Colin Clarke: Gordon Getty- Goodbye, Mr. Chips

Gordon Getty

But it is Chips’s final monolog, interspersed with responses from the boys he “calls on” and sonically backlit by the chorus, that is so beautiful. Getty just avoids the saccharine here in his melodic writing. “My boys” is Chips’s final cry, and the opera’s end, cutting to the quick.

All the roles here are more than creditably taken, and the orchestra and chorus are beyond criticism; all of Getty’s tighter corners are negotiated with ease. Conductor Dennis Doubin paces the flow superbly, ensuring a sense of cohesion throughout the many time shuffles. The booklet includes a full libretto, plus a brief essay by Getty himself and program notes by James M. Keller. As “an opera re-imagined for film,” due to COVID restrictions, Goodbye, Mr. Chips received its premiere in November 2021 at a screening in San Rafael, CA. With his most recent opera, Gordon Getty takes his place in the pantheon of significant American opera composers.

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This is Gordon Getty’s fourth opera, and Fanfare has done him proud, as has Pentatone in releasing these works in such handsome packaging, and with such detailed documentation. And here is the latest: an opera on the famous Goodbye, Mr. Chips, a novella by James Hilton published in 1934. The story has formed the basis of several adaptations for the screen, big and small (two for cinema, two for television). It follows a teacher, Mr. Chipping (“Chips”), his trials, travails, and loves, revolving around an English school in wartime.

It would be good to see this on video at some point: Getty’s own essay details how certain actions on stage are used to effect sudden changes in time (the change of Mr. Chips’s age from 85 to 48, for example). Also, the use of the singer who takes the principal role of Kathie (Chips’s wife) to return “through” Linford is something we can hear on disc but which would be even more effective if seen. There is also the dramatic device of bringing back the domineering headmaster Ralston at the end, in a scene based on one of Hilton’s short stories.

One aria from Goodbye, Mr. Chips has been reviewed before: a version of Kathie’s aria in a version with piano on another Pentatone release, Melody Moore: An American Song Album (Melody Moore, with Bradley Moore on piano). It is of course good to hear the entire piece and with orchestra, and it is indeed Melody Moore who sings the part of Kathie, Mr. Chips’s wife who dies so tragically in childbirth (the infant does not survive either). Kathie’s first entrance, literally with the words, “Goodbye, Mister Chips!”, is radiant here.

The opera begins with a Rückblick: Merrivale reflects on how Mr. Chips changed Brookfield School, where he taught for 48 years. Mr. Chips is now 85 and narrates his story, via singer Nathan Granner, compellingly. Getty’s music is reactive to the text (he forged his own libretto) and, while sometimes dramatic and more often lyrical, generally lacks just that last iota of memorability. Getty does, however, create a coherent and appropriate sound world—cozy, warm, and nostalgic—for an English boys’ boarding school of yore. His music can be stirring, however, as when Rivers, at a time when Chips’s job is threatened, reassures him that “the governors are with you to a man.”

There are perhaps elements of Benjamin Britten in the vocal writing: “It was 37 years ago” sings Chips just prior to Kathie’s second entrance, and it does rather put me in mind of the prolog to The Turn of the Screw (“It is a curious story”).

Kathie’s re-entrance takes us back to 1897 and the announcement of her pregnancy. The sense of joy Getty sets up is certainly palpable: The Barbary Coast Orchestra is disciplined yet jubilant. Later, Getty’s use of percussion is most evocative as, one month later, Chips and Kathie celebrate New Year’s together. As the pregnancy starts to go awry, Getty places Kathie’s previously excerpted aria (“Chips, darling, it’s started”) here, a real highlight of the piece and beautifully sung. The warmer scoring of the aria in the context of the full opera still includes piano but is necessarily lusher. Actually, I prefer the piano version; it seems more desolate, more predictive of what will come. Moore is brilliant in both versions: Her voice flies freely in the climactic higher moments, yet can sing conspiratorially in the lower registers and dynamics. In context, her aria is heard as an insert within Chips’s ongoing narration. Kathie’s death later furnishes a “hook” for Chips’s prayer for Grayson’s father, who was on the Titanic when it sank: Chips prays to Kathie to intercede on behalf of Grayson’s father. That is arguably Nathan Granner’s finest moment, although in terms of stamina (both vocal and dramatic), his huge monolog in the second act is a real achievement.

Because of the use of memory and variable time placement in the opera, Kathie can indeed reappear, as she does in the second act (Moore is just as convincing as before). In addition, there is a “dream sequence” in act II. This use of “time shuffling,” and on a more immediate level also of juxtaposition of memories, is the opera’s greatest strength, structurally. It offers not just a “retelling” of the well-known story but an alternative mode of telling suited to both stage and opera, and this is Getty’s greatest achievement.

Both Chips and Merrivale act as narrators, looking back in time. Of the two, baritone Lester Lynch’s Merrivale is the more convincing; Nathan Granner’s tenor is not always quite as substantial or confident. The scene where it is suggested that Mr. Chips should retire features Ralston (who suggests it), sung incredibly strongly by Kevin Short, who doubles as Rivers in the very next scene.

Bruce Rameker is a convincing West, who is in trouble for fighting. It’s a pity that when Chips tells West he has “200 lines” it does not, in the opera, reflect back to Chips’s early scene with students and how he tries, to no avail, to discipline them with the threat of lines. It is Lynch, though, who shines as the finest exponent here, alongside Moore. His Germont père in the Dresden Pentatone Verdi La traviata (with Oropesa as Violetta) was perhaps less inspired (a view shared by both fellow reviewers Fogel and Tuttle in Fanfare 46:2), but I find it hard to find fault with him here.

The chorus is used effectively, framing act I, marked “unseen” in its first instance and “offstage” in the second. (I am unsure of the difference, not having actually seen the opera, but “unseen” could imply onstage but not visible.) It is Chips who has the last word, however, in act I; a similar process informs act II. The opening chorus of the second act is a school song; the closing choral number goes back to the alma mater of act I. But it is Chips’s final monolog, interspersed with responses from the boys he “calls on” and sonically backlit by the chorus, that is so beautiful. Getty just avoids the saccharine here in his melodic writing. “My boys” is Chips’s final cry, and the opera’s end, cutting to the quick.