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Friday 9 January 2009

A fine romance

I Capuleti e i Montecchi
Of Thee I Sing
Opera North, Leeds

Slightly perversely, Opera North has been running a series of ‘Shakespeare operas’ ending with Bellini’s I Capuleti e i Montecchi, which means that the programme book consists largely of articles explaining that the story doesn’t derive from Shakespeare at all. So what? I am inclined to ask, but themed series are ‘in’, though why anyone seeing Falstaff a year ago might feel more like going to Bellini’s great work I don’t see.

The main thing is that Capuleti has indeed been done, and very finely. Musically it is virtually flawless and, if scenically it is wayward, the action is lucid and the central relationships powerfully and economically drawn. Leslie Travers’s sets suggest or embody collapse. No scenery for the first part aside from an askew glass chandelier, which shatters deafeningly. Later on we have a huge perspex box, or room, hanging over Giulietta, with nebulous figures reflected in it, I think. And for the final scene there’s what appears to be a huge cracked cardboard egg. The time is the present, with all the characters dressed in drab working clothes. None of this, possibly surprisingly, impedes the performers, who are perfectly capable of enacting hatred and passion with or without bizarre visual stimuli.

There is something of a mystery about Bellini’s finest operas. The means are invariably simple, but the effects are not only strong but also reward pondering. His central figures, in all his major operas, skirt round the happiness of love fulfilled but almost never achieve it. Romeo and Giulietta suffer from the obvious impediment of being officially enemies, but something about the exquisitely eloquent idiom in which they sing suggests that they might be at a loss if the bar to their happiness were removed. It seems appropriate that Romeo should mistakenly think Giulietta dead and so take poison just before she wakes up, because their wonderfully subtle portrayal by Bellini dooms them more decisively than any whim of fate. They are Wagnerianly ‘death-devoted’, but death in Bellini has no metaphysical connotations. However, I also tend to think that Bellini’s elegiac idiom doesn’t encompass erotic fulfilment, as opposed to palpitating anticipation or agonised regret. His characters sound happiest when they are bellicose, which seems odd, but think of Norma.

More articles from: Michael Tanner | this section

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