That shifting of forms runs through the very structure of the piece, so that we get a bit of blues, a bit of jazz, a bit of country but there are also traces of Donizetti, of Brecht and Weill, even of Gilbert and Sullivan. If one day Paul Bunyan was an operetta, the next a music- theatre piece, and the next they thought they were doing it on Broadway, that's in part what gives it currency today, when we more readily accept all forms of music-theatre." They issue a kind of warning: `Be careful of nature, of animals, of man.' As always, the myth is a tool used to tell a story. Being foreigners, new immigrants, Auden and Britten had a wonderful take on the culture behind the myth. All these 19th-century American myths - Davy Crockett, Johnny Appleseed, Paul Bunyan - are tied up with the notion of taming nature. Obviously we could have a huge boot, or whatever, on-stage, but any physical representation feels hokey. Zambello sees this as an essential part of the work: "It brings a wonderful mythic sense. In fact, he doesn't appear in his own opera, existing only as a disembodied speaking voice. He was immense, physically and mentally, capable of chopping down trees with a flick of his hand and of eating 5,000 pancakes for breakfast."Ī figure to put Desperate Dan to shame, but an unlikely character for the opera stage. Forests had to be cleared so that people could farm, and the Bunyan story is an idealisation of the agrarian world. Now we think of that as something bad, but in the 19th century, it wasn't. What's consistent in every version is that he was a logger who worked his way across the country, clearing the forests. I have two children's books that I stole from my nephew, both telling the story of Paul Bunyan, but they're completely different. "Like all myths, it exists in many different versions. Not that any opera is easy to direct, but Britten always draws you completely into the dramatic situation with the simplest musical means: simple in that they're so suggestive of mood and atmosphere."Īlthough she wasn't asked to stage Paul Bunyan just because she's American, Zambello certainly knows the legend on which the opera is based. As she suggests: "Where so many composers down-play the librettist's contribution, Britten always respected the words he set, and because he was so careful about writing for the voice, he's a dream to direct. Britten has been something of an abiding presence in Zambello's career: her Geneva staging of Billy Budd has been seen at Covent Garden (where it won an Olivier Award), in Paris and Dallas she has also directed The Rape of Lucretia, Albert Herring, A Midsummer Night's Dream and Noye's Fludde. That may change next week when the Royal Opera presents a new production by the American director Francesca Zambello. The work has been seen and recorded since, without establishing itself in the Britten canon.
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