John Baxter ponders the pleasures of Opera which leads him to to a YouTube viewing of I DREAM TOO MUCH (John Cromwell, USA, 1935) starring Lily Pons

Editor's Note: John Baxter is an expat Australian who has spent a lifetime writing about, joking about and making films. He has had a couple of dozen books published - novels, travel guides, literary companions and biographies of film-makers among them. Most recently he has self-published two volumes of memoirs, "The Paris Mens Salon" about a literary life in his adopted home and most recently "Filmstruck: A Life in the Movies". The latter volume is reviewed on the Film Alert 101 blog and for those who are subsequently curious to read it there is an email link to purchase one or both books via Sydney's Cinema Reborn. You can find the review and the email link if you CLICK HERE

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At school, music wasn’t my best subject. In fact, the chorus master, after hearing a few of my failed attempts at B flat, exiled me to the group in the back row who mouthed the words, but in silence.

         Fortunately this didn’t impair my appreciation of music, augmented in adulthood by having as a companion a soprano sufficiently gifted to sing in the London Symphony Orchestra Chorus and the choir at Benjamin Britten’s Aldeburgh Festival. She introduced me to that most improbable of all musical forms, opera.

         The week we arrived in London, still a bit unsteady after thirty days at sea, the cheapest way in those days to escape from Australia, she took me to the Royal Festival Hall, in the Purcell Room in which Janet Baker was singing. No sign directed us. Instead, a bar of music in brass, embedded in the marble, indicated the entrance. I sensed that perceptible click as her mind switched to musical mode.

           “When I Am Laid in Earth,” she said. “Dido’s lament from Dido and Aeneas.”

           “By Purcell?”

          “Yes.” Of course, dummy

           “What about people who can’t read music?”

           She shrugged. Well, whatabout them?

           This indifference is common among lovers of opera. Either you’re born with the gene that attunes you to its delights, or you stand in the back row and mouth the words. Against all odds,  I had the gene, although it never sat comfortably with its neighbour in my artistic DNA, the love of movies. Cinema can never quite convince itself that opera isn’t a bit...well,  silly.I mean...sung dialogue, and those costumes? Easier to make fun of it than try to understand.

         And of course some of the send-ups are sublime. The baritone in A Night at the Opera, banging away gamely at Il Trovatore as the backdrops behind him change from castle to tram terminal. Bugs Bunny in a blonde wig as Brunhilda in What’s Opera, Doc?,  draped over a libidinous-eyed horse. Not to mention Mae West as Delilah in Goin’ to Town, miming to Saint-Seans while toying absently with the phallic braid of Samson’s wig. 

         What troubles cinéastes about opera is often the element of performance  - not on the part of the artists but of the audience. Cinema is austere. You take your seat in the dark, watch in silence and leave without applause. Maybe you have an ice cream. Contrast opera, where one dresses up, applauds, gives standing ovations, demands encores – never mind watching from a box at Covent Garden, or attending Glyndebourne, where patrons dress formally and dine on the lawn between performances on champagne and foie gras. A friend who could only afford standing room for a performance of Die Walkure in Vienna was slumping towards the end of the second hour. A passing usher gave him a nudge. “Bitte, stand up straight, mein herr,”he said severely, “This is the Staatsoper.”  Catch that happening in a cinema, even the Curzon, Mayfair.

The closest cinema comes to accommodating opera is the filmed adaptation. Luchino Visconti never filmed any of his stage productions and Nino Rota failed to lure Fellini into the opera house. But we have Joseph Losey’s Don Giovanni, made on location in the lagoons around Venice, Frederic Mitterand’s lush Madame Butterfly, and Francesco Rosi’s smoky, sweaty Carmen.

All these are creditable facsimiles of opera, but no closer to the real thing than a Shakespeare play on film. Films that take an oblique look or address the form are rare. Tom Hanks in Philadelphia, of course, his spirit briefly lifted out of a tormented body by the sheer delight of Callas, Dorothy Comingore struggling with Bernard Herrmann’s pastiche Salammbo in Citizen Kane, and Mike Leigh’s Topsy Turvy, which makes us feel we have lived through the experience of Gilbert and Sullivan writing The Mikado. But after those, not much.

         John Cromwell’s 1935 I Dream Too Much is not in the same league as these. But stumbling recently on a TV transmission in the small hours and refreshing my memory by re-viewing it on YouTube, I was surprised at the degree to which its star, the soprano Lily Pons, revived some of the awe one feels at the sheer improbability of opera, and particularly of bel canto

         The tiny Pons, a mere five feet tall and thin with it, is more or less forgotten today, but she was a household name between the wars, easily as famous as Joan Sutherland for her expertise in the same rarefied heights of the coloratura repertoire. I Dream Too Much, popularly called I Scream Too Much because of Pons’s penchant for skittering around above high C, was the most worthwhile of her three RKO films.  She’s in her best voice as a country girl who just wants to settle down to married life with Henry Fonda, whereas he’s set on writing the world’s greatest opera and having her star in it.

         Pons sings a few inconsequential Jerome Kern/Dorothy Fields songs but what makes the film memorable is a five-minute staged performance in costume of the Bell Song from Delibes’ Lakmé, a coloratura showpiece. Cromwell was already astute enough to keep directorial touches to a minimum and to let Pons demonstrate how startlingly big a voice could emerge from her schoolgirl’s body. Her naiveté as she shows us is charming. There’s none of the star’s condescension. Instead, she seems to be saying “Look what I can do! Isn’t it fabulous?” Well, yes, as a matter of fact, it is. Even in the back row, you can tell that.

         Pons, incidentally, was not just a pretty voice. Her name has come up a couple of times in quite different connections. In 1949, an English text of Jean Cocteau’s Le Sang d’un Poète was published. Pons did the translation. And in the late twenties, a quack surgeon named Serge Voronoff claimed he could rejuvenate the human body by transplanting tissue from monkeys. Apes being thin on the ground, even in the 19^tharrondissement, he started a farm to raise them on the Riviera near Menton. Among his regular visitors was Pons. Maybe there was more behind that incredible voice than we realise.