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Friday 5 December 2008

Torment of languor

The Rake's Progress (Royal Opera House)

So it isn’t long before the show is a shapeless ruin dramatically. The trouble is that the opera is shaky on those grounds anyway, so every production needs to be a rescue operation, as the RCM’s was, for instance, or supremely Glyndebourne’s with Hockney’s famous sets. The designer and director have to give the characters some semblance of life and plausibility, since the music so often runs dangerously thin. The truth is, surely, that Stravinsky was not suited to write a full-length opera, and often we can painfully hear him watering himself down, sounding almost helpless.

That is, until the last half hour. As soon as the graveyard scene begins, the first music that Stravinsky wrote for the opera, before he even had any of the text to work on, we are on a different level, the tension is soon overwhelming, the arachnean harpsichord music ‘creates an incomparable impression of numb crisis’, as Joseph Kerman puts it in his brilliant pages on the opera in Opera as Drama. It is astonishing that at this late point we do, in the work itself, suddenly have a Rake that we can believe in, after the wet, well-meaning, passive, in fact incoherent figure of the previous two hours. And then in Bedlam there is some of Stravinsky’s most exquisitely poignant music, which makes that notorious Epilogue a slap in the face from two poetic and one musical would-be naughty schoolboys.

More articles from: Deborah Ross | this section

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