A Distant Nightingale

Music in The Alien Corn

by Roger Brunyate

Music has the power to carry one back to other places, other times, and it stirs feelings which defy words. So it was for John Keats. The title of W. Somerset Maugham’s 1931 short story, Alien Corn, refers to a passage in Keats’ Ode to a Nightingale, in which the poet hears in the nightingale’s note…

…perhaps the self-same song that found a path
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn.

Ruth in the Bible had left her own country, Moab, to dwell in the land of Israel. Maugham, however, reverses this situation in his story, which deals with a group of Jewish exiles: the wealthy Bleikogel family, who came to England from Germany in the later nineteenth century. But there is little question of being “sick for home.” The family prospered in England and its leading figure, the banker Alfons Bleikogel, renounced his religion, bought an English country estate called Tilby, was made a baronet in return for services rendered, and changed the family name to Bland. When Maugham’s story begins in the later 1920s, Alfons is dead, and his son Adolphus, the new baronet and now a Member of Parliament, lives as though the family has been English for generations, telling people to call him “Bertie.”


Somerset Maugham

The one member of the family who does hear the nightingale’s song is Bertie’s son George. Feeling that his family is living a lie, he rejects his father’s plans to have him join a good regiment and later stand for Parliament in his turn. Instead, he wants only to become a concert pianist. He eventually wrings out permission to study in Munich, on condition that he play for a celebrated pianist, Lea Makart, on his return and agree to abide by her opinion. Once in Germany, it becomes clear that his odyssey is more a search for his cultural roots than the simple development of his talent, but it is a journey that ends in tragedy. George returns home, plays for Mme. Makart, and, on hearing her confirm his own realization that he is no more than second-rate, takes his own life.

When, eight years ago now, the composer Tom Benjamin suggested that we might write an opera together, we were thinking of a single act of under an hour. I thought of Somerset Maugham as a possible source because of his numerous short stories, which I then proceeded to read through. They are an immensely varied bunch, ranging from domestic social comedy to tales of passion and adventure in distant lands. But Alien Corn struck me immediately as being different, with more fully-developed characters and ideas which resonate far beyond the bounds of the story — and which soon made us realize that we had a full-length opera on our hands. Most especially, Alien Corn is a story about music. Maugham is usually an emotionally reticent writer, but here he uses music to suggest a world of the senses which he so seldom describes, making it George’s means of reaching back towards his true identity. The story seemed a natural choice for opera.


	Tom Benjamin

Curiously enough, the central place of music in the story was also a reason why we almost decided against it. How could we have a grand piano on the stage and move from one setting to another? Make George a violinist instead, perhaps. But if he were to play onstage, how could the audience separate the performer’s abilities (or lack of them) from those we are supposed to understand in the character? We thought of turning George into a painter or a poet, but both seemed undramatic. In the end, remembering that opera works through singing rather than playing, we decided to keep the piano in the orchestra pit. Seven of the eight orchestral interludes which are played between scenes have been treated like miniature piano-concerto movements, in a variety of styles related to the scenes before or after. The one exception is the interlude during which George plays for Lea Makart, and that is left entirely to the audience’s imagination; the piano drops out of the texture altogether, and remains silent until after she has delivered her verdict.

Even if Maugham’s Alien Corn were not about music, it would still have much to make it suitable for the stage. It is a marvelous portrait of upper-class English manners between the wars, brought into sharper focus by the fact that virtually all the characters are playing roles which are alien to them. Not unlike E. M. Forster, Maugham had a knack of skewering pretension and hypocrisy. He has fun with Bertie’s genial portrayal of the country squire, and etches the snobbishness of his wife Miriam (“Call me Muriel”) with a nib dipped in acid. Tom Benjamin makes full use of such opportunities in his score, with affectionate parodies of patriotic ballads, dance-hall ditties, and even a fox-trot played on a phonograph! Its serious aspects aside, this is at times a very funny opera.


John Keats

Making an opera libretto from a short story is a different matter from adapting a novel. One still has to cut a great deal, but the story format also leaves room to expand certain characters beyond their function in the original; this is especially important in creating an ensemble work with roughly equal roles capable of being sustained for the full duration of the opera. There are three characters in our adaptation which have been greatly expanded from the original, and each illustrates something about the particular use of music in this story.

The first of these is George’s grandmother, Hannah Bleikogel. A terrifying dowager of advanced years, she is the only member of the family who has made no attempt whatsoever to assimilate to British society, and she still speaks with a heavy German accent. But because of this, she represents George’s only contact with what is authentic in his heritage. In a scene (which we have completely invented) set in a box at the Royal Albert Hall, she tells him that her mother was a singer, and recalls her favorite lullaby — a genuine Yiddish melody, which is the only thing of its kind in the opera, but whose echoes permeate the entire score. It is Hannah who will pay for George’s study in Germany. And Hannah is the only one of the family to understand what he may be seeking there. As she says in a scene (also totally invented) with her brother:

We have no land but what is in our hearts;
No roots but those that reach into our souls.
For us, the truest voyage leads us to our past.

An English Country House…

Belton House, Lincolnshire


	…and another
	Possible models for Tilby?

Maugham tells the story through the eyes of a rather reticent first-person narrator. The opera, however, expands this figure into one of its major characters. Somerset in the opera forms an immediate bond with George, sensing his artistic yearnings and sharing his feelings of isolation. Although painting himself as a musical ignoramus, he reveals the ability to respond to much that is below the surface. Visiting George in Munich and hearing him play, he recognizes at once what George is trying to achieve, while being painfully aware that he may never succeed. Although there are at least two other adaptations of Alien Corn (a film from 1948 and a television play from 1970), neither includes the author as a character. In doing so, we have called upon what is now known of Maugham’s life — although married and extremely cautious in his public appearances, he appears to have been a homosexual — and suggested (very gently suggested) a deepening affection for George. We have also explored the paradox that Somerset, although the only native Englishman in the story, is an alien too. For the writer’s role by its very nature is that of an outsider, looking upon a society which he can describe and anatomize, but to which he can never fully belong.


Dame Myra Hess
A possible model for Lea Makart

Finally, there is the pianist Lea Makart. Although she appears in an early scene, and it is her recital that occasions that visit to the Royal Albert Hall, she does not have an important part to play until she arrives to hear the audition in the second act. In the story, after giving George her opinion, she plays a piece of Bach which immediately shows the difference between the true artist and the talented amateur. But our problem was to convince the audience of her greatness as a musician without having her play a note. One way we have attempted to do this is by giving her an aria before entering the music room — a lovely piece that is quite different from anything else in the score, a description of a walk on the South Downs, full of the freshness of an English spring, with the flute singing like a lark in the high sky. After the audition, she invokes a different kind of bird — Keats’ Nightingale. Making explicit the connection that is only implied in the story, she speaks the poet’s lines, accompanied only by a piano in the distance playing something so exquisitely simple it sounds as though it might come from the Anna Magdalena Notebook of Bach… but which is in fact by Tom Benjamin.

Alien Corn premiere, March 2005 Return to top