admitting, as he did, that the forty or so operas he had considered barely scratched the available surface.

But, then, a talk which had been previously billed as 'The Spooky in Opera', had expanded to encompass 'The Supernatural in Opera', which, as well as ghosts, brought in gods, demons, elves, fairies, witches, and even mere figments of an unstable mind, one possible interpretation of Britten's 'The Turn of The Screw'.

Mick began by teasingly asking us whether we believed in ghosts, refusing to say if he himself did or did not. A brief survey of the vast literature of the supernatural followed, and some of the books he quoted from are shown below. The book on haunted theatres includes an item about the Leicester Haymarket. In literature, one third of Shakespeare's plays feature supernatural elements, and six of them have been turned into operas.

From the outset the first operas in 16th century Italy used supernatural elements. Gods would descend from the flies or Neptune arise from the (wooden) billowing deep to reward the good and punish the wicked, as in Cavalli's La Calisto.

But the first musical extract was from Purcell's Dido and Aeneas of 1689, a gathering of witches plotting the downfall of Dido, with Janet Baker in an early role. Handel's Rinaldo followed, in which we heard the first of the evening's many rolls of thunder as another sorceress, Armida, descends from the clouds with 'terrible fury'.

Forward to Verdi and his treatment of Shakespeare's Macbeth. Mick read out Verdi's careful instructions for how the ghost of Banquo is to be portrayed—it must the same actor who has been singing, and he must be clothed in a certain way with wounds showing on his neck. The very irritated composer sent follow-up a year later asking why none of his instructions had been adhered to! Similar instructions were issued for the later scene where the ghosts of all those Macbeth has murdered appear. We heard the scene with its eerie voices of children.

On to the Germans and Weber's Der Freischutz, whose 'Wolf Glen' scene was described by one critic as 'the most gruesome imaginable'. And Wagner, whose every work apart from Die Meistersinger has elements of the supernatural. Indeed his little-known first opera is Die Feen (The Fairies). Mick chose to illustrate Der Fliegende Hollander (The Flying Dutchman) in the scene where the drunken townspeople gather round the deserted ship in the harbour, taunting the Steuermann (helmsman) to come and drink with them, and are frightened out of their wits when the ghosts of the dead sailors appear. Mick apologised that the Klemperer recording of this high point of the opera was 'not the most exciting', but it certainly sounded exciting enough to me.

It's always a tricky point of staging as to how such ghosts are to be portrayed: by singers offstage, singers in the auditorium, or singers onstage? Mick has done all three variants and he is firmly of the opinion that what works best is real singers onstage.

Part One finished with something more soothing, the end of Act III of The Valkyrie. Wotan summons fire-god Loge to create a ring of fire around the sleeping Brunnhilde so that only a fearless hero will be able to find her. It's one of my favourite moments, beautifully combining the motifs of fire, slumber and the hero Siegfried as the flames rise around the Valkyrie, ending with a quiet but foreboding cadence on the 'fate' motif which always sends a shiver up my spine.

After the break Mick continued with a swift catalogue of supernatural operas he was not going to illustrate by French, Russian and Czech composers. But he wasn't going to omit Gilbert and Sullivan, especially as the late John Brooks had insisted that he must include Ruddigore! Mick dedicated the item to John's memory and played a thrilling live performance of Ruddigore's 'When the night winds howl...' by John Ayldon.

Rather than the climax of Mozart's Don Giovanni in which the Don is dragged off to hell by the statue of the Commendatore, Mick played us the analogous scene from Berlioz's Damnation of Faust. The eponymous hero is transported to hell on a galloping black horse, whose rum-titty-tum-titty music annoyingly put me in mind of the theme from 'Dick Barton'. Berlioz got there first, I suppose, also indeed anticipating Tolkien and Anthony Burgess by inventing a new language for the jeering demons. Mick recalled a spectacular staging of the opera in Amsterdam.

Did the turn to 'versimo' in the late 19th - early 20th century mark a move away from the supernatural? Far from it, and Mick reeled off a list, including Doktor Faust (Busoni), Die tote Stadt (Korngold) and The Departure by Elizabeth Maconchy, in which a woman envisages her own funeral after she has died in a car crash.

Britten's The Turn of the Screw is adapted from a story by Henry James, whose psychologist brother William was interested in the supernatural and an early member of the Society For Psychical Research. The question here is whether the ghosts are real or whether they are emanations of one or more of the characters's minds. We heard two extracts, the first where the sinster caretaker Quint calls to the boy Miles during the night, and the second where Quint attempts to get Miles to steal a compromising letter. The agitated pizzicato writing depicts the anxiety of both: the one who desperately wants the letter not to be sent; the other who does not want to try to steal it.

We then heard stratospheric soprano singing in Thomas Ades' The Tempest, the voice of Ariel sounding aerial indeed.

Then more Britten, Owen Wingrave, Curlew River and, almost finally, two extracts from that most beautiful opera made by Britten from perhaps my favourite Shakespeare play, A Midsummer Night's Dream. Britten creates three quite distinct musical worlds: that of the court and the lovers; that of the fairies; and that of the rustics, whose music parodies 19th century Italian opera. I recalled my first encounter with this enchanting music during an illness as a teenager and I have loved it ever since.

Although Puck and the fairies had brought the play to an end, Mick wanted to send us off with some consolation that if we ended up down there, it wouldn't all be doom and gloom. So he rounded off the evening with the jolly can-can from Offenbach's Orpheus in the Underworld.

I thoroughly enjoyed this ride on the ghost train through a lot of repertoire which I barely knew. I haven't mentioned the many projected images which Mick brought along, of composers, of singers in costume, of sets and dramatic staging, which vividly brought the subject to life. It was illuminating to be conducted by a professional singer who knows this stuff from the inside out, having performed it. And by a rare presenter who, when occasion demanded, could and did sing themes to us by way of illustration!