Lady Magnesia

Libretto by the composer after George Bernard Shaw's play 'Passion, Poison and Petrifaction'; English version by David Fanning; German version by Hans-Ulrich Duffek (R,E,G)

Having discovered his voice as an opera composer only in the late 1960s, Weinberg produced a spate of four operas in the early 1970s, of which Lady Magnesia (1973) is the last. It seems likely that he conceived it as part of a comic double bill, together with the immediately preceding Pozdravlyayem! (Greetings!, or better, Mazl tov!), to Sholom Aleichem’s tale of courtship among Jewish servants. In each case Weinberg himself fashioned the libretto, and each uses a cast of four or five singers, including parts for a maidservant and a lackey. Lady Magnesia is closely based on George Bernard Shaw’s 1905 tragi-comic melodrama Passion, Poison and Petrification. Weinberg worked from the translation by Vera Stanevich, poetess and friend of Boris Pasternak. The opera was dedicated to Rodion Shchedrin, who more than most Soviet composers of the time might have been expected to enjoy its light-farcical elements. Shaw’s play was a pot-boiler written largely on train journeys, and it has never been one on which his reputation as a dramatist, social satirist and wit has crucially rested. Passion, Poison, and Petrifaction or The Fatal Gazogene (i.e. soda syphon) in its full original title, is a satire not only on the vapid main characters but also on the conventions of Victorian/Edwardian melodrama, including the title and stage directions.

The action plays out in the bedsitting room of Sir George and Lady Magnesia Fitztollemache (who have fallen on hard times). In his jealousy of the lackey Adolphus Bastable, his wife’s lover, Sir George tries to stab her; but she awakens, and he hastily explains that the knife he carries is a present from her mother. When Adolphus enters, George gleefully poisons him with soda water from the ‘gazogene’. Having unexpectedly won back his wife’s love through this crime of passion (shades of Oscar Wilde’s fragmentary play, A Florentine Tragedy, but with heavier irony), George is persuaded to administer the only known antidote. This turns out to be lime (i.e. calcium oxide), which he and Magnesia obtain from plaster in the ceiling and from her bust (i.e. her head-and-shoulders statuette, though Shaw is not above using the obvious mildly smutty pun). Adolphus’s attempts to ingest this substance give him a desperate thirst, in the slaking of which he at length turns into a statue, thus becoming a comic realisation of the Stone Guest (Shaw’s Man and Superman contains another, more explicit parody of the same Mozart/Da Ponte scene). Weinberg omits Shaw’s bit-parts for a landlord, policeman and doctor, all of whom are killed off in the original by a thunderbolt. Instead he has the lightning strike the maidservant, Phyllis, neatly fulfilling Magnesia’s premonitions of death and giving point to the associated heavenly choirs (which Weinberg suggests may be pre-recorded on tape). Shaw’s play ends with George and Magnesia standing Adolphus upright – he has now become ‘his own statue’. Weinberg adds to this a pitiful plaint from Adolphus-as-statue, telling Magnesia to remember but not to weep for him, accompanied by male chorus in funeral march rhythm. This epilogue is in fact a setting of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 71, here given comic resonance because of the line ‘When I perhaps compounded am with clay’, derived from Weinberg’s voice-and-piano version in his Six Shakespeare Sonnets, Op.33 (1946).

Apart from these modifications to the denouement, Weinberg sets Shaw’s text almost entirely line-for-line, in the continuous arioso manner established by Dargomïzhsky’s The Stone Guest and continued by Musorgsky’s The Marriage, several of Prokofiev’s operas, and Shostakovich’s incomplete The Gamblers. The singing translation, of course, cannot reproduce much of Shaw’s original, since it needs to follow the rhythms of Weinberg’s Russian setting. Weinberg’s musical idiom is here far removed from the folksy lyricism of his Mazl tov! His 19-piece chamber orchestra consists of flute, two clarinets (one doubling bass), alto saxophone, horn, trumpet, jazz kit, three tomtoms, guitar and electric guitar, bass guitar, piano, harmonium and string sextet, not so outré as one might think, in a country that had already been through a passionate, albeit semi-underground, obsession with The Beatles. The instrumental ensemble creates an atmosphere of tangy triviality, established in the opening scene by the two electric guitars. Tonal passages appear exclusively for purposes of pastiche (the ridiculous heavenly choir is close to a paraphrase of the deadly serious ‘Black Wall’ chorus from his first opera, the Auschwitz-based The Passenger), while the dance genres with off-key harmonisation serve to bring out the superficiality of the characters’ emotional worlds. Most extreme is the extended free improvisation for electric guitar and jazz percussion that accompanies Adolphus’s pre-poisoning music, where he dances to show off his new silk waistcoat. This extended section is balanced by a frightened tarantella once the act of poisoning has been revealed, and offset by gruesomely triumphant waltz and march music for George. The exotic instrumental colours do as much as the harmonic invention to keep the ear engaged, and the continuous arioso allows plenty of scope for imaginative singer-actors to project the comedy of George and Magnesia’s reconciliation and their farcical administering of the antidote, during which the characters’ exchanges are spoken rather than sung.
David Fanning © 2009