How should you feel at the end of a Ring cycle, before — at any rate if you’re a reviewer — starting to list the pros and cons? Nothing very simple, obviously, but some kind of exaltation, of however confused or complex a kind. Famously Wagner had severe problems with the conclusion to the cycle: in the very first version he had Brünnhilde freeing the Nibelungs, including Alberich, and leading Siegfried and Grane up to Valhalla, where the gods, too, were to survive.
There is no experience faintly comparable to sitting in an opera house at the opening of Wagner’s Ring cycle, knowing you will be watching and listening to the whole thing in the space of a week. The opening E flat, especially when it emerges as it does at the Royal Opera in total darkness, the pit as well as the auditorium, is thrilling beyond belief, and as the music slowly begins to move the sense of being in at the beginning and not knowing what will happen is overwhelming, however familiar you may be with the Ring. Wagner’s dynamic instructions are very specific — at no point in the prelude should the sound rise above piano, though that is a direction that no conductor, almost, obeys.
‘Tell a dream and lose a reader’ was one of Henry James’s most immediately practical if obvious pieces of advice to fellow authors. Dying in 1916, he didn’t have much chance to experience surrealism in its numerous manifestations, and one can’t imagine his responding positively if he had. For the abandonment of memory, of motive, of logic, of any of the categories by which we make sense of experience is gleefully embraced by surrealists — and by no one more thoroughly than Georges Neveux, in his play Juliette, or the key of dreams.
As any regular opera-goer knows, next year is uniquely one for three major operatic centenaries, two of them, Verdi’s and Wagner’s, bicentenaries, while Britten was born only 100 years ago, but seems to have been dead for a very long time. So we can expect numerous series — of performances, recordings, broadcast radio and TV features — and probably quite a few biographies and critical studies.
Going to the Riverside Studios in Hammersmith for the annual season of Tête à Tête is a chancy affair, though one can be sure of a very high standard of performance, both vocally and instrumentally. It helps, of course, that none of the studios is large, so the singers can produce their voices at conversational level, though many of them choose not to. As always, there is a big range of operas to choose from, so the choice of the pair I shall be discussing was based on no principle other than that the subject of one of them intrigued me, and while I was about it I saw another. In fact, I saw two more, but they were very brief, about ten minutes each, and performed in the Riverside Studios foyer, as a warm-up for the audience.
Glyndebourne’s last offering this season is one of the most stylish things it has done for a very long time, Ravel’s two brief operas directed by Laurent Pelly, who was responsible for its brilliant Hänsel und Gretel in 2008. It may seem odd that Ravel’s pair — though they were conceived quite separately, and years apart — don’t get done more often, but they both demand elaborate sets, and would just be boring if not unintelligible without them. Actually, I find L’heure espagnole, first performed in 1911, boring anyway, but that seems to be a minority view.
My first visit to Dorset Opera, last year, left me very impressed. If anything this year was even better, though I found one of the three operas dull. In last year’s programme, I seem to remember, we were promised an Olympically themed opera, Jesse Owens, but that didn’t materialise, nor was there any mention of it. As usual, after ten intensive days of rehearsal, with all concerned living in Bryanston School, Dorset Opera puts on one opera the first night, another one (this year two) the second, the first on the third, and on the last day the first is a matinée. This year’s mainstay was Il Trovatore, an opera that I have never seen satisfactorily performed, despite its musical unsinkability.
If I said what I really thought about Götterdämmerung at the Longborough Festival, of which I saw the last of four performances, anyone who wasn’t there would think I was madly exaggerating; but anyone who was there would agree — I have run into several people who were at one or another of the performances, and they were all breathless with excitement and admiration for this astounding achievement. Raving doesn’t make for enjoyable reading, I realise, so I’ll try to be a bit more specific. In the first place it was a tremendous team effort with, at its centre, the fanatical dedication and experience of the conductor, Anthony Negus, colleague of Reginald Goodall but very much his own man in particular points of interpretation.
The Royal Opera season concluded, as is now customary, with an evening in which the participants in what used to be the Vilar Young Artists programme, in the light of events renamed the Jette Parker Young Artists, are paraded to show their progress. They make a truly international team, as the slip inside the programme indicated: ‘Ji-Min Park has withdrawn...the role of Il Conte di Libenskof will be sung by Ji Hyun Kim...the role of Zefirino...will now be sung by ZhengZhong Zhou.’ For the first time the programme consisted of a single work; previously it has been made up of excerpts from several.
Verdi’s art reaches its summit in Otello, and in doing so reveals both his greatness and a paradox that seems inseparable from it. The plot is harrowing, more so than any of his other operas, and Verdi exploits its agonising capacities to the full. The glorious love duet which concludes Act I is something to make the most of, for that is the end of happiness, as the act’s final bars suggest. From then on it is a series of dreadful scenes in which the chief characters, deliberately or not, create as much suffering as possible — suffering which, at least at crucial points, the audience is bound to share in a satisfactory performance.
There are two places in Le Nozze di Figaro where the music undergoes a brief but potent change, which indicates how much deeper the undercurrents are than the busy actions we are witnessing. If either of these is short-changed or mismanaged, the whole work is rendered less moving and serious than it really is. The first and less conspicuous is in the finale to Act II, when the Count is trying to trap Figaro about the letter of assignation. The Count says he can tell from Figaro’s face that he is lying, and Figaro replies that in that case his face is the liar. The music to which he sings that disappears briefly, but then reappears as a kind of prayer or hymn to which Susanna and Figaro, with the support of the Countess, ask the Count to bless their marriage.
In the late 1970s the Royal Opera announced that it would be performing Berlioz’s Les Troyens and Wagner’s Ring in alternate years, the idea being that the two great 19th-century operatic epics would prove equally popular. We never found out whether they would have done, since while the Ring cycles continued, Les Troyens never got off the ground, and has not been performed complete at Covent Garden for 40 years. My hopes for the new production were extremely high, and only moderately dashed by Jonas Kaufmann’s withdrawal from the role of Enée, one of grand opera’s least rewarding: as a character he is no less unsympathetic than Aeneas always is, and most of his music, especially his big aria of remorse and self-justification, is strenuous and unconvincing.
This week’s opera-going afforded one example of truly great art, and one of its plausible counterfeit. To deal with the latter first: no one can deny that Billy Budd is one of Britten’s most accomplished pieces, a virtuoso exercise in the use of large orchestral forces, and in restriction to male post-pubescent singers. And musically it is done almost complete justice in the new production by English National Opera, conducted with staggering ferocity, tenderness and occasional sluggishness by Edward Gardner. The chorus was the most lusty I have heard in the past 35 years at the Coliseum, with the opening of Act II sounding like the gathering of the Gibichungs — uncannily like it, in fact.
Welsh National Opera’s new production of La Bohème, which I saw last week in Birmingham, is striking in a variety of ways, but its outstanding feature is the conducting of Carlo Rizzi. One tends to think that of all operas Bohème can look after itself, and up to a point that is true. Bashed out metronomically on a pub piano, or dispersed underneath the arches at Waterloo, or most absurdly of all made into a DVD and set in ‘real’ locations, with actual snow falling, it remains inviolate, though that isn’t perhaps the first word to use in connection with anything Puccinian. Yet every now and then it gets the royal treatment, and how much more satisfying it is when it does.
It struck me for the first time at the latest revival of David McVicar’s production of Richard Strauss’s Salome that this opera, Strauss’s first to maintain a place in the repertory, and its successor Elektra are, for all their differences, companion pieces. Even before reading the late Patrick O’Connor’s excellent article ‘Happy Families’, the best and least pretentious in the programme book, I’d been reflecting on how the two operas deal with the classic issue of the powerful and disturbing relationship between father and daughter: in the case of Salome, it is a stepfather in love with his stepdaughter, but that hardly alters the point; while in Elektra it is a daughter obsessed with her father.
English Touring Opera ended its spring tour in Cambridge this year with three performances of The Barber of Seville and two of Eugene Onegin, both in English translation, the former done without surtitles, the latter with. Neither of them really needed them, since the Arts Theatre is small and most of the singers enunciated with a clarity one hopes they retain in the careers one hopes some of them go on to have. Barber was moderately successful, Onegin almost wholly so. Comedy is much harder to pull off than tragedy, as everyone knows, but singers don’t necessarily remember and act on that when they come to perform, and too much of this production, directed by Thomas Guthrie, consisted of people doing funny walks, sticking their stomachs out and other trappings of absurdity.
It’s taken me a shockingly long time to realise how great Verdi’s Falstaff is, and I still wouldn’t agree that it is his greatest opera, which fully paid-up Verdians tend to think. It may be a measure of my progress, though, that I got a lot of pleasure out of the new production at Covent Garden, by Robert Carsen, even while recognising that it is a shallow, wilfully unsearching account of a work much of whose magic is extraordinarily subtle, not only for Verdi, but for anyone. Carsen’s production, and the musical side, too, are on a level with the Shakespeare play from which Falstaff derives, which is agreed by everyone to be a potboiler.
Pharmaceutical considerations were uppermost in my mind as I made my way to the Barbican Hall for Philip Glass’s Einstein on the Beach, a production which began touring in Michigan in January and ends in Hong Kong next March. I imagine that marijuana is probably the best preparation and accompaniment for seeing it, but that makes me feel merely giggly and stupid, so I took a modafinil, primarily intended for shift workers, insomniacs and examinees, to aid concentration and combat sleeplessness, clearly an indispensable medicament for opera critics too. But in this case it didn’t work. Einstein, which lasts about four and a half hours, has no interval, so the audience was invited to come and go as it felt fit.
The new production of Wagner’s first indisputable masterpiece The Flying Dutchman by English National Opera is a decided success, the best account of what contemporary producers make strangely heavy weather of that I have seen in decades. For some reason they find it hard to focus on the title role, and make it all a dream of Senta, or the Steersman. Jonathan Kent presents the Dutchman on Wagner’s terms, even though he can’t resist beginning the opera — and during the Overture, absurdly — with Senta as a small child being put to bed by her father Daland, and reading the story of the Dutchman, while projected mighty waves and a vast hulk loom excitingly.
Weber’s Der Freischütz is the finest neglected opera in or hovering on the edge of the canon. It’s not entirely bewildering why it should be, but there are ways of coping with structural defects, which is what it suffers from. Yet I don’t think there has been a UK performance of it since Edinburgh in 2002 (not counting the Berlioz version last year at the Proms), when Jonas Kaufmann sang Max in a concert performance. Perhaps concert performances are the best idea, since the one last week at the Barbican, under Sir Colin Davis, was thrilling and moving.
