Stanford Robinson, who conducted the first performance of Roberto Gerhard’s The Duenna (a studio broadcast) in 1949, is said to have told the composer that he loved the work but wished that he hadn’t mingled its sprightly comic opera elements and Spanish rhythms with atonality. What he was probably thinking of was a scene in Act 2 where three characters drink together to a vivacious quodlibet of Spanish folk melodies. This is followed by a spoken scene in which the young Don Ferdinand pleads with his father Don Jerome to allow Ferdinand’s sister Luisa to marry the man she loves. Jerome refuses, telling his son that he himself married for money, and such loveless but companionable marriages are not to be despised. The music, Spanish no longer – indeed atonal – darkens under this, refuses to allow us to laugh at Jerome’s “We were never fond enough to quarrel”, and a solo violin most movingly tells us what he cannot say himself, that the widowed old man misses his wife terribly.
Gerhard was intent on creating that apparently impossible paradox, an English zarzuela or tonadilla, but he could not have achieved the depth and poignancy of that involuntary self-confession with folk music references alone. The Duenna gains its strength from this hybrid status, but it was that quality, no doubt, that kept it off the stage for so long. Absurdly enough – but it wounded Gerhard deeply – when it was heard by an audience unlikely to be put off by its occasional modernisms, at the ISCM Festival in Wiesbaden in 1951, it was coolly received because Gerhard the pupil of Schoenberg seemed to be wasting his time on light music.
It mingles not only modernism with copious references to Spanish vernacular music but also broad comedy with meltingly lyrical arias (try Luisa’s monologue in Act 2 scene 2) and with something deeper and occasionally more disturbing. One of the most touching moments is towards the end, where Don Isaac, the rich but plain suitor who Jerome intended for Luisa, is married off by a trick to the elderly duenna of the title. Despite themselves they feel happy in each other’s company, and they briefly sing some of the sincerest love music in the opera. The mostly jubilant final scene, three pairs of lovers finally united, is repeatedly undercut, by a chorus of beggars outside and by references to an austere penitential chant heard at the beginning of the opera. Like the Sheridan play that was its source it is a comedy that touches on the mercenary and the moral aspects of marriage, and reflects that happiness is a very chancy thing indeed.
It wasn’t until 1992 that The Duenna finally reached the stage, 22 years after Gerhard’s death. That production (sung in English) was seen in Madrid and Barcelona; it was splendidly cast (Felicity Palmer, David Rendall, Anthony Michaels-Moore, Enrique Baquerizo, Richard Van Allan) but, deplorably and unaccountably, was not recorded. Nor was the Opera North production, mounted very soon afterwards with much the same cast. This recording is of a recent revival, with Van Allan and the conductor the only remaining links with those 1992 performances. With mostly young voices that will not take pressure it is a creditable but slightly small-scale reading. Claire Powell is accomplished but does not quite make the title-role as central as it should be; Van Allan is vivid and touching as Don Jerome, but his voice is now rather worn. Susannah Glanville is effective in her Act 2 aria and elsewhere. All the other principals are more than competent, and their very clear diction and way of suggesting the pace and pungency of a stage production make up for a feeling that the opera has been slightly under-cast. Antoni Ros Marba conducts with a fine ear for Gerhard’s strange and magical sonorities as well as the obvious local colour; the recording is clean but pleasantly atmospheric, again strongly evoking the stage.
Sheridan’s play contains rather more plot than an opera of reasonable length can handle, and there are some awkwardnesses of timing – and rather too many scenes of speech over music – that David Drew’s performing edition has not been able wholly to eradicate. Yet John Gardner’s judgement (“The greatest of all Spanish operas – and one of the greatest English ones, too”) seems not too much of an exaggeration. '