Paul Bunyan
from the original production, 1941
Paul Bunyan, Britten’s earliest operatic venture, was originally conceived as a ‘choral operetta’ for student performance. Troubled by dramatic flaws and the negative reviews of several critics, Britten withdrew the work after the first run of performances in New York in 1941 and it was only revived (with a few revisions) in 1976, since when the work has entered the repertoire and proved to be a valuable addition to the canon of Britten’s stage works. It marked the composer’s largest, and only operatic, collaboration with W.H. Auden whose story of the legend of the giant lumberjack of American myth is set by Britten in a score of striking freshness and ingenuity. The musical influences run from Donizetti, through Gilbert & Sullivan and Kurt Weill to the blues and country-and-western, though this characteristically eclectic mix is melded into a highly individual synthesis that could be the work of no other composer.
Although the ‘Broadway musical’-type structure is far removed from Britten’s later practice and there are as yet few hints of his main dramatic preoccupations, the experience and example of writing Paul Bunyan clearly prepared the way for the more fully-realised achievement of his first full-scale opera Peter Grimes.
from the English Music Theatre production, 1976
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