Second helpings

I Capuleti e i Montecchi;
Dido and Aeneas; Acis and Galatea
Royal Opera House

There has been a three-week gap between the opening and closing sets of performances of the latest revival of Bellini’s I Capuleti e i Montecchi at the Royal Opera. Smitten by migraine on the first night, I had to leave in the interval. Returning this week for the whole work provided me with an evening of almost unmitigated pleasure, even jouissance. One can quibble with some of the production, and the secondary singers are not great, but overall it makes for as intense an experience of Bellini’s early masterpiece as one could ever expect to see. And what strikes me each time I do see this work is that, as with Bellini’s other masterpieces or near-masterpieces, more and more of it comes to life. Passages that seemed to be merely preparatory to one of his gorgeous melodies, or to be getting rid of some action so that he can get down to passion, turn out to have an interest which may not be as intense, but is different and enterprising. I have tended to think of Capuleti as a moving series of aborted love duets — there certainly is no actual love duet — with a framework, necessary but workmanlike, no more, provided by the warring factions, Lorenzo, and so on.

Thanks in largest part to the conducting of Mark Elder, which has tightened up and also become more penetrating, the scenes of conflict are vivid in their own right, though a Tebaldo with a more luscious tenor voice than Dario Schmunck would have been welcome; and Capellio, unforgiving even by Italian operatic standards, needs more variety of inflection than the woofy Eric Owens provides. But the music carries them through, and though the action is stylised to a dangerous extent, when you think of what it would be like if it weren’t, there is cause for gratitude.