Collected Letters Volume One: Family Letters 1905–1931. Walter Hooper

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It is a pity that you happen to be at the front just now, as–at last–an Opera Company came to Belfast while you were away. It was the ‘Moody Manners’, but that you have heard P. talking about. They were quite good, though somewhat early Victorian in the way of scenery and gestures. We went to ‘Faust’⁶⁸ and ‘Trovatore’.⁶⁹ The former was perfectly glorious, well sung and everything. It is a very good opera and of course knowing a good deal of the music and having read Goethe, I enjoyed it very well. Of course I have discovered that it is no use expecting to hear the overture or preludes to the acts at Belfast, as everyone talks all the time as if nothing were going on. Il Trovatore, as we have always agreed, is a very mediocre thing anyway, and, with the exception of the soprano and baritone, was villainously sung. I don’t want to hear it again.

On the following Friday we got badly let down: the Glenmachonians Greeves’s and I had made up a party to go to ‘Samson and Delilah’,⁷⁰ which we were all looking forward to immensely. Imagine our feelings when the cod at the door told us it has been changed to ‘Fra Diavolo’–a very inferior comic opera of Auber’s!⁷¹ I seem to be fated never to get fair treatment from that theatre management. Fra Diavolo impresses on one how very badly the comic opera needed reform when Gilbert and Sullivan came to the rescue:⁷² it is the old style–bandits, a foolish English earl, innkeepers ‘and sich’. It was without exception the greatest drivel I ever listened to. There has been nothing worth noticing at the Hippodrome lately. Those two people–I’ve forgotten their names–who do the sketch about the broken mirror, were at the Opera House last week. The Opera House is now in the grip of that annual monstrosity the Grand Xmas Panto. I suppose I ought to be reconciled to it as fate by now. One good thing is that Tom Foy is coming, but of course the whole thing will be awfully patriotic.

      I like your asking why I didn’t go to meet you in town. You omitted the trifling precaution of telling me your address–or did you intend that I should go up to a policeman in Piccadilly and ask, ‘Have you seen my brother anywhere?’

The new records are a most interesting and varied selection, comprising ‘The calf of gold’ from Faust, with a vocal ‘Star of Eve’⁷³ on the other side: the Drinking and Duel scenes from Faust: Saint Saen’s ‘Danse Macabre’:⁷⁴ Grieg’s ‘March of the Dwarfs’:⁷⁵ and ‘Salve Minerva’ from Faust. There are also several new books, but most of them are not in your line: the only two you might care for are the works of Shelley and Keats.

We were up at Glenmachan yesterday (Monday) evening to a supper party of Kelsie’s where you went representing a novel.⁷⁶ All the usual push were there of course, and I quite enjoyed it. A number of people besides, whom I had never seen before, also turned up. There was one rather pretty thing whom Lily⁷⁷ is arranging as ‘suitable’ for Willie Greeves⁷⁸–in opposition I suppose to the Taylor affair. Of course it is all very nice, but don’t you thank the gods you haven’t got a sister?

One other piece of local gossip is so funny that you really must hear it. Do you know a vulgar, hideous old harridan on the wrong side of 40, a Miss Henderson, who lives at Norwood Towers? She’s just the sort of creature who would live there. Well the latest wheeze is that you meet her every time you go to Glenmachan, running after Bob.⁷⁹ And the beauty of the thing is that she makes Bob bustle about and talk to her and flirt with her. I know you can’t imagine Bob ‘courtin’. I promise you it is a thing of beauty. While admiring the creature’s energy in getting a move on anyone like him, I don’t want her to get into the connection even as remotely as the sister in law of my second cousins.

You’re becoming quite a hero in your absence, and I can always command a large and attentive audience by spinning yarns about ‘The other day my brother, who is at the front etc.’ Hope is here now, and the Captain was home for a few days–I suppose you saw that he is now a Major? Why couldn’t you manage to get a few days off? You would at any rate have a change of clothes and diet if you did. Last week we went to the Messiah with Carrie Tubb⁸⁰ as soprano–she can sing, but she’s as ugly as the day is long. The contralto, altho she hadn’t much of a voice, was an improvement in that way–really quite a magnificent creature. Rather like the woman whom we СКАЧАТЬ