Culture

A few weeks ago I was speculating anxiously on the possibility that even the greatest masterpieces, in opera or other art forms, might be exhaustible, or that anyway I might not be able to find anything fresh in them, and therefore might succumb either to a state of mild boredom, or else, like some critics, irritably demand that every production ‘break new ground’, as if it is the job of directors and performers to cater primarily to jaded palates.

They are lighting the candles at Covent Garden to honour one of the great singers of our age. Thomas Allen (as he was then) first appeared on the stage of the Royal Opera House in 1972, as Donald in Billy Budd, when Benjamin Britten was alive and his opera not nearly so highly thought of as it is today. This month he returns as a long-standing knight of the realm and, so far as our major house is concerned, a monarch to boot. He may have been born a commoner in County Durham 68 years ago but the baritone’s stellar international reputation granted him regal status many moons ago, particularly in the great Mozart roles.

The Enchanted Island is a baroque concoction at the New York Met which has been widely touted and last Saturday was relayed worldwide to cinemas, a transmission that went less smoothly than any I have seen before, with some sharp variations of volume and a temporary complete breakdown. On the whole, the sound level is very high, as if everyone is singing at the top of their voice; while it’s nice to have ample volume, it is clearly and disconcertingly a misrepresentation. Danielle de Niese, for instance, has a small voice which just about fills Glyndebourne’s house. Here she sounded like a Wagnerian on the make, with coloratura sounding like ‘Hojotoho!’.

Giulio Cesare was the first of Handel’s operas to return to general favour after more than a century and a half of neglect, and I suppose that it is still the most frequently performed. That isn’t surprising, since its plot is, by Handelian standards, simplicity itself, and the level of inspiration in the arias is astonishingly high. There is a problem with it, at least in the UK at the moment, and that is that David McVicar’s Glyndebourne production of 2005 has been so widely and wildly acclaimed, and distributed, that new productions are bound to be seen in its shadow.

‘It is impossible that you should not have sensed,’ wrote Wagner to Ludwig II shortly before the first performance of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, ‘under the opera’s quaint superficies of popular humour, the profound melancholy, the lament, the cry of distress of poetry in chains, and its reincarnation, its new birth, its irresistible magic power achieving mastery over the common and the base.’ The King, and anyone else, might well not sense that in the latest revival of Graham Vick’s production of the opera at Covent Garden.

Having seen and been most impressed by two New York Met relays of Wagner operas on the big screen, I was interested to see how the largely close-up medium would cope with a Handel opera, where the challenges are quite different. Both composers have single characters singing for large stretches of time, but, while Wagner’s are always involved in a process of feeling, so that there is a sense of exploration at every moment, Handel’s are immersed in states of feeling.

The time of year is approaching when Nutcrackers take over from opera, and then a further round of Traviatas gets under way. But that does at least mean that it’s also the time when the schools of music put on their end-of-term operas, and this season is unusually promising. Next week Sir Colin Davis is conducting Berlioz’s Béatrice et Bénédict at the Royal Academy of Music, and the week after the Royal College of Music is staging two equally rare Bizet operas, Djamileh and Le Docteur Miracle. I doubt whether either of them will give me more, or as much, pleasure as the Guildhall School’s production of Nicolai’s Die lustigen Weiber von Windsor (The Merry Wives).

I only very recently began going to live Met relays in the cinema, but if you can get in it’s very well worthwhile. In Cambridge, where the sound is so-so, as I discovered going to Siegfried, there is no hope of getting in except on the day booking starts. In Huntingdon, where the sound is fantastic, there was just a handful of oldsters for Die Walküre in May, who were rewarded with the best Act I that I have ever seen, thanks to the electrifying conducting of James Levine and the amazing Siegmund of Jonas Kaufmann; and the rest of the performance was of a high standard. Siegfried skirted the sensational, thanks to the last-minute replacement in the title role, Jay Hunter Morris. Remember that name.

Rameau is the great baroque master who has yet to be properly rediscovered, at any rate in the UK. It isn’t easy to see why, when one contemplates the Handel-mania that has been sweeping the land for the past quarter-century. Rameau is at least as melodically fertile, his scoring is extraordinary and often extraordinarily lovely, and his plots are far easier to grasp. And while Handel’s operas grind to a dramatic halt every few minutes for an extended expression of feeling, and there is only rarely the sense of interaction between characters, with Rameau we have that sense constantly. The main trouble, I think, certainly the main trouble for me, is the fairly frequent intrusion of dance sequences, which can drain the urgency from the action with lethal efficiency.

Compelling, succinct, elemental, The Flying Dutchman, Wagner’s first indisputable masterwork, wouldn’t seem to present any great problems for an opera house, unless his directions about heaving ships are taken too literally — very unlikely — so why does one never see it well produced? The Royal Opera has made especially heavy weather of it, but not in the right sense, for the last quarter-century. Tim Albery’s 2009 production has egregious faults, and few merits: above all, it fails to establish any potent atmosphere, and the singers are left largely to their own devices, with unhelpful scenery to stagger around on. The present revival is nonetheless very worthwhile, thanks to the powerful rendering of the two leading roles.

Whereas Don Giovanni seems, for assorted reasons, to be unfloatable at present, The Marriage of Figaro is virtually unsinkable, with Così somewhere between. In general it seems that comedies go in and out of favour and fashion more than tragedies or ‘straight’ works, though Figaro may be a glorious exception, like Die Meistersinger. It is horrible to contemplate the possibility of a world which was indifferent to their charms and profundities. Even so, the new production of Figaro at ENO gives some cause for alarm. Fiona Shaw, who has not previously produced a classic opera, sees the work as a maze, a harmless enough notion unless you take it that in the middle of a maze there must be a Minotaur, the only candidate for that in Figaro being the Count.

  Street Scene may well be Kurt Weill’s most successful work from his American period, but seeing it in as good a production as the Opera Group’s at the Young Vic was cause for both enjoyment and reservations. In the next couple of weeks it will be touring to Basingstoke, Edinburgh, Newcastle and Hull, so plenty of people will have and should take the chance of seeing it. I’d go again if I were nearer one of those places, for Weill is always at least interesting, though not always quite in the way that he wanted to be — he intended, like Brecht, that we should be filled with indignation about many of the scenes he presents, but we’re much more likely to be beguiled by catchy melodies.