I’ve been listening to The Tigers again, and whilst I’m even more impressed by it, at the same time I’m even more intrigued by it.
Most of the discussion of it seems to focus on the ‘anti-war’ aspects of it. But I find the anti-war, anti-militarism aspects of the opera quite muted. The Tigers are presumably a Territorial Army regiment, not a regular army regiment, and the opera isn’t set during WW1, but just as it begins, with a false alarm of a Zeppelin attack occurring in the final act. It could almost be understood as Kitchener’s New Army ruefully nostalgic view of ‘how we were before the war’, how unprofessional the army was, how we underestimated what total war would be like. (Note how the Colonel of the Tigers, Sir John Stout, whilst depicted as absurd and given to issuing nonsensical and contradictory orders, is actually treated quite sympathetically).
You can see there’s a lot of satire of operas like Hugh the Drover, showing the English folk going about their traditional business, in The Tigers, and this type of action is disrupted by farce (the young man on the elephant being chased by police, the illiterate stall holders, the soldier-worshipping clergy and so forth), but not by brutal reality, and there is a sense that these elements are still valid, for example the way that Columbine and Pantaloon emerge from the Carnival at the end of the Prelude, or the Tigers making merry with the harvestgirls rather than taking part in military manoeuvres (as you would).
The way I think I understand the opera is that it is saying that both the pre-war Edwardian summer of Englishness greatness and our knowledge of the horrors of the War (actually not articulated in the opera) are not real responses to the experience of the last so many years of late C19 and early C20 life (Brian’s life-time). What are the real responses? where do they come from? Perhaps, the opera suggests, they come from the life of the untrammelled, dream-like imagination that is presented to us in the opera in the Symphonic Dances which contain the most amazingly impressive music (NB the title of these, is Brian saying, ‘well here’s an opera, but I think my symphonies will contain my real imaginative life’ ?).
This is underlined by the fact that here, as in the Gothic, the voices are subordinated to the music. That is, whilst the words and the word-setting, vocal melodies &c are not incompetent or uninteresting, the main interest in the Opera is in the orchestral music, and the most impressive vocal writing is where the voices, usually the chorus, becomes a part of the orchestra and what they are singing is less important than the sound they make (again as with the Gothic).
I think that in this opera Brian was doing something similar to what he did in writing the Gothic, thinking in effect ‘right, they’re not performing my music, I don’t care, I’ll just write the most extraordinary music I am capable of, with no regard for any practicalities of performance, that’ll show them’. I don’t think we ever see this opera staged (how do you have an elephant on stage? Or a dog and a donkey fighting?), but it did occur to me that what we might see, and this would apply to other operas where the staging is a problem, like The Ring, is a studio performance coupled on a DVD with sophisticated art-cartoon version of the opera.
The music, it goes without saying. is of the most incredible power and delicacy. I am reminded of the C19 inventor who used his newly-invented steam-hammer to crack an egg. Contrary to the heresies flying around here about Brian’s orchestration, I think he was one of the masters of the orchestra of the C20, if a passage sounds to someone with a good knowledge of classical music as thick, heavy and inappropriate, then presumably this is exactly what Brian intended, and you have to ask what this means for an understanding of the work. You can find plenty of examples in The Tigers of music that is deliberately plodding and thick, and these are for satiric or parodic purposes, so the same would hold true for such passages in the symphonies.
One final thing I noted with amusement was how the theme of an older man in love with a younger woman crops up, with Columbine and Pantaloon in the Prelude and with Sir John Stout and Mrs Pamela Freebody in the rest of the opera. Is this a reflection on Brian relationship with his second wife, who was younger than him?
