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The Silver Tassie
World premiere
BEST SINGER: GERALD FINLEY.Royal Philharmonic Society awards, 2000
Nominated for the 2000 Oliver Award for Outstanding Achievement in Opera
"…Gerald Finley, in his company debut, gave the performance of his life as Harry” International Herald Tribune
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Composer |
Mark-Anthony Turnage |
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Libretto |
Amanda Holden after the play by Sean O’Casey |
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Venue and Dates |
Coliseum, London 19, 24, 26, 29 February & 3 March 2000 |
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Conductor |
Paul Daniel, Jeremy Silver |
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Director |
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Performers |
Harry Heegan: Gerald Finley Sylvester, Harry’s father: John Graham-Hall Mrs Heegan, Harry’s mother: Anne Howells Susie, the girl downstairs: Sarah Connolly Mrs Foran, an upstairs neighbour: Vivian Tierney Teddy, her husband: David Kempster Jessie, Harry’s girlfriend: Mary Hegarty Dr Maxwell: Mark Le Brocq The Croucher: Gwynne Howell Staff Officer: Bradley Daley Corporal: Jozef Koc
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Notes |
Click the photo below for details of a recording of this production
What the critics say
Michael Billington for The Guardian,
February 18, 2000
http://arts.guardian.co.uk/reviews/story/0,,700206,00.html
Triumph from the trenches
Rating: * * * * * Five out of five stars (Unmissable)
Sean O'Casey's great anti-war play has always had its problems: it was rejected by Yeats for the Abbey Theatre on the grounds it lacked "unity of action" and it has always seemed to be a volatile mix of expressionism and realism.
But Mark-Anthony Turnage's magnificent new opera and Bill Bryden's production solve the problems musically and visually by treating the work as a comment on the horrors of war and the cruelties of peace.
The standard objection to the play is that the story of Harry Heegan, the football hero who returns from the 1914-18 war confined to a wheelchair, is that it suddenly lurches into a nightmare vision of the trenches in the second act. But Bryden and his designer,William Dudley, brilliantly remind us that the horrors are indivisible.
Behind the fragmented Dublin tenement of the first act we see massed ranks of silent soldiers. In the hospital-set third act even the beds and cabinets are ominously khaki-coloured. And in the final act, while Harry's former friends dance Irish jigs and the maimed are edited into oblivion, we are aware of the shadow of a mighty emplacement gun.
Within the unity created both by the production and Amanda Holden's wondrously taut libretto, there is a rich diversity in Turnage's music. Each act has its own style and character. In the first act the music is restless, febrile, expressive of character.
But in the second act, with its strong echoes of Britten and Tippett, Turnage touches the heart not least with a sombre, repeated choral lament in which the soldiers cry "Shall we die in November?" And in the last two acts, which focus on the despair of the one-time hero who sees his girl filched by his VC-earning rescuer, I heard touches of Berg's Wozzeck alongside the Irish reels. If Turnage's score is referential, it is also bound together by its invisible symphonic structure. It not only marks a major step beyond Greek but also suggests - rare for a new opera - a work destined to enter the repertory.
Inevitably you lose some aspects of the original play: much of O'Casey's wild comedy, for instance, and the harshness that allows a one-time pious nurse to say of war-victims that "if you'd passed as many through your hands as I, you'd hardly notice one". But the bonus of the opera is that it gives the work a tragic unity and, in Bryden's production, it is superbly acted and sung.
Gerald Finley's Harry makes nonsense of Yeats's claim that the work lacks a dominating character: whether exulting in his soccer triumphs, gazing wanly at the hospital image of a Sacred Heart or dashing the silver tassie to the ground, Finley charts the character's progress to impotent despair and makes every word audible. David Kempster as a blinded neighbour, Sarah Connolly as a heartless nurse and Gwynne Howell as a trench Jeremiah also give beautifully sung performances.
But the final triumph belongs to Turnage and his librettist who have taken a difficult play and fashioned from it an opera that speaks urgently to the heart.
George Hall , Opera News, June 2000
On February 16, English National Opera unveiled Mark-Anthony Turnage's new opera The Silver Tassie, based on Sean O'Casey's 1928 play, before an audience that included many members of the U.K. musical establishment. Turnage -- who turns forty this year -- is regarded as the most talented British composer of his generation. The title derives from a song by Robert Burns referred to in the opera's first scene: "tassie" is a Scots word for cup. The young hero, soldier Harry Heegan, returns to his family home in triumph from his victory at football, bearing a silver trophy. The following morning, he goes back to the battle trenches of World War I and is seriously wounded. After a failed operation, he spends the latter part of the opera in a wheelchair, understandably bitter. Finally, his girlfriend, Jessie, goes off with his former best friend, Barney, at a dance, leading to a painful fight. After Heegan leaves the stage, the others resume their dancing. Life goes on, despite the sufferings of individuals.
In effect, the drama seems only partially a comment on the destruction of human lives (even those of the survivors) occasioned by war: the ability of the untouched to ignore suffering is an even more troubling theme. O'Casey used songs in the original play, as well as a kind of choral chanting for the soldiers in the trenches that might predicate an operatic expansion. For all that, and despite librettist Amanda Holden's skillful condensation of the play, the question is whether music -- particularly Turnage's complex, richly textured kind of music -- adds significantly to the largely naturalistic, colloquial dialogue. A simple tale suggests a simple setting; Turnage has provided something full-blown, varied, colorful and ambiguous, but unfortunately the material is not sufficiently striking to identify character or situation in an immediate manner. Some listeners heard Britten's influence, but it was the all-purpose, somewhat anonymous, domesticated modernism of Henze (one of Turnage's teachers) that registered with me. Notwithstanding that the opera was lengthily tried out in a workshop process, allowing the composer a valuable opportunity to iron out wrinkles, many of the words failed to come across at the premiere. Some singers managed better than others, though the inconsistency between Irish and English accents among the cast in Bill Bryden's production -- clearly set in Dublin, though the libretto states "at a town somewhere in Britain" -- didn't help.
The staging was nevertheless clear in narrative drive, and William Dudley's sets were effective in establishing the feel of the period. The daunting challenge of fulfilling the lengthy, vocally demanding role of the wounded hero fell to Gerald Finley, who threw himself into the task with absolute commitment; not surprisingly, he sounded tired by the end of the evening. John Graham-Hall was not visually convincing as the sixty-five-year-old Sylvester, Heegan's father, but the protagonist's indomitable mother was powerfully presented by Anne Howells. The fickle Jessie was sung vividly by Mary Hegarty, and Sarah Connolly made much of the inconsistent figure of Susie, a religious zealot in Act I and an uncaring nurse in Act III. Young Australian baritone Leslie John Flanagan registered positively as Barney, while David Kempster was a strong vocal and physical presence as the drunken neighbor Teddy Foran. In the battle scene, Gwynne Howell sounded soft-grained rather than vehement as the mysterious Croucher, whose Old Testament-derived utterances commented on the destruction of life taking place all around. Company music director Paul Daniel brought forth a finely controlled, energetic reading that established the score's qualities. Whether they will be enough to win Silver Tassie a long-term place in the repertoire remains to be seen.
Helen Wright, MusicOMH.com
http://www.musicomh.com/opera/silver-tassie.htm
After all the hype (including a CD of 'highlights' sent to ticket holders in advance) this World premiere was eagerly awaited but, perhaps inevitably, a disappointment.
Turnage has been influenced by Britten but says that he tries to avoid anything that would seem too much like a reference. It might be more interesting musically if he allowed himself that liberty.
His first full-scale opera, The Silver Tassie is based on a Sean O'Casey anti-war play and although there are some powerful moments, they are all too few. The hero is Harry Heegan, a good Dublin lad who in 1915 brings home the eponymous tassie - a football trophy - during leave from the trenches.
The riotous first act is splendidly set in a tenement building: excellent design and lighting gives a real feeling of cheek-by-jowl living, and both the comfort and the irritation of neighbours. Harry's elderly father is a particularly vivid character, beautifully brought to life by John Graham-Hall.
When the men are called back to the war the scene changes to the trenches, and this is where the opera fails: what should be a very moving act is somehow flat. Despite mud, bodies and a vast gun emplacement, the horror and despair just doesn't come across - the ENO male chorus sing beautifully, but never convince us that they are anywhere but on stage. Gwynne Howell is a velvet-voiced 'Croucher', perched up by the gun singing ironically as a prophet of doom. Is he already dead? Hard to tell, though sitting up above the parapet he certainly should be...
Harry is paralysed from the waist down, and his neighbour Teddy blinded, when we see them next, in hospital. Harry's girlfriend deserts him for his (able bodied) best friend and the remainder of the piece contrasts Harry's current pitiful state with his former glory as the sports hero bringing home the cup. The only truly moving music comes in a short (all too short) duet for Harry and Teddy when they sing of their loss and despair, at the football club dance in 1919.
The medium of opera should add an element to the narrative. Unfortunately, the Siegfried Sassoon poem published in the programme is infinitely more moving than the opera - so in my book, Turnage has failed.
Gerald Finley - a vigorous Canadian baritone with wonderful voice and stage presence - is superb as Harry both in the riotous first act and when skilfully manhandling his wheelchair. In fact all the singing is fine. It's just a shame there isn't something better for the cast to sing.
George W. Loomis, International Herald Tribune, 23 February 2000
Modernistic Drama With Melody
At the end of the first act of Mark-Anthony Turnage's latest opera "The Silver Tassie," Harry Heegan quietly sings a lyric by Robert Burns after winning a "tassie" of his own for a soccer victory: "O bring to me a pint of wine and fill it in a silver tassie." It's a telling moment after a boisterous first act, one that deepens Harry's character and thus makes the fate that awaits him all the more pitiable.
The opera, which had its premiere at the English National Opera last week, is based on Sean O'Casey's play about how the ravages of World War I unalterably affect the lives of Harry's family and friends and, most of all, his own. The play is sometimes described as anti-war, but there is no overt political message: You simply see war's effect on human beings, and that is enough. It is potent material, and the play's unusual second act (of four), set at the front with none of the principal characters participating, presented the composer with a special challenge, one met most notably with an imposing, Britten-like chorus, "Shall we die in November?" Here and elsewhere Turnage demonstrated that his modernistic idiom allows room for real melody.
And in the final act, when Harry watches from a wheelchair as his best friend steals his girlfriend at a dance, popular rhythms are folded into music of a genuinely tragic tone. Turnage's richly inventive score draws the listener in without striving for "accessibility," and his way with the orchestra is masterful. The haunting woodwind sonorities in particular work a magical effect.
Yet good as "The Silver Tassie" is, I wish Turnage and his librettist Amanda Holden had chosen to deviate more sharply from O'Casey's play. Holden skillfully pared the play down, but in remaining faithful to O'Casey's language and structure, the libretto left too little leeway for the music to transport the drama to new heights. "The Silver Tassie" in fact marks a retreat from Turnage's first opera, "Greek," a retelling of the Oedipus story that was widely heralded for opening up new avenues of expression to opera. Here the dramatic effects were too closely bound to O'Casey's. And curiously enough, O'Casey had his own ideas about music in his play, for he supplied specific chants and other tunes. I came away more curious to see a good revival of the play than another performance of the opera.
The baritone Gerald Finley, in his company debut, gave the performance of his life as Harry, maintaining the character's powerful personality even in his final, bitter moments. Other stand-outs in the strong cast included Sarah Connolly (Susie), Vivian Tierney (Mrs. Foran) and Gwynne Howell (The Croucher). Bill Bryden's realistic production, with sets and costumes by William Dudley, was set firmly in the period and scored a visual coup of sorts when the Dublin flat of Harry's family gave way to trenches and blood-soaked terrain in France.
Paul Daniel's meticulous conducting maintained an ideal balance between stage and pit, allowing nearly every word to be understood.
Richard Whitehouse for Seen & Heard
http://www.musicweb-international.com/sandh/2000/feb00/turnage.htm
Ever since Greek burst onto the scene back in 1988, a follow-up from Mark-Anthony Turnage has been keenly anticipated. The Silver Tassie, to a libretto by Amanda Holden after the play by Sean O'Casey, has been several years in the making, most recently in the workship environment of the ENO Opera Studio; the result is the most streamlined and cohesive full-length opera to hit the London stage in well over a decade.
O'Casey's drama is not the most obvious of choices. Controversial when it opened in London in 1928, it did not even reach the Dublin stage, and was largely responsible for the author's break with the theatre scene there. Certainly its pacifist and socialist overtones would not have endeared themselves in a society struggling with the aftermath of independence and civil war. Holden has fashioned a workmanlike text with a feel for time and place: if few of the characters emerge as little more than stereotypes, this does not weaken the clarity of O'Casey's perspective, or his identification with the 'victims' whose shallow and mean-spirited lives he depicts.
The structure falls naturally into four acts, with Harry, the eventual anti-hero, absent for much of Act 1 and the whole of Act 2. In what might prove a dramatic error, Harry has little enough time to establish his identity, as the local footballing hero returning to the front, and his absence from the war act limits both the impact of him in his prime and the overall dramatic follow-through. Musically impressive though much of this latter act is, with Turnage's writing for strings taking on new expressive potency, the sense remains of a static anti-war tableau, outside the main drama. The reintroduction of Harry and his sidekick Barny, at the point of the impromptu football match, could have reinforced his initial, positive image without harming the inevitability of O'Casey's design.
Act 3 finds Harry in convalescence, his paralysis from the waist down an unspoken certainty and Barny having been awarded the Victoria Cross for 'saving' his friend, delivering flowers from Harry's sweetheart Jesse, whose disinterest is only too apparent. Turnage treats this succession of curt, intense exchanges as a slow-motion scherzo, opening out into the extended dance sequence of the final act. With Harry's confinement and Barny's association with Jesse confirmed, the former's bitterness takes centre-stage; his reflection on the silver tassie of his footballing success, and eventual departure with Teddy, his blinded neighbour, elicit some of Turnage's most poignant expression: the reckless emotion of Greek now transmuted into mature compassion. Both here and in the two orchestral interludes which link the acts in pairs, the intensity of musical expression bodes well for any future operas he may write.
The cast was a strong one, with Gerald Finley magnetic as Harry, Mary Hegarty cuttingly flirtacious as Jesse, and Sarah Connolly convincing as the religion-crazed Susie, for whom war is an unwitting means of emancipation. Gwynne Howell is suitably implaccable in the Greek Chorus-like role of The Croucher. Paul Daniel secured the customary high standard from the ENO orchestra, with Turnage's idiomatic differentiation of wind and brass timbre given real plangency. Bill Bryden's production was evocative and non-intrusive, with subtle and telling lighting and a seamless transition between acts. An all-round artistic success for ENO: a revival will surely not be long in coming.
Hugh Canning on the new Turnage
Opera, April 2000
A golden 'Tassie'
The Silver Tassie is Mark-Anthony Turnage's third opera and his second English National Opera commission after Greek, although that work was a collaboration premiered at the Munich Biennale. Unlike his pieces for music-theatre, it is his first full-length, large-scale work conceived specifically for the resources of a metropolitan company such as ENO: big orchestra, men's and boys' choruses and no fewer than 12 named solo parts. In that sense The Silver Tassie is Turnage's Peter Grimes, and the rapturous acclaim which greeted the composer and his librettist, Amanda Holden, at their curtain-call on the opening night (February 16) suggested that their opera might well have the kind of future as a repertory piece that Britten's has enjoyed in the last 30 years or so.
In tackling Sean O'Casey's dark, pessimistic anti-war play, Turnage and Holden have chosen a drama with Brittenesque resonances, and although Turnage's music sounds nothing like Britten, he has learned from the older British composer's sense of dramatic pacing, his 'symphonic' use of the orchestra and a vocal style which is basically lyrical, singable, grateful to its performers.
Holden has made a brilliantly concise libretto from O'Casey's play-written in 1928-whose rejection, by W.B. Yeats for performance at Dublin's Abbey Theatre, provoked the author's disillusionment with and self-imposed exile from his native Ireland. It concerns the tragic fate of the young football hero, Harry Heegan, whose goal-scoring prowess wins the cup (the Silver Tassie) for his team three times in succession, but whose athletic career-and sex-life-is abruptly curtailed when he returns, paralysed, from the trenches. Although set in the 1914-18 war (c. 1917, according to Holden's directions), it is a timeless tale. It could-and probably will be set during any armed conflict and 'work' just as effectively. War still maims and destroys young lives.
The opera's four strongly contrasted acts offer Turnage ample scope for his wide ranging dramatic compositional style. Act I sets the social and domestic backdrop against which Harry's tragedy is played out: the drudgery of working-class existence during the First World War is manifest in the setting, 'the eating, sitting and part sleeping room of the Heegan family flat' according to Holden's detailed stage directions. The sense of community has something in common with the tenement life of Weill's Street Scene: the neighbours are in and out of each others' homes. Susie from downstairs devotedly polishes a military helmet and Mrs Foran bursts in to cook her violent husband's dinner on the Heegan's fire because she has the laundry boiling upstairs. She burns the steak and later the Heegans and Susie listen with horror as the sounds of Teddy Foran beating his wife upstairs resound through the floorboards.
The marital tussle soon invades the Heegan abode, as Mrs Foran seeks refuge with her neighbours, and Teddy, brandishing an axe, arrives to drag her back home. Like Harry, Teddy is on leave from the trenches, and his suspicions that his wife's sexual behaviour during his absence has been less than appropriate for a grass widow has provoked his jealous fury, which culminates in his deliberate smashing of her prized 'wedding' bowl. The arrival of Harry and his girlfriend Jessie Tate carrying the Silver Tassie prevents damage to Mrs Foran's person and the scene develops into a celebration of youth, football, drink and love, all bound together symbolically in the silver trophy.
It is in this scene, too, that Turnage insinuates the insistent three-note motif associated with Harry's football prowess and the silver cup itself, which binds together the musical material of the entire opera. Act 2 transports the action to the trenches and here the play and opera take on an almost expressionistic, epic quality entirely at odds with the humdrum realism of the opening scenes. None of the principal characters appears on the battlefield ('somewhere in France' according to the text) which is dominated by a strange, seer-like figure called The Croucher, who intones quasi-Biblical, but anti-war and atheistic 'prophecies': 'and the breath came out of them ... and their bones came asunder. .. and they died, the exceeding great army became a valley of dry bones.' This is the powerful language of protest, recalling in its anti-war rhetoric the Wilfred Owen poem in which Abraham 'slew his son and half the seed of Europe, one by one', which Britten sets in his War Requiem. As if to emphasize The Silver Tassie's ideological proximity to Britten's work, Turnage introduces a boys' chorus of stretcher-carriers who sing a jaunty little tune - it derives from an early production of O'Casey's play - which still haunts me. The effect of unbroken voices amid the violence and brutality of war drives home frighteningly the wanton use of 'men' who were little more than children as cannon fodder by the generals of the 'Great' War.
In Act 3 we re-encounter Harry Heegan, a broken man, racked with pain, confined to a wheel-chair and awaiting an operation which promises little chance of restoring life to his useless lower limbs. In Gerald Finley's overwhelming portrayal of the central character, the contrast between the vigorous, handsome, swaggeringly self confident football hero, and the tortured, anguished soul who dominates the rest of the opera is both shocking and deeply moving.
It is in this hospital scene where O'Casey's anger and cynicism boil over: the devoutly Catholic and prim Susie is now a hatchet-faced matron from a boys' reformatory, who refers to her patients, even her 'friend' Harry, by their hospital numbers rather than their names, but is not averse to a bit of slap and tickle from the hands of the smarmy Dr Maxwell. Teddy Foran is now blind and entirely dependant on the wife he has abused, who takes vindictive delight in flirting not only with Maxwell, but, in the final act-the Dance at the Football Club-with a young male admirer under her husband's nose.
The message of the final scene is a disturbing one: that despite the patriotic fervour and memorializing of the ones that stayed at home, the only true heroes are the ones that had the decency to die or those who survived intact, like Harry's friend Barney, who not only wins the VC but filches Harry's girlfriend, Jessie. The blinded and maimed are embarrassing reminders of the price of peace after war.
It is a mark of Turnage's and Holden's achievement-and Bill Bryden's staging that this message emerges with gut-wrenching clarity. Turnage's orchestral palette is dazzlingly varied, and he provides lyrical solo opportunities for violin and soprano saxophone-one of his favourite instruments-in the orchestral interludes. Although much of his music derives its rhythmic energy from his love of jazz, his dance-hall pastiche in the final act owes more to the music of the Inn Scene from Wozzeck.
If The Silver Tassie is a conservative work, it is because it is truer to the operatic conventions of the enduring works of the 20th century-the operas of Berg, Janacek and Britten are its most obvious antecedents-than any of the more abstract works of supposedly cutting-edge avant-gardists such as, dare one say it, Birtwistle. Turnage is not afraid to incorporate 'numbers' - a moving duet for the two wounded baritones, a self-justifying quintet for the lovers and Mrs Foran at the close-and he composes with concern for audibility of the words, a rare and welcome return to tradition by a contemporary composer.
ENO gave The Silver Tassie a classy send-off: Bryden's production, while not observing Holden's stage directions to the letter, makes its dramatic points with clarity and, above all, respects the music. William Dudley's fluid, cinematic sets, atmospherically lit by Mark Henderson, supply realism and powerful symbolism in generous measure. Paul Daniel conducted the score, and the ENO orchestra played it, as if they, at least, were convinced that The Silver Tassie is-to quote ENO's general director- 'the first operatic masterpiece of the 21st century'.
And the cast, led by Finley's unforgettably moving, gloriously sung Harry, was vintage ENO. Sarah Connolly sings the unsympathetic Susie with sumptuous tone, Vivian Tierney's febrile dramatic soprano tone etches itself memorably onto the music Turnage has written for Mrs Foran, David Kempster is a commanding presence as the initially domineering, later pathetically helpless Teddy. Among the supporting roles names such as John Graham-Hall (Sylvester Heegan, Harry's father), Anne Howells (a harrowingly vivid portrait of downtrodden, yet inwardly indomitable Irish womanhood as Harry's mother), Mary Hegarty (as the flighty Jessie) and Mark Le Brocq as the slime-ball Dr Maxwell, indicate the depth of ENO's casting. To have the great Gwynne Howell - ENO's Sachs and Gurnemanz - for the Croucher's brief monologue was a luxury beyond anyone's reasonable expectations. As always with this artist, every word meant something.
That, I think, holds true for most of Turnage's remarkable opera. It has obviously 'spoken' to the public, which cheered its collective head off on the opening night and packed the Coliseum to the rafters at later performances.
Fiachra Gibbons, The Guardian, 9 May 2001
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,487866,00.html
Royal Philharmonic Society awards
Best singer: Gerald Finley for The Silver Tassie
… Welsh National Opera team whose Queen of Spades beat the English National Opera's Silver Tassie and Nixon In China to the best opera of the year title. Gerald Finley softened the blow for the ENO by winning best singer for his role in the Tassie…
