Puzzlingly unmoving

Hard to credit, but at the Royal Opera the new production of Massenet’s Werther begins with the prelude being played while the curtain is still lowered, no one messing around in front; and when it rises, at the point indicated in the score, we see a honeysuckle-covered wall, with a water spout spouting water, and part of a quaint old house. Old-style realism, or semi-realism, which many of us have been pleading for, if not in all cases, at least in such classic period pieces as this. When characters appear, they are dressed in period, too. Fairly soon, however, I began to wonder whether the director Benoit Jacquot, collaborating with the designer Charles Edwards, and in collusion with Antonio Pappano, had their tongues in their cheeks. For not only was the setting ‘traditional’, but so was all too much of the acting. The village characters — the Baillie and Johann and Schmidt — showed what jolly fellows they are using all the old devices of operatic business. The heroine’s younger sister Sophie, winningly sung by Sally Matthews, does a Scarlett O’Hara routine of pirouetting and girlishly poking people, and never stops. Is this sabotage or just under-direction? The question was never answered.

Two of the central figures in the drama transcended the general mode, one emphatically did not. Ruxandra Donose’s Charlotte is wonderful to look at, sings enchantingly if without all the power needed in her climactic scenes, and acts with moving dignity. And Ludovic Tézier, in the thankless role of Albert, her husband, managed to endow the role with some warmth while remaining a stuffed shirt. The two together provided a suitable frame for the agonies of the hero. That was where the big trouble lay.