Opera

Forget the pollsters and political pundits — English National Opera called it first and called it Right when it programmed Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance to open just days after the general election. Who else is the target audience for an operetta that guilelessly proclaims, ‘We love our House of Peers’, and celebrates both the dynastic possibilities of marriage and the material aspirations of a Major-General who bought his ancestors along with his faux-baronial castle, if not Tories (shy or otherwise)? But if ENO has hit a political home run, the same can’t be said artistically of a production Gilbert himself might have described as ‘skim milk masquerading as cream’. Mike Leigh swore he would never direct an opera.

‘What gives your lies such power?’ asks the bewildered Sicilian leader in Szymanowski’s opera Krol Roger. The question is addressed to a charismatic shepherd, on trial for propagating a lascivious new religion of unbridled sensuality. Roger’s wife, Roxana, has already converted along with many of his subjects, while the city’s conservative and clerical factions clamour for the blasphemer’s death. But Roger resolves to see for himself. Or rather hear for himself.

Three staples of the Italian repertoire, performed and seen in very different circumstances, have confirmed my view that they deserve their place in the repertoire, however many other works by their composers or contemporaries may be unearthed. I saw OperaUpClose’s version of Donizetti’s The Elixir of Love in the Mumford Theatre Cambridge, an underused venue that has the advantage of being 200 yards from my house. It is by far the best thing I have seen OUC do, and I regret catching only the last of many performances, but the only one here, where there is almost no interest in opera.

Big slats of orange, burning yellows, an Adriatic in electric blue: I wish I’d bought my sunglasses to the Royal Opera’s latest revival of Il turco in Italia. Moshe Leiser and Patrice Caurier’s production of Rossini’s opera buffo first burst on to the Covent Garden stage in 2005, and its shrieking colours haven’t dimmed with the years. For good or bad, this is one show when you do actually come out whistling the sets (they’re by Christian Fenouillat). I was humming Agostino Cavalca’s costumes too, from gypsy confusion through bouncing fezzes to the absurd glitter of the climactic masked ball.

This week, some 200 years since Goya’s ‘The Disasters of War’, almost 80 years after Picasso’s ‘Guernica’, and over 50 since Malcolm Browne won a Pulitzer for his photograph of a self-immolating Buddhist monk, the British media found itself questioning whether art should, or even could, ever represent the horrors of recent history. It was a conversation that picked minutely over the ethical responsibilities of an opera based on the events of 9/11 — was it too soon? how would the families feel? would it exploit tragedy for drama? — but one whose ceaseless moral whys and wherefores prevented it ever arriving at the only real artistic question: how?

The Ice Break is Michael Tippett’s fourth opera, first produced at Covent Garden in 1977 and rarely produced anywhere since, though there is an excellent recording of it. Its brevity (75 minutes) rather took the wind out of the Royal Opera’s sails, since they had envisaged a full evening’s piece. So, I imagine, did its wackiness, though more extreme things in that line were to follow from Tippett. There are numerous ingredients in The Ice Break, but it gives the impression that its composer was so fascinated by all of them that he restlessly moves from one to another, leaving his audience to see whether they can make sense of them. As with his previous opera, The Knot Garden, almost all the characters have strange names — Lev, Yuri, Olympion, Astron etc.

Before the jukebox musical, back when Mamma Mia!, Jersey Boys and Viva Forever! were still dollar-shaped glints in an as-yet-unborn producer’s eye, there was the pasticcio opera. Literally a musical ‘pastry’ or ‘pie’, these brought together arias from different operas, often by different composers, in a single work, designed as a way of feeding an 18th-century public whose appetite for opera was greater than composers’ ability to sate it with new music. Everyone did it — Vivaldi, Mozart, Haydn, and of course that ultimate musical pragmatist Handel — but that didn’t make the practice any the more respectable, as one satirist’s pasticcio ‘recipe’ makes clear.

Brecht/Weill’s Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny was premièred in 1930, Auden/Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress in 1951. Twenty-one years separate them, but it seems, as one looks back, enormously more than that. Think of 1994 and now, no time at all, and not only for an ageing opera reviewer. Both works tend to be routinely referred to as masterpieces, but seeing them both in the space of three days — Mahagonny at the Royal Opera, The Rake’s Progress at the Royal Academy of Music — I felt fairly strongly that they are both patchy pieces, neither representative of their composer at or even near his best.

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson loved little girls. He loved to tell them stories, he loved to feed them jam, he loved to set them puzzles, and he loved to take their photographs. On 25 March, 1863, he composed a list of 107 prepubescent portrait subjects, arranged alphabetically by forename. Below the Agneses came the Alices, including Alice Liddell, the little girl for whom he created Alice in Wonderland. Mostly good-mannered, occasionally lachrymose and stuffed full of half-remembered governess-led learning, the fictional Alice displays behaviour quite out of step with her age. Instead of doing what she is told to do by the creatures she meets, she behaves like an adolescent (though adolescence was to Dodgson a destructive force) and learns to disobey.

When is an opera not an opera? How much can you strip and peel away, or extend and graft on to the genre, before it simply ceases to be itself? These questions dominated a week in which directors turned vivisectors for new productions — reimaginings — of Purcell’s Indian Queen (ENO) and Mozart’s Don Giovanni (Silent Opera). Anyone familiar with Peter Sellars’s work will know better than to expect any paring back from the larger-than-life American. Amplification is the order of the day for Purcell’s semi-opera — expanded from a trim 50 minutes of unfinished music yoked to a play by Dryden and Howard to a three-and-a-half-hour musico-dramatic spectacle. If that sounds pretentious and portentous, then that’s about right.

Is there a more beautiful aria than ‘O mio babbino caro’ from Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi? There are more overwhelming moments in opera, to be sure, but few arias can rival it for the way its beauty kicks you in the back of the knees; its gentle rocking motion causes your shoulders to slump while the little floated top notes dilate the music’s gaze, drawing the listener irresistibly into its secret promise of untroubled bliss. Nor does it help that the aria’s whole point is to be irresistible. ‘Daddy dearest, I love him so,’ sings Schicchi’s teenage daughter Lauretta.

La Donna del Lago, based on a poem by Sir Walter Scott, is one of the nine serious, dramatic operas that Rossini wrote for Teatro San Carlo in Naples between 1815 and 1822. At the time the opera was produced he had at his disposal not only a great soprano, for whom he wrote with considerable flair, but two expert tenors and a contralto taking the part of the young male lover. In the first-ever production at the Met in New York that has just opened, the colours move from the sultry sky of Scotland in the first act to the starkness of a field after battle and then the sumptuous golds in King James V’s palace in the second act. Something like this happens too in the vocal writing, which ranges from the stunningly beautiful to tones that are darker and more restrained.

ENO’s new production of Wagner’s The Mastersingers of Nuremberg is a triumph about which only the most niggling of reservations can be set. Every aspect — orchestral, vocal, production — works in harmony to effect one of the richest, most intensely absorbing, energising and delightful afternoons and evenings I have ever spent in the theatre. It is above all a team effort, and since individuality and teamwork are very much what Mastersingers is about, that made it still more satisfying. However, two people must be singled out: Richard Jones for the finest of all the productions of his I’ve seen. This one comes from Cardiff, where it was unveiled almost five years ago.

It’s easy to forget what a mess of an art form opera once was. For its first 100 years it had no name, it had no fixed address, it didn’t really know who it was or what it was doing. You’d find it at schools, at weddings, at political functions. It was an artistic whore for hire. Embroiled in an epic tug-of-war as to which of the three art forms — word, music or dance — should be primary, it was also lithe and experimental. In fact, it was more like performance art than anything you’ll witness in a modern opera house. Why this historical detour?

In one of the more peculiar concerts that I have been to at the Royal Festival Hall, Vladimir Jurowski conducted excerpts from Das Rheingold in the first half of the programme, and Rachmaninov’s little-known opera The Miserly Knight in the second half. The idea, I gleaned from a pre-concert chat by the conductor and others, was that the first half would shed some light on the second, showing that although Rachmaninov, at one time an industrious operatic conductor, almost certainly never conducted Wagner, he was strongly influenced by him. The point seems academic, unless you are interested in the minutiae of musical history. Anyway, the Rheingold excerpts failed miserably, on their own terms and as a portent.

What a week to stage an opera about art’s power to challenge institutional authority, oppression — even death itself. Orfeo’s weapon might be a lyre rather than a pen, but the metaphor is silhouetted clearly against the monochrome backdrop of the Royal Opera’s new production of Monteverdi’s opera. Director Michael Boyd, former artistic director of the RSC, has taken a world of nymphs and shepherds and stripped it for conceptual parts. A battle between Gods and men is reinvented as a struggle between individual creative autonomy and faceless obedience to church and state. In Tom Piper’s designs, meadows and bucolic loveliness are out and 24-style metal walkways and gantries are in.

Any adequate performance of Tristan und Isolde, and the first night of the Royal Opera’s production was at least that, leaves you wondering what to do with the rest of your life, as Wagner both feared and hoped it would. What Tristan does — one of the things — is to present an image of romantic love, in both its torments and its ecstasies, which makes everything else seem trivial; and at the same time to undercut that image by asserting the claims of ordinary life, but in the subtlest way.