The Immortal Hour is part of theatrical folklore: In London in the early 1920s it ran, unprecedentedly, for 216 consecutive performances and, shortly afterwards, for a further 160 at the first of several revivals; within a decade it had been played a thousand times. Many in those audiences returned repeatedly, fascinated by the other-worldly mystery of the plot (it concerns the love of a mortal king, Eochaidh, for the faery princess Etain and the destruction of their happiness by her nostalgic longing for the Land of the Ever Young, removed from her memory though it has been by a magic spell) and by the gentle, lyrical simplicity of its music. In the bleak aftermath of 1918, with civil war in Ireland, political instability at home and the names of Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin already emerging from obscurity into the headlines, what blessed escapism this blend of Celtic myth and folk-tinged pentatonic sweetness must have offered; there are still those who remember it with gratitude and affection as a glimpse of a beautiful world of legend: faeryland and Avalon commingled.
Legends cannot always withstand revisiting, but Boughton's score still has the power to evoke that world, immediately and effortlessly. The libretto by ''Fiona McLeod'' (the nom de plume of William Sharp) is post-Rossetti high kitsch, often veering into bathos or becoming embarrassingly over-heated, but it does grope towards something uncomfortably deep in the human psyche, the potentially schizoid fracture-zone between physical and spiritual, Apollo and Dionysos, and Boughton unerringly places the conflict in a world where it can be treated as a myth, a world which lies somewhere in the borderland between Wagner's Forest of the Grail, Debussy's Allemonde and Burne-Jones's grey-green pre-Raphaelite shadows. It is, though, a world that lacks the power and much of the shadaw of those. Boughton's charming melodies, cleverly juggled though they are by a simplified version of Wagner's leitmotiv technique, are not capable of pungent characterization or of conveying strong dramatic conflict or urgent narrative. It is quiet, sweet music, muted in colour and softly plaintive in utterance, and whenever the plot demands more than this the opera sags. Midir, the visitant from the Land of the Ever Young who lures Etain away from the mortal world, really needs music of dangerously heady, Dionysiac incandescence—something like that Strauss gave to Bacchus in Ariadne auf Naxos, perhaps—but Boughton's vocabulary can run to nothing more transported than the prettily lilting Faery Song and to some pages of folksy lyricism with a few showy high notes for emphasis.
No less seriously the music has little dramatic grip. This is partly because of its predominantly slowness, partly because it lacks rhythmic variety (Eochaidh, for example, has a dispiriting habit of ending his phrases on three accented crotchets), but it has much to do with a failure to focus on the essentials of the plot. There are a pair of picturesquely glum rustics in the First Act ( ''I am Manus, and this poor woman is Maive, my childless wife'') who simply hold up the action by mournfully commenting on the weather and retailing incomprehensible folk myths. Worse, in Act 2 there is a quite superfluous chorus of druids, warriors, maidens and (God help us) bards who, having been got on stage in an interminable sequence of processions, must be got off stage, to a repetition of them, before the plot can proceed.
Despite all this, and the consequent evocation of a mythology that is at times a lot closer to Never-Never-Land than to Tir-na-n'Og, The Immortal Hour does have a quality, difficult to define, that is genuinely alluring. I find it in the touching purity of Etain's music, as she sings of a beauty she can no longer recall but whose loss is an inassuageable ache (and how movingly Anne Dawson sings the role: a real discovery, a Liu and a Pamina in the making). It is there in the moments of true darkness that the music achieves: Dalua, the tormented Lord of Shadow conjures up something of the sombre shudder of the supernatural world. And the offstage choruses of invisible spirits in Act 1, the approaching and retreating hosts of faeryland at the end of that act give an idea of the spell this work could still cast if judiciously cut and staged as Boughton intended, in a woodland setting, with voices echoing through the trees and the audience led to some new grove or clearing for each scene-change.
The performance could hardly speak more eloquently for the opera. Alan G. Melville allows the music to emerge from and retreat into shadowy silences, all the principal singers are accomplished and the excellent chorus has been placed so as to evoke a sense of space. The recording seldom suggests the studio: it is easy to imagine oneself in the ''dark and mysterious wood'' at the world's end where the drama takes place—or in the Regent Theatre, Euston, where hushed audiences again and again sought refuge from the realities of 1922; and who is to say that The Immortal Hour might not prove a comforting refuge from 1984?'