The opera was once famous. It appeared at Drury Lane in 1843; within a year it had been played there 100 times, and it soon reached many of Europe's major theatres. Bunn's libretto was derided from the start both for its scurvy verses and its dramatic ineptitude. In the finale of Act 1 the Count, while in full view his daughter is being abducted by the gipsy Devilshoof, delays pursuit in order to lead the chorus in a Meyerbeerian prayer, ''Vouchsafe to lend an ear/To the grief of the wailer/Cut short the dark career/Of the ruthless assailer''; an unhurried ''Follow, follow'' chorus then follows. But such devices had ample operatic precedent (and merry Gilbertian consequent). The wonder is that Balfe's score proved so acceptable to audiences that knew their Rossini, Donizetti and Auber.
True, it does contain the soprano's ''I dreamt that I dwelt in marble halls'', the tenor's ''When other lips and other hearts'', the baritone's ''The heart bow'd down'', and much else that is tuneful and engaging; but even more that is weak, eclectic pastiche, modelled on Weber, Donizetti, on occasion Meyerbeer. Bernard Shaw wrote that ''Balfe, whose ballads are better than Tchaikovsky's, never, as far as I know, wrote a whole scene well''. And seldom, he might have added, a whole number: harmonies grow trite and lame, pretty tunes collapse, sequences are overworked. The Bohemian Girl is less well composed than Benedict's Lily of Killarney. (I don't know Wallace's Maritana, the third panel of ''the English Ring'').
Am I being too severe, expecting too much, not subscribing to ''dear old Bo Girl'' nostalgia? The Bohemian Girl was one of only two operas that Beecham conducted at Covent Garden after the war—in 1951, with a young Roberta Peters as Arline. (The other was Die Miestersinger.) Beecham conducted it with charm, wit and grace, with fun that was never condescending, with some drama, with full appreciation of what it had to offer. He had also clarified Balfe's conventional, functional instrumentation. (Twenty-two minutes of Act 3 were broadcast and have circulated on an unofficial recording.) I remember it as a show that, despite a patchy cast, was at once captivating, somewhat ridiculous, and thoroughly enjoyable. The new recording, which is based on a Dublin concert performance last year, makes less of a case for Balfe's opera, mainly because Bonynge leads it without impetus, elegant shaping, or charm. Even when he sets a fast tempo, inner energy is lacking. Each phrase comes to an end, doesn't propel one on. The effect is sluggish. There was more musical animation in a 1978 Central City production (with Leigh Munro and Vincent Cole as the lovers), but on disc that version had only limited circulation.
Nova Thomas, the Arline, is, for all her bright tone, a dull heroine: her words are largely inaudible, and a singer who blurs and swallows words instead of using them and bringing them to life is a dull singer. But she is note-accurate, and has moments of delicate, well-spun tracery. (Bonynge gets all the cast to sing cadenzas and decorations as if they were taking part in Lucia.) Bernadette Cullen, the Queen of the Gipsies, also lacks verbal vigour, and she is not always in tune. (Edith Coates took the role at Sadler's Wells in the 1930s and again—violently, stridently—for Beecham.) The men's words are clearer. Patrick Power, the Thaddeus, offers clean, plain singing, admirable in its way but not imaginatively inflected. Jonathan Summers's Count sounds like an assignment got up and efficiently delivered (if not always quite in tune). Timothy German is lively in the character-tenor role of Florestein, and John Del Carlo is a sound Devilshoof.
The Bohemian Girl, like most operas, has a tangled textual history. The plot (which is also that of the Preciosa for which Weber wrote incidental music) derives from Cervantes, by way of an opera-ballet. Balfe may have begun the work in French, for the Opera, in 1841; in some numbers, the French 'translation' fits the music where Bunn's words do not. Argo uses an edition drawn from Carl Rosa parts, Mapleson parts, the Boosey vocal score, and English and French full scores in the British Library. This differs in several important ways from the edition by Dennis Arundell and Beecham that was heard at Covent Garden—not only in the matters of reorchestrations and their revisions of Bunn's verses. I won't go into scholarly detail: The Bohemian Girl is no Carmen or Don Carlos.
What we have here is a souvenir of a radio production—an able if not especially distinguished performance—made available to a wider audience than those who were in Dublin's National Concert-Hall and those who heard the broadcast. Maybe all that the 'ordinary listener' really needs of The Bohemian Girl is Heddle Nash's ''When other lips'' (now on Pearl (CD) GEMMCD9319, 8/89); but for those curious about the whole thing this version can—if without much enthusiasm—be recommended. The recording is bright, forward, one-dimensional, with the orchestra often rather too prominent. The spoken contributions from the Radio Eireann repertory company are neither here nor there. Standard stage English is the accent aimed at, but a few lines from a peasant who has evidently arrived in Pressburg from Ireland are more fun.'