Mr. de Lara's
latest production, 'Sanga' (1906), does not seem to have sustained the
promise of 'Messaline.' Another composer whom necessity has driven to
ally his music to a foreign libretto is Mr. Herbert Bunning, whose opera
'La Princesse Osra' was produced at Covent Garden in 1902. Mr. Alick
Maclean, whose 'Quentin Durward' and 'Petruccio' had already shown
remarkable promise, has lately won considerable success in Germany with
'Die Liebesgeige.'
Scanty is the catalogue of noteworthy operas with English words produced
in recent years. The most remarkable of them are Mr. Colin MacAlpin's
'The Cross and the Crescent,' which won the prize offered by Mr. Charles
Manners in 1903 for an English opera, and Mr. Nicholas Gatty's
'Greysteel,' a very able and musicianly setting of an episode from one
of the Norse sagas, which was produced at Sheffield in 1906.
It is difficult to be sanguine as to the prospects of English opera.
Circumstances are certainly against the production of original work in
this country, though it is legitimate to hope that the recent revival of
interest in Sullivan's works may lead our composers to devote their
energies to the higher forms of comic opera. Anything is better than the
mere imitation of foreign models which has for so long been
characteristic of English opera. By turning to the melodies of his
native land, Weber founded German opera, and if we are ever to have a
school of opera in England we must begin by building upon a similar
foundation.
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