An opera in one act by Holst
Cast in order of appearance: [see below]

(Margaret Neville broadcasts by permission of Sadler's Wells Opera Company)

Imogen Holst writes:
The ballet music from my father's opera The Perfect Fool is often played, but the opera itself has seldom been heard since it was first performed at Covent Garden in May 1923. The members of that first-night audience were bewildered. They were given no programme notes, and I can remember their puzzled expressions as they wondered whether they ought to laugh, or whether they were supposed to recognise some deep, symbolic meaning in the story. My father had no idea that the work would prove so perplexing. To him, it was just a fairy story about a Princess who was wooed by an elderly Wizard and an Italian Troubadour and a Wagnerian Wanderer, but who fell in love with an inarticulate fool who was nearly always asleep.

The libretto is his own. The words are excellent to sing, but there are patches of spoken dialogue which I find embarrassing because they sound like an end-of-term game of charades. Fortunately, a lot of the dialogue has been cut for broadcasting, and the music gains when it is allowed to speak for itself. One can still laugh when the Troubadour's chorus of retainers become 'conventionally agitated,' and when the Wanderer's 'Nay, oh nay! Noisiest negative!' is drowned in a surge of trombones. (Only an ex-addict of Wagner's operas could have written quite such a devastating parody as this.) The orchestration is brilliant throughout, and in this performance Charles Groves manages to convey my father's sense of humour with complete understanding and infectious enjoyment