The Perfect Fool: ballet music

The first performance of Holst’s comic opera The Perfect Fool at Covent Garden in May 1923 was a disaster. Intended as an operatic parody, aimed mainly at Wagner but having a go at Verdi too, it was apparently not very funny and was promptly forgotten. The only part of the score to have remained in the repertoire is the ballet music, which was originally written for an entertainment called The Sneezing Charm in 1918 and had twice been heard in the concert hall in the meantime.

The ballet music, which opens the opera, introduces the Wizard who is to play a central part in the plot and who demonstrates his prowess here by conjuring up in turn the Spirits of Earth, Water and Fire - a task also well within the powers of a composer who had recently and so vividly evoked the less tangible elemental qualities of The Planets. The Wizard, a character clearly related to Uranus, the Magician of The Planets, is at first represented by three trombones, which issue his peremptory summons in a weird kind of fanfare. The Spirits of the Earth emerge from the subterranean depths on double-basses dancing lugubriously but tunefully in an awkward septuple time. The dance rises on a crescendo through the orchestra to horns, trumpets, lower woodwind and eventually the whole ensemble in a sustained triple forte.

As the Spirits of Earth disperse, the Magician reappears in the form of a solo viola and then a cello to summon with the same weird fanfare the Spirits of Water - who make their entry to a gracefully flowing march limpidly scored for piccolo and flutes with harp and celesta. An oboe adds an exotic countermelody and a flute offers a contrastingly domestic-sounding folk tune as the theme of the short middle section.

There is an only brief reference to the Magician’s fanfare, this time on bassoon, before the Spirits of Fire explode from the bottom of the orchestra to the top, beginning an inexorable progress that consumes a variety of melodic material (some of it drawn from the St Paul’s Suite) on its way to a brilliant climax. After another explosion the fanfare theme returns, first to be integrated with the fire imagery and finally to end the piece quietly and mysteriously.