William Alwyn is a composer I usually enjoy, but his only opera, Miss Julie, is a failure. The story, described by Strindberg, the original playwright, as a “naturalistic tragedy”, is neither all that naturalistic nor terribly tragic. The characters are miserable, and the only one who generates much sympathy is Miss Julie’s little dog, who gets gratuitously shot at the end. Animal cruelty is just plain repellent, unlike sexual depravity, which everyone knows can be lots of fun to sing about.
The rest of the plot is simple: Miss Julie is an upper-class ditz who has a one-night stand with Jean, the Count’s valet. Everyone seems to hate the Count, who never appears but whose maltreatment of Julie’s mother evidently led to her suicide some years previously. Miss Julie naively believes that she and Jean can run away together and escape from their confined, rigid, empty lives; but the realities of wealth and class impinge on their fantasy, and at the end Jean nastily rejects Miss Julie and suggests that she slit her wrists, as her mother had done before her. Presumably she takes his advice.
The problem with this story is that Alwyn’s music captures little more than its dismal qualities. An experienced film composer, Alwyn expresses mood rather than individual character. The relative level of dissonance combined with the notable absence of memorable melody (the style is basically tonal) results in a frustrating idiom that seems to promise much more than it actually delivers. Alwyn reserves his most luminous music not for a person, but for a place–Lugano, the proposed location of Miss Julie’s and Jean’s elopement.
That said, the performance is very good, with Jill Gomez and Benjamin Luxon giving as much as they can to characters whose inner emotional life is barely suggested by the vocal lines themselves. The supporting cast (Della Jones and John Mitchinson) and orchestra also are first rate, and Lyrita’s sonics uphold the high standards of the house. Hard-core fans of the composer may well react more favorably than I did, but lovers of opera in general will have no trouble in pinpointing just what’s missing here, and may well find the experience as unfulfilling as Miss Julie found her own life. Happily, you don’t have to slit your wrists as a result: just avoid this opera.
