FULL THE BUTTON MOULDER (Edward Lambert) Oundle 1990 Prince William School

Information on the Performance

• Work Title: The Button Moulder  
• Composer: Lambert Edward  
• Libretto: Edward Lambert after Ibsen’s Peer Gynt    Libretto Text, Libretto Index
• Venue & Opera Company: Prince William School, Oundle, UK  
• Recorded: 1990
• Type: Staged Opera Live
• Singers: students at Prince William School, Oundle.
• Conductor: unknown  
• Orchestra:
• Stage Director:   
• Costume Designer:   

Information about the Recording

• Published by: The Music Troupe  
• Date Published: 2020  
• Format: Streaming
• Quality Video: 3 Audio:3
• Subtitles: nosubs  

• ADDITIONAL INFORMATION ON THIS PERFORMANCE

  The Button Moulder comes to collect old Peer Gynt’s soul: playing for time, Peer reviews his life.We see him as a brazen youngster absconding with a young girl on her wedding day. He is almost torn to pieces by Trolls in the Hall of the Mountain King. He bids farewell to his dying mother and to Solveig, the girl who’s devoted to him, and goes off to conquer the world. We see him as a wealthy middle-aged business man who exploits any situation to his advantage and narrowly escapes a plot against him. His ambitions to be Emperor lead him to the Madhouse where he presides over a scene of death and destruction which lays bare his soul. Back home, Solveig, now a blind old lady, still waits for him: and so does the Button Moulder….
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  Peer Gynt, with its mixture of reality and fantasy, is a work young people can appreciate on many different levels. It is notoriously hard to put on the stage (“Do it on the radio” says the heroine in Educating Rita) and Ibsen recognized the need for music to play an important role in underlining its mythical atmosphere. Here much of the play has been followed quite closely, although it has been cut to provide a simple dramatic shape and there has been some updating. The music, intended as an odyssey in itself, draws on a wide variety of styles ranging from medieval music to that of the present day, and from different parts of the world, and some of it originated from projects leading to the production.

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