Michael Tanner

It’s more than three years since there was a production of Wagner’s ultimate masterpiece, Tristan und Isolde, in the UK, and I have been looking forward eagerly to Welsh National Opera’s revival of the one they share with Scottish Opera. Yannis Kokkos, who was the original designer and director, pays tribute in the programme to the great Swiss designer Adolphe Appia, and his sets, spare, concentrating the action and suggesting a lot that isn’t to be seen on stage, are rather similar to the ones that Toscanini used in La Scala in 1923. For me, they are virtually ideal, lovely to look at and enabling the singers to move freely but ensuring that every gesture they make tells.

Welsh National Opera’s new production of Monteverdi’s finest surviving opera, Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria, is an almost unqualified success, and one hopes that the five cities that it tours to after leaving the company’s home in Cardiff will give it the reception it deserves, so that WNO’s cutting back of its tour next spring will be only a temporary measure. The opera is directed by David Alden, whose L’incoronazione di Poppea eight years ago was annoyingly gimmick-ridden. Il ritorno has its fair share of contemporary producers’ clichés, including Ulisse in a wheelchair for much of the time — I thought that one had really been exhausted with Glyndebourne’s lethal Idomeneo.

Recently the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation interviewed me about some of my views on Wagner, as part of their featuring the first complete Ring cycle to be performed in Canada. In the course of the interview, I was asked how I would like to see the Ring and Wagner’s music dramas in general staged and produced, in the light of my expressions of distaste for all the recent Ring productions I had seen. Fortunately, that was a question I had often asked myself, so I was able to reply fairly promptly: I just don’t know. Or rather, I do know up to a limited point, but I’m bashful about saying what I think.

The Bolshoi Opera’s production of Boris Godunov, which they brought to Covent Garden last week, is in almost all respects in a time warp, though it turned out to be a most agreeable one. For the first time in many years, we were able to hear Rimsky-Korsakov’s version of the opera, which has been so widely execrated for its well-meant efforts to ‘correct’ Mussorgsky’s barbarous harmonies, and to enrich his orchestration, that one would only admit to enjoying it to one’s most confidential musical confessor.

PUSH! is the first opera about childbirth, so Tête à Tête claims, and I’m sure rightly. Opera usually likes to concentrate on the other end of life, audiences much preferring to see people leaving than arriving. It would be absurd to make very large claims for PUSH!, and I’m sure Tête à Tête wouldn’t want to. It is a brilliantly entertaining and in two prolonged scenes moving piece, with a dazzling text by Anna Reynolds and effective music by David Bruce.

It’s rare that both of Ravel’s operas appear in one programme, indeed that they appear at all. The RCM, as one might expect, did the fullest justice to both of them, and made clear how immeasurably superior the second, L’enfant et les sortilèges, is to the first, L’heure espagnole. L’heure is entirely a comedy of situation, with a libidinous woman coping with an embarrassing superfluity of importunate lovers by having a muleteer carry them upstairs and down in grandfather clocks, until she realises, with her husband’s acquiescence, that it’s the dumb muleteer himself who is the goods. The music is often merely illustrative, and reveals too fully Ravel’s fascination with machinery.

The Royal Opera has revived David McVicar’s production of Le Nozze di Figaro after only five months, but already with a ‘revival director’, Stéphane Marlot, who has modified a fair number of details, but not, unfortunately, the over-busyness of some of it, including the Overture, during which we see huge numbers of servants bustling and indulging in very McVicarish horseplay. However, since Colin Davis is conducting, the obvious thing is to close your eyes for four minutes and hear that hyper-familiar piece delivered with incomparable verve and an underlying threat of insurrection. It is wonderful how, throughout, Davis illuminates the opera without any nudging, gear-changing, strange emphases.

Opera Holland Park is suddenly fashionable, even people who have never been near it writing about how wonderful they hear it is and vowing to go, while as usual those of us who have been saying that since it started in 1996 ask ourselves what makes us so implausible that we aren’t taken seriously on such matters, if at all. OHP has made a speciality of so-called verismo operas, though what is ‘true’ about Giordano’s Fedora I wouldn’t like to say. Although it ostensibly deals with Russian ‘nihilists’, mention of them obtrudes in the text with grotesque irrelevance.

Bartók’s Duke Bluebeard’s Castle is proving to be one of the enduring operas of the 20th century, despite its inconvenient length, or brevity, and thus the problem of what to pair it with for a full evening. I have always tended to think of it as a work of extreme orchestral sumptuousness, which provides a background to the ritual-cum-drama being worked out between Bluebeard and his latest wife Judit, ending, as it begins, in tears. Their mode of communication, Judit a kind of mythic nag, Bluebeard stonewalling, is almost elevated chanting, which gives an emotional distance to the incidents we watch, and means that, however much we register the pain on both sides, we aren’t much moved by it. That, anyway, is how I have usually responded.

Listing page content here Fidelio, Beethoven’s simple and sublime opera, presupposes a belief in a set of values and their connection with action which it is hard for most of us to accept, possibly even to take seriously. Yet a great performance of Fidelio is inspiring enough to make you reconsider your scepticism, and that is what we had at the Barbican last week, in concert, with distinguished soloists and the London Symphony Chorus and Orchestra under Colin Davis. He has always been a great exponent of the opera, and it’s odd that he has never before recorded it — these two performances will yield a recording on the LSO’s own label.

Listing page content here There can’t be many more tantalising prospects for an operatic composer than writing an opera about the murder of Thomas Becket in Canterbury Cathedral in 1170 and then conducting performances of it there. That is what Stephen Barlow has pulled off, the première and two subsequent performances taking place at the end of last week, the opera, or ‘piece’, beginning when the cathedral was still flooded by daylight, and ending with the audience largely in darkness, though much of the time there were lights shining from high up on pillars, which provided just enough illumination to encourage you to think you could follow the words, but not enough actually to, without damage to your eyesight.

Franco Alfano’s Cyrano de Bergerac may not be a masterpiece, though I would claim that it is a first-rate second-rate work, to use a handy taxonomy of Richard Strauss. Franco Alfano’s Cyrano de Bergerac may not be a masterpiece, though I would claim that it is a first-rate second-rate work, to use a handy taxonomy of Richard Strauss. Yet the altogether superb production of it which the Royal Opera has mounted jointly with the Met has been received with very ill grace. It seems that no Italian composer of the early part of the 20th century can hope for a fair hearing, with even Puccini being tolerated only because it would be absurd to write off a figure so popular.

ENO is having a mini-festival of operas whose plots relate to Greek mythology.

Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin is an argument in favour of ordinary life, as opposed to a life ruled by passion and intensity. It’s a kind of anti-Tristan, in which Isolde decides, in the terminology of Act II of Wagner’s drama, to call it a day as far as uniting with Tristan in undying (or unliving) love goes, and to settle down with King Mark. Actually, Tristan is far more ambivalent about the bliss of love than it at first seems to be, and Onegin about the value of domesticity. The only person in Tchaikovsky’s minor masterpiece who comes off really well is Prince Gremin, and to judge from his music and the sentiments he expresses he is such a thundering bore that Tatyana must leave him or kill herself shortly after the opera ends.

English Touring Opera’s spring tour reached Cambridge the week after the undergraduates left for the Easter vacation, and, though I realise that enthusiasm for opera among students is fairly uncommon, I think there would have been enough curious ones to make the Arts Theatre less bleakly empty than it was for the second performance of Janacek’s great Jenufa, which, together with Tosca, is being taken to 16 locations over a couple of months. Notwithstanding the rows of unoccupied seats, the performance was of the no-holds-barred kind that the work demands, but that must be quite difficult to deliver to order.

Almost everyone who has written about Vaughan Williams’s opera Sir John in Love has defensively insisted that we put all thoughts of Verdi’s Falstaff out of our minds because Vaughan Williams had something quite different in his mind. He knew all the going operatic versions of the play, including Nicolai’s (which is a minor masterpiece, as was demonstrated in Buxton last year), so he must — so the argument goes — have had something special and personal to contribute. We can accept all that, without agreeing that he succeeded in making a valuable addition to the repertoire.

When Berg’s great tragic masterpiece Wozzeck opened at the Royal Opera in 2002 in Keith Warner’s production, I was more angry and depressed than I have ever been in an opera house. The utter betrayal of everything that Berg, who included in his score extremely detailed specifications as to how it should be staged, indicated, to convey the intense pain of his vision of degradation, made me feel that it should be possible to instigate criminal proceedings on behalf of works and composers subject to such gross abuse.