Phyllis Tate portrays Jack the Ripper in her thriller opera The Lodger

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Phyllis Tate portrays Jack the Ripper in her opera The Lodger

In the late nineteenth century, Jack the Ripper raped, murdered and mutilated several women in London. The perpetrator was never found, but many artists drew inspiration from him. The first was Marie Belloc Lowndes, with her 1913 novel The Lodger. Alfred Hitchcock based his first thriller on this, and Phyllis Tate her opera of the same name.

The Lodger premiered in 1960 at the Royal Academy of Music and was broadcast on the radio four years later, by the BBC Northern Orchestra and Chorus, conducted by Charles Grove. It was not until 2018 that the first professionally staged performance took place, by the Stadttheater Bremerhaven, in a German translation. From 18 April, the opera can be seen in a new production at Opera Wuppertal. – This time in its original English version.

Simple unpredictability

For most lovers of classical and modern music, the name Phyllis Tate (1911–1987) will not immediately ring a bell. Yet she certainly enjoyed fame in her own time. However, she did not correlate with more modernist composers such as Elisabeth Lutyens, Peter Maxwell Davies or Harrison Birtwistle, who feature in reference works as the most important representatives of British music after World War II.

No wonder, for in stark contrast to the ‘I don’t care if you listen’ attitude of her more famous contemporaries, Tate believed that music must, above all, communicate. She composed extensively for schools and said in a radio broadcast in 1976: ‘It is essential to write music that is straightforward and communicative, but at the same time – within the constraints – introduces an unexpected twist. I strive for a kind of simple unpredictability, which I admire in Berlioz and Janáček, so often straightforward outwardly and yet so odd and surprising.’

She considered her earlier music too complex and contrived, and explained that her compositional style had, partly thanks to her work for schools over the years, ‘become more economical and simpler; probably also less brainy. I  find it a real challenge, because it’s quite difficult to write easy music, as every note has got to be just the right note.’

Tate destroyed almost all her pre-WWII compositions, even the Cello Concerto from 1934, which elicited the exclamation from Ethel Smyth: ‘At last I have heard a real woman composer!’ The first work Tate recognised was her Concerto for Alto Saxophone and Strings, commissioned by the BBC in 1944. This virtuoso piece was recorded on CD in 2018 by the Finnish saxophonist Olli-Pekka Tuomisalo with his own orchestra; three years before, the 1964 radio recording of The Lodger had been released.

Bawdy song

Phyllis Tate was born in 1911 in Gerrards Cross, some 30 kilometres west of London. According to her witty autobiography, her father was a not particularly successful architect: he would sing songs with her on the street to scrape together the school fees for the girls’ school where he dropped her off on his way to work. She does not mention her mother’s occupation, but notes that she had some musical talent, ‘pounding out on the piano and singing the ballads of the day in a sepulchral contralto.’

Tate is an only child, which she attributes to her grandmother, who had nine children, of which her father was the only son. For him ‘to produce a daughter was more than could be tolerated’, and she forbade him from fathering any more offspring. Phyllis often feels lonely, and her education comes to little. When, at the age of ten, she sings a ‘really bawdy music-hall ditty’ her father taught her at an end-of-year concert, she is expelled from school.

Her parents consider further schooling unnecessary, as girls are ‘only necessary as potential mothers’. Thus, at the age of 10 and ‘virtually illiterate’, Phyllis is left entirely to her own devices. This spurs her on to develop her talents. She devises her own newspaper, Catland News, of which she produces several issues, featuring contributions she has drawn and written herself, full of ‘gory details. Being of a morbid disposition, it gave me the chance to revel in all the horrors of the day’. In this, we may well discern the roots of her later opera about Jack the Ripper.

‘Proper music’

Against her mother’s wishes, she buys a ukulele, which she teaches herself to play. Inspired by the jazz craze, she composes foxtrots and blues for it in the 1920s. She joins a travelling concert troupe that performs in ‘hospitals, old people’s homes, charity concerts and so on’ . During one such performance, she is approached by Harry Farjeon, who offers to teach her ‘proper music’. He is a lecturer in harmony and composition at the Royal Academy of Music, where, at the age of seventeen, she begins studying composition, timpani, conducting and piano.

During her studies, several of her works are performed, including the operetta The Policeman’s Serenade and a symphony, ‘in which every instrument played non-stop without a break throughout. As the duration was close on an hour, the players emerged completely breathless and puce in the face.’ With her characteristic self-deprecating humour, she adds that at the Academy she also composed ‘dreadful arty songs’ and graduated in 1932 ‘with a rather undeserved gold medal’.

Unusual instrumentations

That, as a teenager, she buys a ukulele instead of learning the piano as her mother wants, shows her penchant for unusual instruments. In 1946, she makes her breakthrough as a composer with her Nocturne for Four Voices for four vocal soloists, string quintet, celesta and bass clarinet. It is a setting of a poem written by Sidney Keyes at the age of 17, just before the outbreak of the Second World War. It expresses his sense of impending doom – in 1943 he would be killed in action on the front in North Africa.

‘A remarkable work,’ writes The Times, ‘its theme is youth and death and the composer has pierced through the dialogue of the four voices to the poet’s vision. She has matched his imagery with striking musical figuration… The opening grips the hearer and the grip is never relaxed.’ The critic from Music and Letters adds that this is ‘due both to the delicately picturesque score, with the celesta softening its edges, and to the great beauty of much of the music’.

If anything, her Sonata for Clarinet and Cello is even more successful, a combination unheard of at the time. It is premiered at Wigmore Hall in 1947, by the clarinettist William Pleeth and the cellist Frederick Thurston. Alongside the sonata are works by Stravinsky and Bartók, among others.

Martin Cooper of The Spectator is quite impressed: ‘During this concert, the work of a young English composer, Phyllis Tate, quite overshadowed the small works by great names which composed the rest of the programme. The imaginative power, the real mercurial emotion and the wit and skill with which the two instruments are blended and contrasted makes this essay entirely successful.’

In 1956, she receives further critical acclaim for her four-part cantata The Lady of Shalott, commissioned by the BBC to mark the tenth anniversary of BBC3. She sets this ballad by Alfred Lord Tennyson for tenor, piano, celesta, viola and two or three percussionists. Their instrumentation comprises a colourful mix of triangle, cymbals, bass drum, snare drum, tambourine, brushes, glockenspiel, rattle and gong.

‘Despite the expansive nature of the music, she manages to work through the poem at a surprisingly brisk pace, without losing sight of the heraldic beauty of the details,’ writes The New Statesman. ‘Her music has tremendous momentum; it bubbles up constantly and flows on like a clear stream. The whole piece is fresh, original and utterly unpredictable. I look forward to hearing it again.’

Desmond Shawe-Taylor opines in The New Statesman: ‘Despite the expansive nature of music, she contrives to get through the poem at a surprising rate, yet with strict attention to its heraldic beauty of detail. Her music has great impulse; it wells up continually and forges ahead like a clear stream. She has always had a fine sense of texture and The Lady of Shalott is delightfully laid out for the crisp sound of two pianos, celesta and assorted light percussion, to which in the last section a viola is most poetically added. The whole piece is fresh, original and totally unexpected;  I long to hear it again’.

The Lodger

By now Tate ranks as one of England’s major composers, and in 1957 the Royal Academy of Music commissions her to write an opera. She chooses the theme of Jack the Ripper, as explored by Marie Belloc Lowndes in her novel The Lodger.

In this story, the Buntings run a struggling bed and breakfast, until one day a guest arrives who behaves impeccably and supports them financially. The wife, however, soon suspects that this modest, God-fearing man is the ruthless murderer Jack the Ripper, and struggles with the question of whether she must hand him over to the police.

The book does not focus so much on the ‘gory details’, but approaches the subject from a psychoanalytical perspective on the deranged mind of a psychopath. ‘One moment he is friendly and gentle, with excellent manners, and the next a sexual and religious maniac who, in a frenzy, recites passages from Revelation 17 before slipping out into the night to seek out another prostitute and cut her to pieces’, as Tate writes in her own commentary.

The main character in The Lodger is therefore ultimately not Jack the Ripper himself, but Emma Bunting. Her moral dilemma is partly rooted in Tate’s aversion to the death penalty, which she witnessed near her home in 1955. That year, Ruth Ellis was hanged for killing her violent husband. She was the last woman to get the death sentence, and due to public outrage over this, capital punishment was eventually abolished in Britain in 1969.

Libretto and premiere

Work on The Lodger takes her three years. Tate writes a synopsis of the novel herself and asks the well-known bass and radio presenter David Franklin to turn it into a libretto. Thanks to his many performances at Glyndebourne and Covent Garden, he knows every facet of opera inside out.

This is of inestimable value to Phyllis, as she explains in an interview with The Times. She adds laconically that the writing process was more difficult than anticipated: ‘The first scene took eight hours in the original version, but we managed to whittle it down, so that the whole opera lasts a mere two and a quarter hours now.’

As this is a performance by students, the score must be tailored to their technical abilities. A task right up Tate’s street. After all, out of conviction she writes music that appeals to a wider audience than the atonal and twelve-tone works favoured by the contemporary elite. The music of The Lodger is distinctly tonal, abounds in memorable themes and is orchestrated with great psychological insight. Tate for instance gives voice to the underlying menace and eeriness with growling low strings.

The premiere at the Royal Academy takes place on 14 July 1960, in a production by Jennifer Agnew. She has devised a simple yet effective concept, in which she manages to evoke the street façade or the interior of the house using an ingeniously lit gauze curtain. The reviews are enthusiastic.

‘There is no doubt that it revealed a new English operatic composer capable of producing dramatic suspense by means of fertile imagination and musical resourcefulness’, we read in The Times. ‘The idiom is eclectic, but her handling of whatever language she needs at the moment is so assured, so apt and so imaginative that she more than repays her debts. The introduction of a rowdy cockney birthday celebration not only provides contrast to the slow grim development of the main theme, but leads to a magnificent finale to the first of the two acts.’

The critic from Music and Musicians adds: ‘Few new operas, however lavishly mounted, have made such an impact in recent years. This should not be the last hearing of a fine dramatic story carried by powerfully operatic music.’ The Musical Times concludes: ‘Other than Peter Grimes, this is probably the most successful “debut” opera by a British composer since the war.’

First professional production in Bremerhaven

Strangely enough, not a single British opera house takes up the challenge. The first professional performance doesn’t take place until 2018, at the Stadttheater Bremerhaven. There it is presented under the title Der Untermieter, in a German translation by Steffan Piontek, be it in a slightly abridged version. The premiere is attended by Tate’s son Colin and daughter Celia, her grandsons with their wives, and a great-granddaughter.

The German press, too, is captivated by The Lodger. ‘Phyllis Tate’s music is not only pleasant, but also extremely refined and artistically composed,’ writes the online magazine Der Opernfreund. ‘It aligns seamlessly with the rhythm of speech in the language and is reminiscent of Britten or Menotti. But there are also arias, a love duet, an increasingly grotesque chorus of drunkards, and, in the finale of the first act, a stunning ensemble scene. This quintet alone demonstrates Tate’s mastery.’ The Weser Kurier concludes that the opera house has ‘unearthed a true treasure’.

World premiere of complete version in Wuppertal

Several reviewers argue that The Lodger deserves to be taken up by other opera houses. Among them BBC presenter and arts critic Tom Sutcliffe, who speaks of ‘a completely valid and absorbing achievement with memorably effective music and a viable text. It could well be staged as a Prom. It ought to be revived soon somewhere in the UK or Ireland.’

His appeal appears to again fall on deaf ears in the Anglo-Saxon world. In Germany, the theme of the sadistic woman-murderer apparently resonates more strongly. Eight years after the German premiere, Opera Wuppertal stages a new production. Opera Wuppertal stages a new production. Fortunately, director Greg Eldridge this time presents the full opera, with the original English libretto.

Director Greg Eldridge: ‘Marie Belloc Lowndes, an early member of the Women Writers Suffrage League, penned The Lodger at the height of the British womens’ rights movement. Phyllis Tate composed her version of the story in the years following the last hanging of a female prisoner in Great Britain.
Clearly, these facts both inspired and infused the treatment of this story by these two remarkable artists, and we have been careful to pay close attention to these elements when mounting our exciting new production.’

The website of Oper Wuppertal shows an enticing flyer. Below a photo of a man in a sinister street with blood splatters, we read a short synopsis and the question of who the production might be of interest to. The answer: ‘People aged 16 and over who enjoy suspense, want to dive into the depths of psychology once again, or simply want to spend a pleasant evening.’

So, off to Wuppertal, it is!

The production runs from 18 April through 12 July and will be recorded for cd.

For this article I gratefully drew from the extensive information on the website of Phyllis Tate, maintained by her children Colin and Celia Frank.

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