Britten's Paul Bunyan, York Festival 1980

MUSICAL DIRECTOR & CONDUCTOR Robert Bunting

Set designed by Michael Rogers, made and painted with the help of Michael Wall, Alan Taylor, Mark Hodges, Robin Rawson and Charles Scott.

Properties and costumes by Ricky and Ronnie Scalway, Sheila Surgener and Peggy Levitt (for Q.A.G.S.); Hazel Baker, Bob Greenwood, Michael and Jean Wall (for A.H.G.S.)

Make-up supervised by Robert Milligan Stage Managers - Michael Rogers and Alan Taylor

Business Managers - Sheila MaCAllister, Nigel Wallis, Anne Edwards

Rehearsal Accompanist - Gillian Edwards

Theatre Supervisor - David Bushby, assisted by Sid Kilby, Peter Brunton, Ken Matthews, Richard Fearnehough, Steve Childs and Paul Clayton.

PRODUCER: Keith Daggett

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Paul Bunyan is a product of Britten's American years. It was written at the suggestion of his publishers for "Something suitable for High Schools". The first performance was given by Colombia University, New York on 5th May 1941. Its first performance in Europe was a Studio Broadcast by BBC Radio 3 on 1st February, 1976, with the BBC Northern Singers and Northern Symphony Orchestra.

These performances, given by Archbishop Holgate's and Queen Anne Grammar Schools during the 1980 York Festival, are the first in this country with the forces for which the work was intended. They are made possible by the goodwill of many people and organisations. We would like to express our gratitude to parents and staff helpers. The York Festival has contributed to the cost of music hire. The theatre is made available by the kindness of Rowntree Mackintosh Ltd; our particular thanks to David Bushby and his team. The adult members of the orchestra have donated their services; this orchestral presentation could not have gone ahead without their generosity.

 

PAUL BUNYAN IN LEGEND

Paul Bunyan is the folk-hero of American pioneering. Although there seems to have been a historical Paul Bunyan, in the same way as there was a historical Davy Crockett and Johnny Appleseed, he is elaborated in legend as a kindly giant, much given to the solving of impossible tasks. He appears as the patron-saint of loggers, but has been attached by railroad workers, sheep farmers, cattle-men and, more recently, telegraph engineers and oil-rig workers. His exploits are largely mechanical; he has no magic powers. He is a mythological latecomer; in Auden's words "he is as Victorian as New York."

Paul Bunyan stories are tall stories. The teller claims to have worked on a project alongside Paul, and delivers his ^‘whopper' poker-faced:

"I wuz with Paul that time we wuz digging Lake Michigan to mix concrete in when he wuz building the Rocky Mountains. Then we dug Lake Superior for a slush pit." "Did you ever see Paul's wife? She was so homely that we used to scrape enough ugly off her face every day to mud off a well. Hardest six month's work I ever put in wuz painting that wooden leg of hers."

Bunyan anecdotes were first promoted in print by the Red River Logging Company in the early part of this century as an inspired advertising campaign. Auden probably came across them in New York Public Library. Shrinking their folksy humour to narrative interludes between the scenes of his opera, he concentrated upon their latent themes of Man's place in Nature and the growth - and decay - of the pioneering spirit.

 

PAUL BUNYAN AS OPERA

In Auden's libretto, Paul is an offstage presence; a benign overseer of human activity. Interest centres upon the life of the logging camp, whose inhabitants grow up from a rough-and-tumble innocence to inherit their share of present-day responsibilities and fears:

'From a Pressure Group that says I am the Constitution

From those who say Patriotism and mean Persecution

From a Tolerance that is really inertia and disillusion

Save animals and men'

is the work's final despairing chorus, emerging from the superficial gaiety of a party which has preceded it.

'Paul Bunyan', in fact, belies its title of 'operetta': present-day critics are coming to recognise it as a profoundly serious piece, Auden's counterblast to New Deal euphoria. The work's original critics in 1941 did not recognise this. Britten, fortunately_, did.

'Paul Bunyan' is a mature score, coming after, for instance, the Sinfonia da Requiem and the Michelangelo Sonnets. Its unique interest is that it is his first full-length stage work and it shows characteristics of pacing, contrast and ochestration which were to become fully apparent with Peter Grimes. There are faults: the tessiatura is often too extreme for young voices; the quality of invention thins in Act Two, and so on, but on the whole it is an enchanting score. Who can fail to respond to the 'Once in a while' climax to the Prologue? Or fail to grin at the Cook's mock operatics? And is there a better 'art' Blues outside Porgy and Bess?

Paul Bunyan may have been written in haste in the early months of 1941, and after its critical damning Britten may have repented at leisure for 35 years, but his decision to reissue it was a happy one.

 

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