After its brief detour into magnificence with The Return of Ulysses at the Young Vic, ENO has returned to its hell-bent form with, appropriately enough, a dramatisation of Berlioz’s The Damnation of Faust.
After its brief detour into magnificence with The Return of Ulysses at the Young Vic, ENO has returned to its hell-bent form with, appropriately enough, a dramatisation of Berlioz’s The Damnation of Faust. Not that the composer would recognise his work, first performed in 1846, from the production, described in the programme thus: ‘The extraordinary creative journey of Terry Gilliam reaches the operatic stage for the first time’, while the Synopsis begins, ‘Our production follows the trajectory of German art and history from the late-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century’.
I thought that was Wagner’s province — and just in case his spirit should feel offended, the Synopsis makes it clear that one scene is ‘a Wagnerian entertainment staged for the guests’, who are the Nazi high command. Later on, we learn, ‘Groups of Jews sit among piles of luggage [back to the old days of suitcase-ridden opera], awaiting transportation. Marguerite is among them. Everyone is loaded on to a goods train.’ And as the scene changes ‘Arbeit macht frei’ is projected on to the curtain.
It doesn’t seem to me that it’s a good way to trace the trajectory of German art and history to perform a ‘dramatic cantata’ that has nothing to do with them; and the converse is still more evidently true. Scenes such as the opening of the 1936 Olympic Games are now so clichéd that they dispel rather than concentrate attention, and to have absurd-looking people strutting around wearing Nazi armbands is merely camp. Damnation is a delicate thing. All too easily it can strike one as just one characteristic Berliozian item after another — characteristic either in inspiration or in banality.
I have never seen it staged before, and see little point in the attempt; but nothing could be more inept than this. Berlioz’s own touch in this, as in many of his works, strikes me as so uncertain that only a devoted effort to weld the scenes together by a musical performance of maximum intensity, such as Colin Davis invariably imparts, can make it convincing. The ENO orchestra was on superb form for the second performance, and Edward Gardner brought out many of the score’s marvellous qualities, and had a fine set of singers to accompany; but the nonsense that was going on onstage, after a promising but brief Caspar David Friedrich opening set, was enough to sink the musical efforts.
The only performer who managed to retain dignity under these circumstances was Christine Rice, a great singer making the most of a fairly small role. She invested the shaggy-dog tale of the King of Thule with poignancy and mystery, and took her second, very great aria to a level where, for a few minutes, her lunatic environment was forgotten. Peter Hoare, singing Faust, was unable to do that at any point, partly thanks to the red flyaway wig he was wearing, partly because he doesn’t have a large enough voice to project the heroic lyricism of such sublime stretches as ‘O boundless Nature’. Christopher Purves was a predictably good Mephistopheles, though he sometimes seemed to think he was singing in The Rake’s Progress. The ENO chorus made less impact than I expected, perhaps embarrassed by what they were being asked to do. Anyone who has read Berlioz’s great Memoirs will know how much he suffered from being ignored. If he had seen this production he would have reluctantly agreed that being ignored is not the worst fate.
At the Royal Opera the first night of the first revival of Massenet’s Werther in its 2004 production by Benoît Jacquot provided two dramas: one was, naturally, the opera itself, in all its prolix diluteness; the other, which riveted the audience’s attention far more, was the return of Rolando Villazón to the operatic stage after the widely publicised series of illnesses, cancellations and abandoned performances which have dogged his career for the past few years. Here the news was unmitigatedly good.
He may have begun tentatively — but then Werther does — but he went from strength to strength, and delivered a properly wrenching death scene. Maybe his is too Italianate a performance, but one could say the same about many aspects of the musical side of things, above all of Antonio Pappano’s conducting. He made the score sound, all the time, as if it wished that Puccini had written it, though if he had it would have had a more continuous flow than Pappano imparted to it. On the other hand, there may be something to be said for that approach, since so much of this opera is feeble stuff which needs pepping up. It, like a few other operas I can think of, has one powerful act and two largely inert ones. Mightn’t it be a good idea to have an evening devoted to good acts from otherwise dud pieces?
Much of the strongest music in Werther is Charlotte’s and, though Sophie Koch was on the cool side for much of the evening, she did open up to Werther as she realised what a mess he had made of both their lives. This was an evening of at most tepid enjoyment, but the main fault was, I fear, the composer’s.
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